Thanks Mike. Redundancy was important to me because I once had a return pump fail while I was away on vacation. Not a lot of fun. However, I really like the Eheim pumps and the only way I could get the flow I wanted was to use two of them. It also allows me to service one pump without having to issolate the sump. There's really lots of benefits.

I'd never had a 1262 before and found the 3/8" fittings on the smaller models frustrating. Another great thing about those pumps is you can use standard 3/4" threaded adapters from the hardware store.

I always use a mix of live and dry rock, but it think having a good amount of live rock is needed to seed the tank.

You raise a good question. How much live rock do you need to seed dry rock and what rock to buy?

It would defeat the purpose to buy live rock for seeding and then to introduce unwanted hitch hikers to the tank (bubble algea, aptasia, etc.)

I wonder if anyone with a clean tank would be willing to put some of my dry rock into their tank to seed it? Even smallish pieces should work?

It would probably be easier to buy a small piece of LR from a clean established tank to seed your new rock.

we currently have about 60lbs dry rock in the display tank of our 75....and 3 lbs cured live rock from an established tank. It seems to be doing the trick...I threw in some scallop and saw an ammonia spike, but levels have gone back to normal. I imagine as long as you slowly add bio load to the tank, a minimal ammount of actual "live" rock would be needed. When I ordered from Marco rocks, they said all that was needed to seed the rockwork was a cup of establish sand or a few lbs of good rock from a fellow reefer etc.

So, I've made some significant progress on the tank. Everything got put on hold while we were doing some renovations in the basement, but I'm back on track. I've added a lot of new content with lots of pictures. Pretty much everything after post 18 is new.

Details (Black, Floor, HRV, Screen Top).......Post 17
Tank Leveling.................................Post 18
Water Prep and Salt Mixing....................Post 19

Aquascaping - Part II of III..................Post 22
- Building the aquascape

I'm hoping to have saltwater in this tank by sometime next week. There is no urgency on transferring live stock, so I will take my time cycling the tank and getting all of the equipment operational.

I am for sure buying LED lights. The leading contenders are Pacific Sun, ReefTech LED and Vertex. If you haven't seen my LED thread, take a look at some of the things that are going on here (Next Generation LED Lighting).

Thanks!

The tank is filling with ro/di as of 9pm tonight. At a rate of 100gpd, it should be full by Sunday afternoon.

very nice Brad, any hints on the aquascape ?

Thanks John. There are pics of the aquascape here.

http://www.canreef.com/vbulletin/sho...t=66389&page=3