If you ask most people what words come to mind when they think of saltwater aquariums, most of them will eventually mention “complicated”, “difficult”, or “a lot of work”. And – yes – saltwater aquariums ARE inherently complicated. BUT, they don’t have to be difficult or overwhelming or “a lot of work”. What if it were simple, easy and fun? What if it could be this way for you?

Well, I am here to tell you it can be. I don’t like to toot my own horn, but if there is one thing I am good at, it is taking things that are inherently complex and making them simple. In fact, if you are going to be both successful at saltwater aquariums AND have fun doing it, you must learn to keep it simple or simplify.

When people ask me what does it take to make a great saltwater aquarium I tell them that it is as simple as this:

1. If you put stuff in, you have to take stuff out – otherwise you end up with pollution.  Another way of saying it is that in order to prevent accumulation of bad stuff (nitrates, phosphates, organics, detritus, waste, etc.)  you need to always be removing it.  There are many ways to accomplish this, such as:  water changes; activated carbon, protein skimmer, refugium w/ macro-algae, water changes, phosphate-removing media, etc..
2. Stop and just stare at your tank regularly – few skills are more crucial to a successful saltwater aquarium than observation.  Observation is absolutely foundational to your success.  And the good thing is it is really easy to do.  Just stand and stare, and do it on a regular basis.  You will learn more, discover more, prevent more problems and come up with more solutions by just getting quiet and still and just watching your tank.
3. Become a learning and reading maniac and ask lots of questions.  Learn as much as you can about the animals you are keeping and have a strong sense of wonder – Whether it is animals or filtration equipment, it is vitally important that you learn as much as you can about them.  Let’s face it, this part takes a while, and yet there is no way around it, unless you are going to hire someone to take care of your tank for you, which may be an option for you.  You will need to learn about their life history, ecology, husbandry requirements and compatibility with other potential tank mates.  And filtration equipment or life support equipment must be understood in order to select the right one and to operate it properly.  So read as much as you can (books, magazines, online forums, blogs), join a local saltwater aquarium hobby club, attend seminars, workshops and lectures, and above all be open-minded.  Know you can never know everything, and be willing to be contributed to.  Be willing for the other guy to know more than you, so that you can learn something new (this alone has taken me very far).
4. Be consistent and keep a routine – There is no beating around the bush.  Saltwater aquariums require consistent routine care, and if you skimp on your consistency or miss a day or a week here and there, it can come back to bite you.  Tropical coral reef thrive with consistent conditions,  and your saltwater aquarium is no different.  You must be regular and consistent with your saltwater aquarium maintenance routine.  I have seen amazing tanks whose only difference from mediocre ones was that their routine was amazingly thorough and consistent.  The bottom line is that saltwater aquariums need regular attention.
5. Prevention, Prevention, Prevention – The saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is alive and well with keeping saltwater aquariums.  To the degree that you focus on preventing problems with your saltwater aquarium, you will be more successful.  This is an area I have been forced to become very good at as the owner of Gibbons Aquaria, Inc., a high-end custom saltwater aquarium design/installation/management company.  With multiple customers and multiple tanks (most of which are more than several hundred gallons) my business and my customers cannot afford too many problems.  And to be frank, saltwater aquariums require good problem solving skills.  Even if you are wildly successful, you will still have your share of surprises, such as mechanical failures, leaks, disease outbreaks, animal aggression/mortality, etc..  All of these unpleasant things are going to happen to you eventually, no matter how good you are.  The key is to prevent, minimize and respond to them so that they don’t cause big problems for you.  In other words, if a pump stops working and you don’t even know it, you can lose your entire tank.  Or even if you notice in time that the pump has stopped working but you don’t have a spare, you are in trouble.  So prevent problems in the first place.  Minimize them when they do happen.  And then set yourself up with some kind of monitoring system to notify you so that you can respond when they do happen.
6. Be like a boyscout and be prepared – Preventing problems is one thing (and it’s absolutely huge), and being prepared for problems is different.  If you can afford it, keep spares of as many critical life support components as possible (pumps, light bulbs for reef tanks, heater, etc.).  Also, part of being prepared is making sure you know that problems are going to happen and design your aquarium setup to accommodate them.  An example of this would be to make sure system fails “safe” in the event of a power failure.  This means that your sump will not overflow or your system is capable of starting back up without you needing to be there when the power comes back on.  Another example is to have your aquarium notify you of key life support failures when they happen by using a monitoring system (I love the Sensaphone 400 and Sensaphone 800).
7. Become a critical thinker and ask lots of “why” and “how” questions – It is vitally important that as you learn, that you actually understand what you are learning and why the thing you are learning is so.  The opposite of this is like kids in school who just want the teacher to tell them what’s going to be on the exam.  Just learning the answer won’t help you if you don’t actually understand why it is the answer.  In fact, this failed approach leads to more problems whereby you are mystified and confused, but now with even more problems that you don’t understand.
8. Move lots of water – Proper water circulation can be almost magical in its beneficial impact on a saltwater aquarium.  Here are some of the benefits of proper water circulation:  helps keep detritus and other waste up in the water column so that it can be removed by filters; helps increase oxygen levels and reduce carbon dioxide, brings nutrients to corals and invertebrates, provides ideal respiration for all animals and plants, acts as a treadmill for fish to get exercise, allows for better density of coral skeletons,  helps create more natural coral growth forms, increased coral growth rate, etc..
9. Lighting:  The proper quantity and quality of light – Simply put, you need enough of the right type of light.  One rule of thumb for reef aquariums with photosynthetic corals is to use 2.5-4 watts of lighting per gallon of aquarium.  So if your tank is 70 gallons and you want to keep stony corals, you will want to be at the upper end – at 4 watts per gallon.  So if we do the math:  4 watts x 70 gallons = 280 watts of  lighting.  A fish-only aquarium only requires enough lighting for aesthetic benefit -  about 1/4 of the wattage per gallon.
10. Build it fail-safe – It is one thing for bad things to happen with your saltwater aquarium.  But what if something bad happened (like a power failure) but no bad consequences came of it.  This is what happens when you design and build your aquarium’s life support system to fail safe.  For example, the aquariums I install and maintain can easily accommodate power failure, pump failure, leaks, overheating/cooling, and unwanted changes in water levels.  All of these can happen without any negative consequences to the tank and its inhabitants, because it was built to fail safe.
11. Water quality rules:  If you don’t have good water quality, nothing else you do will matter - Test the following water quality parameters once a week and graph your results so you can track trends over time (pH, salinity, alkalinity, calcium, magnesium, nitrates, and phosphates).
12. Disease is always present, so use a ultraviolet sterilizer - Since there is always disease in every aquarium all the time, use an ultraviolet sterilizer (U.V. sterilizer) to help prevent an outbreak.  Your fish and corals can live happily with a chronic low level of parasites, as can we humans.  But when stress levels increase in your aquarium (for whatever reason), disease can spread quickly and is difficult to get back under control once an outbreak occurs.  Thus, a U.V. sterilizer prevents such a thing from happening and in my opinion is mandatory as part of your saltwater aquarium’s life support system
13. Prevent stress and you will significantly lessen the occurrence of disease, aggression and deaths.  Just like in humans, stress is accumulative – even for fish and corals and other invertebrates.

Technorati Tags: aquarium lighting, easy aquarium, reef tank, saltwater aquarium, saltwater aquariums, U.V. sterilizer, ultraviolet sterilizer, water movement, Water Quality

I got into whitewater kayaking because I wanted to have fun. And yet it is inherently fraught with dangers. So my motto became “Safety first”. If you’re not safe, then someone’s going to get hurt, and then no one’s having fun. So if you put safety first, you can have fun.

So right now you might be thinking “Ok … so what does safety first have to do with keeping a saltwater aquarium? Well, instead of ‘safety first’, think avoiding problems. If you can, at the very least, avoid problems, then you are going to have a lot more fun. Would you like to know my secret to avoiding most problems?

Keep reading.

In fact – let’s face it – most problems are caused by us humans. Yes, the majority of problems (by far) are human error. Next in line is mechanical failure, and then, lastly is biological. Biological error is usually out of our control – for example where one fish all of a sudden begins harassing another or even kills it.

So the big question is what if you had a procedure to follow, that, when you followed it – you were all but assured of avoiding most problems. I mean, I’m talkin’ preventing 95% of the problems that come with keeping an aquarium – period. Do I have your attention?

Ok, here’s my secret. I use a ‘check-in and check-out’ procedure. I treat my tanks like a patient in the hospital. We’ve all seen the shows on T.V., like E.R.. Whenever a doctor comes on shift, the first think they do is they do “rounds”. This is where they go around and check all patients, and confirm that all equipment is operating correctly, and that all vital signs are normal, etc. (I’m not a doctor). And just before the go off shift, the do rounds again. Here, again, they make sure all equipment is operating properly, that all vital signs are normal, etc.. You get the idea.

CHECK IN and CHECK OUT is a routine procedure – a check list – that you do at the beginning and end of each time you do any work on your aquarium. And when it is followed, nothing is missed and often you catch something you forgot to turn off, or a valve that was set wrong, or a pump that was off, or a tank that was still filling, or a leak, or a water level that isn’t right – you get the idea. I can’t tell you how many times I have been interrupted in the wee hours of the morning and called to go to a customer’s tank (we use computer monitors that call our cell phones), only to find a problem that was not caught during checkout – because aquarist did not follow the CHECK OUT list.

So, imagine, you set aside an hour or two to work on your tank. You go about fragging corals, cleaning glass, doing a water change, changing GFO (ferric oxide – removes phosphate – Rowaphos is the best for this), culling algae from your refugium, etc..

But you didn’t begin by going thru your CHECK IN procedure and check list, so you didn’t discover that your R.O. unit was leaking (Revers Osmosis filter – purifies tap water). You went about having your fun with your tank for two hours and now that it’s time to leave, you go to get some Reverse Osmosis water to top off your tank and now you discover the leak. But this is a whole project all by itself, and you have to meet your family for dinner in 25 minutes. Had you gone through the CHECK IN procedure when you started, you would have found the leak at the beginning and had plenty of time to fix it. You get the idea.

How’d you like to get your hands on the CHECK IN/CHECK OUT sheet that we use? Submit a comment and be sure to include your email address and I’ll send it to you. In fact, if you would like me to, I’ll do a video going over the entire CHECK IN/CHECK OUT procedure and put it up here on the blog. Just post a comment below, and let me know if you’d like to see that video.

And if you’d like to be notified of new videos and articles, just subscribe to our newsletter (upper right corner of the blog).

Technorati Tags: "check in", "check out", leak, monitor, problem prevention, problem solving, refugium

When it comes to checking the salinity of your reef tank or fish-only tank, are are you using a hydrometer or a refractometer?

Well . . . which one? The reason I ask is that there is a big difference in accuracy between the two. Years ago I used to use hydrometers – you know the
plastic ones they used to give away with a bucket of salt. The scary thing was that if you bought five different plastic hydrometers, then you would get
five different readings. This wasn’t the case with the glass hydrometers, but they are just too easy to break, and my idea of fun reefkeeping is not cleaning
up broken glass.

Back to the plastic hydrometers – as long as you used the same one for your tank, and cleaned it often with vinegar or muriatic acid to keep minerals from giving you a false reading, you were fine. But still – this was a pain in the … well.. you know.

Now, we have the refractometer, which is much more accurate. And the prices have come way down in recent years. And not only are refractometers a lot more accurate, they are a lot more durable and easy to calibrate too.

Calibration was a strange process with the old plastic hydrometers. I remember having to write with a sharpie on the side of the hydrometer “reads 3ppt too low”, or “add 3ppt to reading”. This is no longer necessary.

If you don’t already have a refractometer, you can get one here.

Technorati Tags: fish-only tank, hydrometer, reef, refractometer, salinity, saltwater aquarium

Here’s a quick video tip on water quality testing.

At the end of the video there’s a link to a free bonus we are offering to help you with your tank.

And please leave a comment and tell us your biggest challenge with testing your aquarium’s water quality. You never know – your question could be the feature of our next blog post.

Here’s the link again to the free bonus.

Thanks,

Warren Gibbons

Technorati Tags: Water Quality, water testing

Last Saturday morning, I was in the car with my wife and son, and my phone rings.  When I answered it, I realized it is the computer monitor for one of our customer’s aquariums, calling to let me know there was a water level alarm.   I called it back and told it I was on my way (pressed the code to acknowledge the alarm).

So I began to think, “ah, yes, ‘alert condition 3′ is a float switch in the sump – telling me if the water level is too high.  As I began to trouble-shoot the alarm in my mind, I quickly realized that this must mean that either the main pump has stopped working (mechanical failure) or the switch that is supposed to shut off the evaporation dosing pump has failed and isn’t turning the dosing pump off when it gets to the proper level.

So, I went to the client (got there within 45 minutes of the alarm), went into the filtration room – and what do you know I was right.  The cause of the alarm was the float switch that is supposed to shut off the evaporation dosing pump had failed because of some debris getting in the way of its contact.  I cleaned if off and voila – problem fixed – flood avoided. 

By the way, this is a an 8-foot long 300-gallon jellyfish exhibit in a restaurant.  Imagine what could have happened if this had gone undetected.  The sump would have eventually overflowed, plus the salinity would have been dropped significantly, which jellyfish don’t like.  It could have very easily ballooned into a tank wipe-out. 

And … that didn’t happen. 

Within 45 minutes of getting the alarm phone call from the computer, the problem was solved and a disaster from a simple and common mechanical failure was prevented.  The key word here is prevented. 

The reality is that mechanical failures are part of the game with keeping a saltwater aquarium.  They happen.  And Muphy’s Law says that they will typically happen at the worst time.  In this case it happened on a weekend, when no one was there to catch it.

You might be thinking, “yeah that’s nice, but what does a computer monitoring system cost?”.  Well, this one costs around $1,200, including all the other sensors.  The other question to ask is “what would it have cost if the problem had gone un noticed”, and been allowed to create a flood (i.e. water damage) and kill all the jellyfish?

Well, the cost to replace all the jellyfish alone would be roughly $1,000; not to mention the time and hastle to replace them.  But the biggie here is the cost of a flood in terms of water damage and cleanup time.  I don’t even want to add those numbers up, but I know it would be in the thousands and possibly far more.

In fact, almost every customer of ours has one of these computer monitors on their aquarium’s filtration system.  With them we can monitor water temperature (failed chiller or heater), air temperature, leaks/water on the floor, low water levels, high water levels, and last but not least – power failure. 

In the event of any of these alarms, I get a phone call on my cell phone.  And if I’m not there – it leaves a message and then moves on to the next of up to four phone numbers.  And it will not stop calling until it has reached someone and the alarm has been acknowledged and the problem has been solved.  This system is practically worth it’s weight in gold.

In fact, it typically pays for itself (in mishaps prevented) within a year. 

The moral of the story here is that mechanical failures and leaks (etc.) happen with saltwater aquariums, so why not be prepared to prevent them from causing big problems and/or negative consequences.  We integrate problem prevention and preparedness into every aspect of our business - from the designing aquarium systems, to installing them, to our maintenance routine.

If you want to learn more about how to setup your system or make changes to it so that you too are prepared – go to

>>> http://www.saltwateraquariumsecrets.com <<<

and sign up to our free newsletter.  You will also get our free e-course on the top 10 causes of disease and how to prevent them.

My hope is that you too learn to think this way, as it allows more time to enjoy your aquarium, and minimizes time spent reacting to emergencies and other nightmares.  I like to think of it as failsafe insurance.

So here’s to dry floors and happy humming pumps that go and go, and problems prevented.  As the boyscouts say – “be prepared”.

Happy Fishes,

Warren Gibbons
http://www.saltwateraquariumsecrets.com