A six foot tank is going to be quite expensive. In reality, you could set up a decent four foot 90-120 gallon reef tank for $1000, but it would be a basic, no frills tank. You could alternatively set up a pretty great nano tank (~20 gallons) for $1000. Not including livestock, if you wanted a top of the line, totally automated, capable of keeping pretty much anything 6’x2’ tank, I would think you’d be spending at least $8-10k on just the equipment. And alternatively you could spend $4-5k on a totally spec’d out nano tank. It really just depends on what you want, how much maintenance you want to do, what you want to keep, what kind of aesthetic look you’re going for, there are just a lot of variable. Most people who put together a large, decked out tank plan it for months if not years. There’s a lot of research that needs to be done and a lot decisions that need to be made. If you want more of a plug and play type of thing, there are more options in nano sizes, but for larger tanks that kind of come with most of what you need, I’d look into a Red Sea tank, you can order it to come with pretty much everything you need in sizes up to 200gallons (I think that’s around where they top out), and they’re fairly easy to setup and maintain. But they are pretty pricey, on the larger side, you’d still be looking at $8-10k, for everything that’s included you could piece together a similar tank for substantially less (but again, it’s still going to be thousands).
www.reef2reef.com
