Your Biggest Lesson?

[Gazog2]

Quarantining everything. Plants, corals, fish, inverts. You may not be able to medicate most of those, but you can watch them for parasites or hitchhikers.
Plan out everything. Every little thing you can think of. And research.
I would possibly suggest using dry rock. But this kind of goes with the first one about hitch hikers. Some are cool and awesome, some not so much.
Make this an investment. Don't try and skimp on things. Not saying you need to use starfire glass for all 5 panels, but you get it.
Plan out your fish. Talk with the family/wife and see what they might be interested in. Finding out after you have the tank up and running that your wife wants a sohal tang, and you have a 100g tank will suck.
Record everything. I keep both an on-line journal and a physical journal.
Make things easy on you. If it takes an hour and moving 3 different pieces of equipment to change some media, unlikely you will do it when it needs doing.

Some very good advice,

But most of the time there is no need to quarantine corals, they normally don't carry anything that cannot be cured by a good dipping with Coral RX, every reefer should have this in their reefing tool box. Same thing goes for Inverts, I have never QT'd a single one and in 30 years never had any issues.

Live rock as you said can come with some really neat stuff but it can also come with some really nasty stuff. I lost 3 extremely expensive Fire shrimp to a 4" gorilla Crab that I did not know was in my tank, came in on a rock and lived in the back of the tank for 2 years before I saw the big bugger! Scared the crap out of me when it reached out and grabbed the stick on the scraper I was using one day, wife said I screamed like a little girl!

Had a heck of a time getting him out too. finally lured him out with a whole freaking snow crab leg, speared him with a 18" long sharpened meat fork.

Mostly dry rock with a small piece of live borrowed from a reliable fellow reefer and it will only be a matter of a few weeks and you will be seeing all kinds of stuff.

And Starfire glass on anything other than the front and sides is a waste, cannot see the back or the bottom so why bother, but I do agree if you can afford it go for it you will not regret it at all.

 

[Diazreeflife]

Awesome post gazog I will be using your quarantine process for sure!! Now one question do you quarantine more then one fish in the same tank at the same time?

 

[Squishie89]

Some very good advice,

But most of the time there is no need to quarantine corals, they normally don't carry anything that cannot be cured by a good dipping with Coral RX, every reefer should have this in their reefing tool box. Same thing goes for Inverts, I have never QT'd a single one and in 30 years never had any issues.

Live rock as you said can come with some really neat stuff but it can also come with some really nasty stuff. I lost 3 extremely expensive Fire shrimp to a 4" gorilla Crab that I did not know was in my tank, came in on a rock and lived in the back of the tank for 2 years before I saw the big bugger! Scared the crap out of me when it reached out and grabbed the stick on the scraper I was using one day, wife said I screamed like a little girl!

Had a heck of a time getting him out too. finally lured him out with a whole freaking snow crab leg, speared him with a 18" long sharpened meat fork.

Mostly dry rock with a small piece of live borrowed from a reliable fellow reefer and it will only be a matter of a few weeks and you will be seeing all kinds of stuff.

And Starfire glass on anything other than the front and sides is a waste, cannot see the back or the bottom so why bother, but I do agree if you can afford it go for it you will not regret it at all.

I have not QTed corals, but the thinking behind it is a dip or even multiple dips will get rid of everything. Inverts can have their own issues like parasitic creatures. Again, I have not QTed inverts, but there is no reason not to, especially if you have the chance to.

The starfire example was meant to be considered silly. The point was not to spend a million dollars on start up, but on the flip side don't spend just $100.

Awesome post gazog I will be using your quarantine process for sure!! Now one question do you quarantine more then one fish in the same tank at the same time?

You can quarantine more than one fish at a time, but do realize if you have Fish A in there for 25 days and then you add Fish B, the clock restarts for Fish A as he has now been in contact with a fish with unknown status. The other thing is maybe Fish A has ich or velvet and Fish B doesn't, you still end up treating both fish, which may kind of suck for Fish B.
Mr. Saltwater Tank's Quarantine Guide is a really good book to have on hand (or at least on your computer).