Setting the Aquarium Up

Today is actually the day! When Blake and I had gotten back to his house the night before with all of the stuff to put our aquarium together minus the live sand, we were pretty bummed we had forgotten it. It actually turned out to be a good thing though, because we started looking at the filter we had bought, and realized it was a few years old. There were much newer models out and we had paid as much for it as the newer ones cost that were coming out. When Blake went today to get the live sand at Reef Runners, that we had forgotten the night before he talked to them about exchanging the one we had for a different type of filter.

The one we had bought first was a hang on the back type. It was a black box that hangs on the back or side of the tank, it has a tube that takes in the water and after it filters the water it cascades back into the tank like a mini water fall. They lady at the store was nice enough to let Blake switch it out for a canister filter. These types of filers have two tubes. One tube sucks the water out, which is then run through the canister and filtered. While the other tube puts it back into the tank, simple enough right!  We ended up really liking the canister filter better, it is much more quite, and you can just put it under the tank and you don't have to see it unlike the other one which hung on the back.

When we got back to Blake's house and tried to put the canister filter together it was a little bit hard... Blake sometimes has a hard time following directions, but don't tell him I said that. Just kidding, He was really good at it, I think they just accidentally added extra parts that weren't needed and it really threw us off!

This is Blake's "I know exactly what I am doing, I am not confused at all." face, and also a picture of the cool filter that we have!

We tested it out on one of the buckets of water we had just mixed in with salt to see how loud it was actually going to be.

It seriously is so silent! You can't hear it at all, the Ac in the house runs louder than it is so we were pretty pleased about that.

Now for the live sand! I don't know if I have clarified this but it isn't actually alive, it just has living bacteria and organisms inside it already. Since the sand is used as a sort of filtration system it, quickens the process of getting a livable ecosystem in your tank so you can add fish more quickly than you would be able to with regular sand. 

Now the last step before you put the water  in is to arrange the live rock! There are a ton of different recommended formations to make your tank most efficient for the life in it! We just placed all of them into the tank so that we could see what we were working with.

When we played around with it enough and tried out a couple formations, Blake and I decided on more of a U shape. With a couple smaller rocks just up from for fun! 

Blake being the genius that he is thought of the idea to use the filter that we had to fill the tank. The filter has an input and output tube. It was a little tricky getting the filter/pump going, but after we placed the intake tube in the containers of water, and the output tube in the aquarium it filled it up very nicely.

We put the filter under the tank, and just on the off change that it leaked we put it in one of our empty orange 5 gallon buckets. 

The last and final touch was to put our little hermit crab into the tank. Now one of Blake's favorite things to say... don't ask me why, is turd burglar, he doesn't even use it in context most of the time! :)  With me it is one of those love hate relationships with that word, it really is so annoying but when Blake says it I can't help but smile and laugh. 

When we were looking at some fish in one of the salt water shops, we found a Goby we really liked. They are interesting because they eat the rock/sand and sort of sift it through their gills, they can even, when they are making caves under the rock, fill up their mouth and spit the rock out somewhere else. Anyways it is really entertaining to watch. Blake asked me if he could name our Goby we will get in the future a turd burglar. He thought he was really funny but I told him he couldn't because it was one of my favorite fishes! 

Later that day we found out that even though you need hermit crabs in your tank for the whole system to work they kill each other off because each hermit crab wants the other hermit crabs shells, and that they are very territorial creatures. Since they die off quickly and change shells around enough you can't really keep track of which one is which, you can't name them! 

After finding this out Blake struck a deal with me. If he promised that he would not name any of our fishes turd burglar than we would have to name all our hermit crabs turd burglars.  I begrudgingly agreed.

I think Blake's favorite part about it is that when I am talking about the hermit crab, or even our future hermit crabs, he says "What are they called?", and I have to say "turd burglars." 

That is our turd burglar crawling around in the middle of the picture, kinda hard to see I know, but if you look really close!

It actually ended up taking a few hours to put the whole thing together, so it turned out really great that we didn't put it together the night before. We ended up getting a better filter and having enough time to complete the whole thing. It was a lot of work but after a little clean up job of our working area, sweeping the floor (because of the salt we spilled), and spraying off the containers outside. We got to just look at the tank, and that was the coolest thing of all! We are so happy to finally have a saltwater tank and with our little turd burglar!

The First Big Step

Even though I spent my morning up American Fork Canyon adventuring around the outdoors, the day dragged on like Christmas Eve! I was so antsy, in anticipation for Blake to get off work and for us to go to the saltwater shop called, Reef Runners, in Orem. We were going to get the main things you need to start up the tank, which means it was really happening! Nothing better than Christmas at the end of summer. When he finally got off work we had to make a pit stop at home depot to get 6, 5 gallon buckets to hold enough water for our aquarium.

 We did eventually make it to the shop, which is a pretty cool little store, they have the coolest fish there. Even if you aren't planning on getting a saltwater tank it is a cool place to look at! 

When we had arrived we were pretty sure that we knew what we wanted, after spending the previous Saturday at a saltwater shop in Salt Lake, Fish 4 U, and talking to the owner Chris, we thought  we knew what the start up list consisted of. 

Unfortunately after talking to John, the owner of Reef Runner, he told us a different list. This just goes back to the fact that everyone does their tanks a little different. Which I was pretty bummed about because we thought we could at least get some hermit crabs on the first day. The owner John said they couldn't live in the tank until we had it up and running for about 3 weeks. When John saw how sad I was about it he said he would give us one free hermit crab just to prove his point. This definitely brightened my spirits! After talking it over with each other what we decided to get was 30 lbs of live sand, 30 lbs of live rock, 30 gallons of water, some salt, a filter, a hydrometer, and of course our free hermit crab!

There are two types of water that you can get. Either the saltwater that is already mixed, which is 2 dollars for every five gallons, or just RO/RI water, which is just special water that you mix salt in yourself. It is a little cheaper to mix the water yourself and we weren't opposed to the inconvenience of it so that is what we decided on. We had been at the shop for a while though and it was time to close so the owner graciously gave us 3, 5 gallon buckets of each, to speed the process of filling the buckets up! So half our water was premixed saltwater, and the other half we needed to mix ourself. Blake and I were pretty happy about that! 

We loaded up the car and when we were half way home we realized we forgot to put the live sand in the car! This was devastating really, because you have to put the live sand in the bottom first! Which meant that we couldn't actually start our tank that night. We called John the owner on his cell and he said he had already left the shop and that we could come and get it the next morning.  I was pretty disappointed I will not lie. 

When we got home we unloaded all of the stuff into the house! 

Since we could not put our aquarium together tonight we had to do something about the live rock that we had! Technically we had to either keep it very moist of completely submerged in water. 

We even got to pick our own rock out! Which was pretty cool and I think we made some great choices! 

What we ended up doing was placing it in the 3 saltwater buckets that were already mixed. 

What I was most worried about was our hermit crab! He had no sand to be in! since he was just given to us in a plastic bag.We ended up just placing him on one of the live rocks in the saltwater buckets. He was completely content and made a little home in one of the holes of the rock! I am really hoping he survives because I would hate to kill the first animal that we got!

Cleaning Time!

The tank that we got, for our aquarium, from Blake's parents house was a little dusty and still had a lot of hard water crusted on the glass. We were told the best way to get hard water off of the glass was to use water and vinegar. There were a ton of different methods we looked up but we decided just to scrub it down with mostly vinegar and just rinse it out in the end. We ended up taking it outside as to not make the house soaking wet! Just to make sure that it didn't leak, because that would be an important thing to check, we filled the whole thing up with water from the hose. We were pretty happy that it didn't :)

We even found this cute guy on the hose while we were filling it up! Snails are weird...

There were a few scratches on the glass and I think Blake was a little more torn up about that than I was :) We just have to pick a side that has less scratches, and remember that will be the front!

After we filled it up we dumped the water out and started scrubbing it down with the vinegar water, after sitting in storage unused for probably over a decade that stuff was on there pretty permanent! Luckily after a while of scrubbing it we got most of the hard water off of the tank.

Finally we rinsed it with the hose, one last time then dried it! Now we are as prepared as we are going to be and so excited to start the long, slow, rewarding process of owning a saltwater aquarium!

The Big Decision

In some of mine and Blake's first conversations we soon found out we shared an interest in fish! Not to eat mind you, because that is one thing that I do not have a taste for, but as pets! It probably came up when I described my love for my current beta fish Swarly that I have had for coming on two years. Along with my past hundred plus fishes that I have had. Blake had a 30 gallon fresh water tank while he was a child and he loved it! We always talked about how cool bigger fish tanks are and how interesting we find them.
Then one day Blake decided why not start now? When we thought about it, we made the big decision to get a saltwater aquarium.  In our adventure to get a saltwater tank we decided it would be best if we put in the time before hand to know exactly what we were getting into. We then did a lot of research. I will be honest most of the research was done by Blake! I did love to hearing about it, and reading the articles or posts that he showed me. We even made it to a couple saltwater shops and what I soon discovered was saltwater fish tanks are so much work! I had to idea that it took so much effort to have a saltwater tank. You have to measure on a regular basis the temperature, Salinity, Ph levels, Ammonia, Nitrates Alkalinity, Calcium, Magnesium, Phosphates, the list goes on forever! This however did not deter our great project in the making!
The only problem was that every single person we talked to about how to start up our first saltwater tank had a different opinion, and all of their opinions were the only right one, or so they informed us. Our heads swimming with information we just decided that maybe everyone was right and we should just pick what we liked about everyone else's tanks. The only problem was that we had no idea what it was that we liked most about them all! To many choices!
So we went to the basics... the tank! Blake had a fresh water tank when he was much younger so we decided to just use that instead of spending an extra $150.00 on something that we already had! One Sunday Blake's parents Steele and Nancy were nice enough to have us up for dinner with his family and that is the day we decided to get the fish tank and bring it home with us! The tank was under the stairs in a storage area. It was quite the feat to get it unburied, but we succeeded and with the help of Blake's brother, loaded it into Blake's car to take home to his house. When we got home we decided to set it up just to see it all together. I am so excited to get this going I can't even stand it! This is a great picture of the tank with the stand! Even the sweet light on top from the 90's unfortunately we have to get a new light so it wont be as matching :)