Doctors Office Tank

This could be a stupid question but it has been bothering me to find out and I was curious if anyone here would know:

At my doctor's office, they have a 90 gallon saltwater tank in a wall along the corner of it. It has some sand, maybe 2 inches in some areas, and bare in other places. All fake rock, and I believe 12 fish(4-5inch yellow tang is the largest, but also a fat roughly 5 inch long nose hawkfish). The water is absolutely crystal clear, tank and glass clean and the fish seem very happy. I know there's a sump underneath that I could see sort of, but there's only one return tube which is the only means of flow as well.

How does a tank like this work with no live rock?

 

Good chemical filtration and the sump may have some live rock.

 

Interesting, so they just neutralize the nitrates?

 

dont forget the doctor is probly paying someone well to maintain it. ;D

 

Heavy water changes, a good skimmer and/or bioballs in the sump, a bit of live sand and good overall maintenance can work for a FO tank.

 

Possibly a UV as well. See this a lot on systems that don't get touched much.

 

i have seen some cool tanks like this. 1 of my lfs tanks wich is a system on its own( not looped into other tanks) is like this except on a much much bigger scale i believe it is a 225. i think they have their sump full of LR and some sort of man made stone.

 

Most doctors are going to bring in an aquarium maintenance company to service the tank, which is what I do. He's paying top dollar for someone to do it. Probably around $80 an hour, $2/gal for saltwater for water change, $20-$30 for a bag of run of the mill carbon, phosguard.., $5 for a new piece of filter floss, etc.

and in most cases there is probably a few spare pieces of coral replicas/rock that are swapped out and then bleached.

 

This is the power of wet dry filtration. There may be some nitrates in the system, but for a fish only tank it really doesn't matter much. Wet dry filters truly are powerful and work very well for FO tanks. I agree with everyone else though. I'm sure they pay top dollar to have the glass scraped and a weekly water change to keep the water clean.

 

+1 fish are ok w/elevated nitrate levels