Marine Care basics (I know - wrong forum!)

[Franks]

Apologies but I'm sure a few of you also keep marine (or have in the past) and I like this forum - the advice is solid!

I've a friend who keeps a marine tank and sadly their partner who looked after the tank has passed away. The lady hasn't any idea on what to do and I want to offer my help in maintaining it and plan on going round soon to check out the kit so I'll have more information soon. All I know for now is it is a large tank, has fish and also runs a sump. Everything else I'll find out on my visit this week.

Can anyone point me to some solid basic routine maintenance steps perhaps i.e. daily, weekly, monthly, etc.

I come from tropical planted tanks with Co2 injection and daily fert dosing but marine I've never kept.

I want to help this lady out as I'm local and can pop over when required.

Thanks

 

[mort]

Hi franks, with marine the biggest issue is salinity. As water evaporates the salinity increases so this is one of the first things to get right. If the tank doesn't have a lid and is big you could see quite a lot of evaporation and you need to make sure enough RO water is added to keep the salinity stable.

The next thing is does it have corals? If it does then it makes it slightly more complicated as you need to consider calcium, alkalinity and magnesium which can be dosed like we do our fertilisers. That really only applies if the tank is heavily stocked with hard corals, with softies you likely won't see a big drain on alk, ca or mg and water changes will keep things pretty stable. For a fish only things don't matter as much.

So without knowing anything about the setup yet I would just do the usual checks on temp and salinity. Next see if it runs a skimmer and empty that if need be (but a warning to the non marine initiated, it stinks) and check to see if it runs a doser or calcium reactor.

To tell you the truth with a background in higher energy planted tanks you will probably see marine as simpler and we'll done for stepping up.

 

[tam]

Marines tend to water change less/less frequently, so don't feel you need to rush. Once you've seen the equipment - what's in the tank and what's kept in the cupboard for maintenance you'll be able to work out more easily what the routine is.

 

[Franks]

Excellent, thanks guys - much appreciated.

I'll update with pictures once I see the setup and should hopefully be able to establish a maintenance routine that we can share.

Cheers!

 

[kadoxu]

@mort is pretty much spot on. If it's fish only, it's pretty much up to salinity and temperature, if there are corals in there, it gets a bit more tricky.

I recommend using the Ultimate Reef Forum if you need some more help with this.