3'x3' cube tank. need help

[AcroButcher]

Howdy all,
I am in the process of setting up a 3'x3'x 25" tall euro braced aquarium. its roughly 140 gallons with a back center overflow. i have done sps for roughly 4 years now and im looking for a new challenge with this tank. id like to hear your thoughts on how to set up and maintain a nfs tank. for lighting i would like to do a t5 fixture with roughly 2-4 ati lamps. does this sound about right? and would you chose 2 or 4? also what would you do for flow? how would you keep the particles suspended? i was thinking about using a tunze wavebox but dont know if they work on eurobraced tanks. any suggestions will be greatly appreciated. or if you know of any killer books on the subject.

Thank you,
Jason

 

[uhuru]

I'm currently setting up a 150g NPS tank, about 300g total system volume. I'll tell you what I have planned but this is my first dedicated NPS tank so I'll also be following along to see what others advise for you.

Depending on what type of NPS you want to keep this is going to play a part in your lighting plan. If you are going to keep corals that require constant food infused into the water, you may want to go with predominantly actinic and blue lighting to avoid algae growth, maybe throw in a daylight bulb just for viewing and photography purposes. 4 bulbs would give you a little more control with all of that. I'm actually going to use a 10 bulb ATI fixture.

For flow I am going with 3 vortech mp40s, they are controllable, they can create laminar flow, and they can keep particles suspended. I'm pretty sure you could use a tunze wavebox but if you go with vortechs this is completely unnecessary.

 

[stunreefer]

First off, love the dims of the new tank :thumbsup:

As you know, lighting doesn't really matter - it's all up to you, but as uhuru mentioned you want to keep algae at bay (with less light). i would also recommend a Vortech over Tunze, but I'm biast (cuz I have one ), but the wavebox would definitely do the trick. If your planning on keeping NPS gorgonians however, make sure to look into the species specific requirements. Most of the time they're found in laminar flow rather than a back n forth wave action, which is also the only way they'll feed.

Main thing to keep in mind is that we introduce tons of nutrients nito NPS tanks, and you need to be prepared to remove them before they break down preferably:

-Big efficient skimmer
-Weekly water changes
-plenty of beneficial bacteria colonization (biological filtrattion = live rock + live sand)
-bacterial driven system (is what I do )

Nutrient import must = nutrient export :thumbsup: