10 Gallon Reef ?

so i was wanting to do a little reef for my office and since i have a spare 10 gallon i was going to set it up tomarrow. I only have a few questions how much Flow do i need for a 10gallon tank?, and is it really needed to use "Live" Sand or can i save money and just buy sum of the cheaper sand? was thinking to do about 15 lbs of sand and about 10+ pounds of live rock and let it cycle, and just sum hardy corals, also what is a good light to use that is fairly cheap for a small tank like this?

 

Everything sounds good, look at drsfosterandsmith they have great prices for lighting fixtures, I would go with about 50-100 watts depending on the corals you wana keep.

 

for flow you take your gallons in your tank and you take how many gph your pump is. then you divide your gph of the pump by the total water volume. This gives you turnover. For softies/ricordeas/frogspawn 10-30x is good. For sps you need more random flow at about 50-100x turnover.

You can get a small pump from ebay or your lfs that does like 50 or 70 gph and that will be good for a 10 gallon.

 

Hi Ant

you need neither live rock or live sand , you can use base rock, and bacteria will colonise it over time and it will be live rock, coralline will also come, either on snails or other CUC members, and also with any frags or corals you put in there , the purple rock effect just takes longer if you use base rock, but IME it comes eventually

a HOB filter would be good for a 10 gallon, but get one rated for up to 4 times - so one rated for a 40 would be good IMO

lights - depends on the exact dimensions of your tank ? but check out twin T5s fixtures as there are some twin T5 canopies with either 15 or 18 watt lamps (been checking myself recently to see if I could fit 2 of these and get 4 tubes over my nano)


for flow, +1 on Dingo for me, I have 200 GPH total on my 5 gallon which is 40x and it does not seem to much, but 50% is the HOB filter , which lacks any power , its just a cascade , so with that a small 100 GPH power head gives the majority of water movement in my tank

Steve