Hi all, I'm new in here !
I'd like to present you my current set-up ; it's a 135 gallons with a 50 gallons sump in the basement.
To make it short, it's been around ten years now that my boyfriend and I are blowing money on that awesome hobby. We started it up with a small 25g reef tank to quickly turn it over to a 77g one. A year passed and once again we started to think this was too small and we wanted a bigger set-up. We transfered everything in a 90g. Thereafter we still weren't happy yet. We needed something new... we always had a crush on butterfly fishes and angel fishes, since most of them aren't reef safe we changed our reef tank into a fish only one. So we bought a small 60g for our corals and things and we transformed our 90g into a FO.
Months later we found out this was lots of work taking care of two salt water aquariums considering we weren't at home during the week and we had to take care of our two dogs while at home. So, we bought ourselves a house last year and started to build up our dream tank : a 180g reef tank in the dining room with a 90g sump in the basement. Now we were happy.... throughout a year at least. The house experienced some humidy problems with that much water and the electricity bill was a bit expensive for us considering we had three 175watt MH, a large water pump in the basement that's riding up water 13' high and a deshumidifier running 24/24 7/7. So we had to think this over........ again.
I then suggest my boyfriend to sell everything out... but of course he disagreed on this. So we reached a compromise on decreasing in size everything. That's where we currently are in the story, since 3 years now we own a 135g cube tank of 36x36x24 with a 50g sump. Since we wanted it to be our LAST reef tank, we equiped it with the best hardware.
Here are some pics of our evolution during those past years, enjoy !
Our first reef aquarium 10 years ago (25g)
Our second reef aquarium (77g).... observe the fixtures ! A Giesemann MH at the left and a PC Coralife one at the right... lol
90g reef tank (and FO time later)
60g reef tank
180g reef tank
and then, our current 135g cube.
