New?

[ChadTheSpike]

Wow, it’s been a while!

This morning I was looking at a spot in my living room and thinking, “do I want to do saltwater again?”

It’s directly above my utility room, access to all the things, it would be perfect for my dabbling. I always took a very diy, engineering focus, to my reef keeping and was active on this forum and very very active in my local at the club (WAMAS), so my thoughts shifted to, “I wonder how the reefcentral community is doing these days”

You see, I started doing saltwater reefs in the early 90s and kept at it, passionately, until about 2016, when after a move life (crazy busy in job and new kid) delayed me setting the tank up back up. A couple of moves later and I no longer have most of my old equipment.

Well 9 years later, here I sit, thinking about it again and wondering, should I get back at it?

Ironic side note, when I recovered my RC account this morning, I noticed, it’s nearly 20 years to the day since I joined this community for the first time.

Saturday morning coffee ramblings…

 

[Reefing102]

Welcome back and Happy RCiversary!

I can tell you the biggest things that’s changed is the cost of everything (mainly coral and the like). Truthfully name brand LED cost about the same as name brand Halides used to cost back in the day (give or take a couple hundred or so).

A lot has dropped off RC thanks to other social media but there’s a few of us still around.

 

[griss]

Welcome back. Like you, we’ve got quite a few reefing dinosaurs here. I started in SW in the 80’s and set my first reef up in 1990.

 

[ChadTheSpike]

Thanks y’all!

It does seem quite a lot quieter around here than I remembered, but I suppose that’s the way of things these days.

Has much changed with supply? I see there’s few more captive bred species available, that’s awesome to see! Neptune looks to have expanded to all the things for control, probably not many left dabbling with their own diy controllers based on the (once very active) diy forum.

Otherwise, my foray yesterday didn’t reveal any big changes in the basic how tos, so looks like just a decide how big, do the planning, do the buying/building, do the daily husbandry, solve the problems, and watch it grow? Miss anything?

 

[Reefing102]

Neptune and Hydros are the biggest brands in controller systems. There’s also GHL and if you like to DIY, ReefPi (based on the the RaspberryPi system).

Nothing huge with supply that I can think of except that Bertram Capital (a private equity firm) owns Aperture Pet products who is the owner of Bulk Reef Supply (which merged with Marine Depot and Neptune), and Ecotech Marine (not merged to my knowledge) and AquaIllumination (also not merged to my knowledge), there may be more but I think that’s it for now.

Beyond the consolidation of those brands under a single entity, the only other thing I can think of is LiveAquaria quality has gone down hill significantly based on reviews.

 

[griss]

^ summarized really well.