Things that reefers can do to help save themselves money

[Leah]

Sell the kids and other furry pets.

P.S. A couple of dogs, a cat and bird and a child all potty trained... will trade for fish and equipment.

[somewherebeyondthesea]

Don't buy anymore tanks! I filled my fluval edge with coral and now I bought a second one!...gonna be a seahorse tank!

[whatcaneyedo]

I'll try not to list anything already mentioned.

1. Reuse dead coral skeletons in a calcium reactor.
2. Sell frags.
3. Buy frags rather than colonies.
4. Feed fish free dead clams and mussels from a local sea food store. (they throw out the dead ones daily if I don't ask for them)
5. Hire a knowledgeable person to look after your tank when you go on vacation. Paying them a few bucks is cheeper than coming home to a dead tank caused by an inexperienced cheaper/free person.
6. Use non pharmaceutical grade magnesium chloride ice melting salt.
7. Purchase your annually consumed products during boxing day sales (bulbs, test kits etc)
8. Use crushed coral substrate rather than ARM fine reactor media in a Calcium Reactor.
9. Do weekly water changes rather than weekly trace element supplementing.
10. Lugol's Solution Potassium Iodide can be purchased from a pharmacy for less than half of what the Kent product retails for.
11. Plumb your tank with lots of unions and flexible hot tub hose. That way if you need to change something later you don't have to destroy everything with a saw. I've filled 2-3 garbage cans with old ridged plumbing configurations that I couldn't use anymore.
12. Keep spare parts, backup pumps and empty salt buckets. The extra inventory is cheaper than a dead tank caused by equipment failure.
13. Purchase an all in one controller rather than many individual controllers and monitors. Set it up to alarm and send a text message if something goes wrong. Again, dead tanks are expensive.
14. Buy small juvenile fish and clams rather than more expensive, less adaptive large adults.
15. Keep it simple... I think that is a contradiction to everything I just said. Oops.

[Reef_Geek]

there are also activities one can do, not to save money but to bring in money to subsidize your own expenses. By no means, does this typically produce much profit beyond a transaction basis, because a true business would have to consider all start up costs in its operations... thus one can only call it true profit if revenues have exceeded both 1) costs of goods & services of that transaction, plus 2) recovered all start up costs. Technically, it's called margin, where there is excess above cost of goods sold, but not yet considering overhead.

so some things one can do to 'subsidize' one's expenses in the hobby

1) buy a big piece of coral, frag, and trade/sell off surplus
2) grow and frag your own colonies for trade, store credit, or online sales
3) breed fish / seahorses
4) buy used or shut-down deals for further trading / selling
5) go get a business license and buy wholesale for trading / selling
6) write articles and sell first publication rights
7) leverage trade skills, for example, build aquarium cabinets and sell on consignment with a LFS, or make a service fee schedule for building DIY units... such as LEDs, for others
8) aquarium servicing. Weekly fish tank maintenance at offices and homes
9) culture Berghia

PS- be careful. the fastest way to take enjoyment out of a hobby is to turn it into 'work'

[Reef Pilot]

I have 2 display tanks, one on the main floor, and one downstairs on the other side of the wall from my sump room. When changing water (every 2 weeks) I reuse the upstairs water to replace the water in my downstairs tank. I also have a QT that also uses the upstairs tank water when I change it (about once every 2 months or more depending on usage).

My upstairs display tank has SPS and other more demanding corals. So it gets the new fresh SW with a change. For that tank, I also dose Ca and KH, MB7, trace elements, as well run a bio pellet reactor, carbon and GFO. When I change water, my N03 and P04 are at or near zero in that tank, so that water is still very suitable to reuse in my downstairs tanks.

But in my downstairs tank, I don't dose anything. I have mostly softies and less demanding LPS in it, and they seem to be just fine.

With my plumbing, and how my tanks and sump are situated, water changes are very easy to do. And I only have to use 1/2 the salt and other chemicals that otherwise would be necessary for all my tanks.