Tips/Advice in 24g Aquapod

[Guy W]

Greetings,

I've been out of the aquarium hobby for 2 years. I had a 125g semi-reef tank for several years, but being an apartment renter, I decided to give it away after having had to move it a 3rd time (well moved it twice, going on the 3rd time I said no and gave it to a friend).

So I'm missing the hobby but I still rent, so I was thinking of getting the Aquapod 24g with 150w HQI MH setup. Drs. Foster/Smith has it for a little over 300$.

I've searched the forums and the general reaction is the AP is a decent setup. One thing I couldn't find an info on is the color of the bulb that comes with the 150w setup.

My preference is a very on the edge between a crips white and cool blue look. On my 125 I had 6 PC lamps with 4 10k bulbs and 2 actinics. I liked the look of the setup very much, although it wasn't bright enough really for much more than some soft corals.

In my 125g I had a lot of mushrooms and polyps. I'd like to get some of that again in my 24g but I'd also like to keep some Hard Corals. I've read the AP setup with 150w MH is good enough for most LPS corals, but how would it handle SPS such as Acropora's. Is the lighting and water flow sufficient for these?

So I guess overall I'd like to have my setup with few fish, maybe just a pair of clowns and a 6 line wrasse, with a lot of polyp corals (buttons and colony) and shrooms on the lower level of the tank and some SPS branching corals on the upper section of the live rock.

Not having a lot of experience with SPS corals any advice on the fesability of this setup would be most appreciated.

Thank you

 

[BCreefmaker]

with that kind of light you would be able to keep anything you wanted light wise, but for acro, and other sps, your probbably gunna want to get 20 times turnover per hour or more, and some chemical filtration. which i doubt come stock on the AP your getting. you also need to supplment calcium for SPS, normal water changes wont give very good growth. but im shure you knew most of this

 

[Guy W]

BC, Thanks for the reply.

I anticpated needing to suppliment calcium with Kalk or some 2 part dosing system. I'll probably try something other than Kalk, as in my pervious experience it was a bit of a pain to drop dose my old tank, but it did work well.

Water changes are no biggie, having had to do it on my 125g bi-weekly anyway, doing small ones weekly on a nano should be easy.

My concerns were the light quality on this setup and water movement. The built in pump that comes with the AP24g with 150w MH is 290gph, so thats like 12x per hour. I suppose there would be a way to setup another power head on that tank without having it look clunky.

I'm still curious about the look of the lighting. I'm really hoping to get the look I'm after without having to do something additional to the provided light setup.

 

[BCreefmaker]

its probbably going to be a 10-14k blulb, they probbably wont be gigving you a 20k for that price.