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Portion circled for $15 Self collect WEST COAST Gardens Sent from Singapore Reef Club mobile app

The disadvantage of placing the chiller inline with the return is: (1) There's some head loss so you'll lose flow. (2) Flow required for your chiller to cool water effectively looks to be lower than the recommended return pump flow (5-10x tank volume/hr), so there's incompatibility there. (3) Single point of failure, eg. if return pump fails, then it's equivalent to taking out your chiller as well. You have no back up pump/return from chiller. The advantage of placing inline is that you'll just need 1 pump, so you can save some money on the cost of the additional pump and cost of electricity I guess. imo, disadvantages outweigh advantages, but your tank your call. Skimmer should not be required during a cycle, though the gas exchange does help, so you can consider running it dry (no skimmate). Lights is actually also not required, but if you want to turn it on that's fine as well for aesthetic reasons I think it would be good if you bought a cheapish but fairly reliable test kit(eg. Salifert) to test your ammonia levels before deciding if you need to ghost feed or not. You may not be required to ghost feed too, depending on your stocking plan. If you put in a hard-ish fish in first, imo you don't need to ghost feed once the cycle is complete. Just add the fish in and feed for real. Cycle is complete when ammonia is zero and you can detect nitrates. Should take anywhere from 2-6 weeks depending on your bottled bacteria (if you're using any). If no bottled bacteria I would say at least 4-8 weeks or more. Not sure if I was clear but please add the fish only when cycle is complete!

Hey. A few suggestions. 1. Ensure the rock work is stable and well joined together. 2. If the liverock is of good quality and relatively pest free, it can help your tank to mature faster. How confident are you regarding LR from hobbyist whom you don't know? 3. IMO, less rock, more coral. Provide caves and swim thru for your fishes, shelters for corals prefer less flow, as we as a mixture of varied light and flow conditions to suit different animals. 4. Composition wise, rule of third, negative space, depth, all these are ways to help the whole aquarium look balanced. 5. Before building the rockwork, it helps to picture the grown out aquarium in mind, how will different coral fill up the scape. Plan accordingly. All the best!

Thanks for the feedback Rob. The overall volume without sand, liverock comes to around 200 gallons. Correction on my part - the pumps will be 2 x apex cor-20 and not cor-15 that together have the capacity to churn 4000 goh which is 20 times the water capacity. Over and above I have the apex wav kit ( 2 wavemakers) factored in and will be added as time passes. The apex wav at full capacity is another 4000 gph. The close looped system will be as follows: - 2 or 3 pipes drilled mid lower section at the back - a web of pipes connecting via a T spread across the entire bottom with Flare nozzles for the output - pipes buried in the scape rocks with low profile bulkhead overflow strainer as the output. This set of pipes will be tuned not to spray and full capacity with option to tune in as and when required - all closed loop return pipes will have check valves installed - 1 each at the pipes and an additional one on the main line as a backup Ozone- love to have it and on my priority list however yet to figure out the spot for the ozone machine away to avoid issues with family around Regards, Allan Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk