What size power head?

Detritus is basically all the crap (usually literally poop from coral/fish) that starts floating around. It can collect in areas of low flow and if you don't regularly clean your sand bed and rocks (at least once a week I think) it can start to decay which can add all of those nutrients (nitrates/phosphates primarily I think) that the fish/coral ate back into the water column which can feed nuisence algae/make scraping the glass every day a pain, plus excess nutrients are generally not good for coral or even fish if they get out of hand. If it stays suspended it's more likely to be filtered/skimmed out and removed from the system altogether.

I'm not sure what lighting you have (maybe I just am forgetting at the moment :-[ ) but not having the appropriate lighting is a good reason not to get high light loving corals. However, there are some stony corals, like a lot of LPS, that do not require any more light than a lot of soft coral. Something to consider anyway.

There's also more to keeping some hard corals than just light as well, more concern about calcium/alkalinity/magnesium parameters, possibly more concern about nutrient levels etc.

 

i just picked up a sundial t5 fixture 54x4

bulbs are ati blue plus actinics and day bulbs are 12K Ati Aqua Blue...i just bought it locally should be picking up next week. ill probably swap out the 12k bulbs for a 10k bulb. i perfer the white look over the blue look

 

That's a reasonable fixture, maybe not top of the line but the current fixtures can definitely keep hard corals, especially with good ATI bulbs. You should be able to keep LPS and softies well and you could even do SPS higher in the tank under those bulbs. Going a bit off topic but if you want it whiter than 50/50 blue plus/aquablue you might go with 3 ATI aquablue and 1 blue plus. The ATI 12k/aquablue bulbs are already pretty white and you might not see much change between them and 10k bulbs, plus the ATI aquablue are some of the highest output bulbs out there.

 

on ok...im gonna look at the bulbs before i switch them out. I like the fixture cause everything is built in. I havent got it yet so i havent seen how white or blue it is. Gettin it for 200 buck with bulbs from a local forum so i had to jump on it. The bulbs alone are worth 80-100 bucks.

 

bump

 

Thread is from 2009.