I'm a noob setting up my refugium...

megisawesome06 · Jun 25, 2015

Hey! Noob here setting up my refugium. It's an established tank already, and has nothing but water in it right now. How would I go about setting it up? What needs to go in there? I've seen sand and plants in there...what do you experts recommend? Thank you!

steve&mari · Jun 25, 2015

We keep lr and macro algae in our fuge has tons of pods in it also have a small tunze nano powerhead in it to keep some algae tumbling for even light n growth.we also have a baby Morse code maroon clown in it to recover a bit temporary trying to mate it with our lightning maroon clown but she was getting pretty rough on him. After he heals we try again. If it's part of sump 1st chamber is for inlet from tank and skimmer ect. 2nd is fuge with whatever you chose to add then 3rd chamber is return pump. Hope it helps

tfink660 · Jun 25, 2015

chamber 1 Protein skimmer and media reactors, chamber 2 cheato live sand and fiji mud if you want live rock rubble ,chamber 3 return pump

megisawesome06 · Jun 25, 2015

Is sand something I should be messing with as a noob? Also I would need to qt anything I put in there, right?

steve&mari · Jun 25, 2015

Sand or mud is optional it's basically what you decide. If you're growing mangroves you'll want mud. If you want easier maintenance lr n macro is easier to keep chambers cleaner. I can pull lr n macro out n vacuum out chambers.

steve&mari · Jun 25, 2015

Personally I've never qt algae and know what I had when adding rock I started with dry rock to keep pest out n only things we want in our setup.

FlyinBryan · Jun 25, 2015

I added a deep bed of Miracle Mudd! Ive had great results! But a dsb of anything! Along with any kind of macro algae.

megisawesome06 · Jun 25, 2015

Would I put snails in there too or just leave it lr and algae?

Ebone · Jun 25, 2015

I have some snails, hermits, live rock, rubble rock to use for frags, a huge ball of cheato and a million pods.... and some random hitch hiking buggers along with anyone who misbehaves in DT... I have a 6500k CFL buld that grows the cheato great hanging over it

megisawesome06 · Jun 25, 2015

Cool. The guy at my LFS told me I fist have enough snails. I counted like 8 in there. He said his store tank had 600 and his giant one at home had 1200! So...how many snails approx would I need for a 150ga and refugium?

pnastys · Jun 29, 2015

I have always tried to shoot for one snail per gallon. I also ended up dismantling my fuge so to speak, had sand rock and cheato. Now I just use it to hide my equipment: skimmer, heater, & reactor. I keep a deep sand bed in my display. I would also avoid snails in the fuge, good chance of them crawling into the return pump. But keeping extra live rock seems like a great idea!

Dsb keeps my nitrates at zero and cheato just spreads to the display as I pull off the growth, now I am constantly pulling it out of my display, Irritating.

Good luck.

Matt23469 · Jun 29, 2015

I have 3-4 types of macro algae and 36 marine pure biofilter balls I was told they = 10lb of live rock each seems to work well on my 125

Daytonareefing · Jun 29, 2015

I don't think anyone said make sure you run the light for the refugium at night not during the day so the ph stay more stable in the tank and having a small amount of live rock in there helps clean the water as well like bio balls. lol