Purchased New Refugium...Need help stocking it appropriately

[sacrifice333]

Just purchased a brand new refugium off of ebay complete with 6500K power compact, all plumbing, and powerhead.

Now I need to stock it appropriately for the reef I am creating. I presently have only one little fishy as I've been needing a new skimmer and a fuge to help combat a small cyano issue I've been battling for far too long.

I understand that putting some miracle mud and then growing some macro algaes, such as caulerpa will help to control any micro algaes that may be in my tank. Also one can 'grow' micro-inverts such as amphipods and copeopods to feed the tank naturally, but how does this happen?!

Please school me on how best to set up my fuge...

[trilinearmipmap]

I'd also like to know, what is the best refugium substrate: aragonite, miracle mud, or no substrate at all.

[Stirfry]

i have a 8 gal fuge and i have it bare bottom(only because i cant afford anything else{but so far so good iv seen a decline of hir algea in my main tank and i see a few pods growind in it}) and a trickle filter on top of the small tank. and a little bite of caulerpa
on thing that i know is that you want to have a very small amount of flow in the fuge because you need to let the marco algea absorb all the nutrience it can so the more conttack the better other than that i would suggest searchin it on google and see what others have done. and possibly you'll find some other ideas. Anotherthing is all things take time.

[monza]

In mine I have half MM and half sand. After all the reading you can do on both who knows?? I've never (knock on wood) had any bad algae problems. I was planning on taking out the MM soon is it has been there for two years or so, I was not going to replace it with anything except live rock maybe sand. MM has really taken a beating as to it's value and called a scam many times yet many people still use it. Live sand just seems to have a life span and issues that are different for every tank. You just have to know one day it'll have negative effects and need replacing.

You can read arguments for both or none. I don't think you can get an answer like, ‘do it this way.” It is just one fraction in a big equation that the better balanced you are at the end, the better your tank does.

So having not really answered your question I’d go sand bed. Add some Macro algae’s get as much diversity of pods and critters as possible going on in there.

Good luck.

Dave

[sacrifice333]

Oh such a fun hobby... never a direct answer... always something that works one way for one person and another way for another.