hello all! I have recently gotten into the SPS world and I have some questions. My sps grow great, but they have lost color over the weeks ive had them. I feed Reef Chili twice a week and my fish are fed three days a week. below are my parameters:
Luke - Went back and read your initial post. Unless you've a really weak/small return pump, I seriously doubt that it only has 150 gph flow. That'd be a really tiny pump, such as the Sicce Syncra 0.5. What would make more sense is that you have a
1500 gph return pump, and you're probably getting about 1/2 - 3/4 of that rated flow once head pressure is factored in. That's more than enough for a 100 gallon tank.
You initial post doesn't mention anything about in-tank flow. As others mentioned on the thread, this is absolutely necessary for SPS, though you can get away with just the return-pump flow for LPS in some cases. When thinking through this (if you don't actually have in-tank flow), keep in mind that more and smaller powerheads is much better than fewer and bigger powerheads. The reason for this is that there's a limit to how fast the flow can be over even SPS before you're impacting the coral's health, this is even more true for LPS. Most DC-powered pumps like Tunze's Stream, Ecotech's Vortech, and the Maxspect Gyre are
easily capable of coral-blasting force if aimed directly at them. And where the pump is not directed, you can have "dead" spots. So you can see that if you had, for example, only one Vortech MP40, you'd have a lot of flow in the general direction of the pump, and not much elsewhere. And if you crank the velocity of the pump to get OK flow "elsewhere", the direct stream from the pump will be way too much.
There's no doubt that more and smaller pumps costs more than fewer and bigger pumps, so there's a trade-off. And at some point you don't want to go completely overboard and populate your tank with 20+ powerheads. Because you've LPS in the tank that will not tolerate really high flow levels, I'd suggest something fairly modest, like starting with 2
Tunze 6040 nanostreams (on sale at the moment), or
2 Vortech MP10s. Don't be fooled by the small size of either of these pumps - they put out massive amounts of flow. And at some point later, you can add two more for a total of 4 - that will easily give you more than enough flow for a 100 gallon SPS tank, and give you 4 flow points to even out the flow field and avoid the blasting/stagnant issue that comes with having only one, bigger pump in a tank.
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