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!