What it took

Well what it took to get things going again was seeing the equipment I needed at the right price. I had been thinking the time was right for me to get back into the hobby and I was visiting various pet stores and asking all sorts of questions about what I needed. First thing I new I needed was a new filter because the old Magnum filter was not working and I needed to replace it, but with what? I found the largest canister filter available on sale for half price at a local store who sold salt water fish (SWF) and all the equipment needed to keep them including live rock. So I went home and started researching that canister filter and all the other things I would need to get started again and that's when I learned about live rock and how it acted ass a filter. So on August 23, 2009 I went down to the store and bought that great big filter (the Marineland 360 multi-stage canister filter), and I went home and started rinsing out all my crushed sea shell sand bed that was still in the tank the whole time it was in storage. I spent the better part of that whole weekend washing that gravel with vinegar and rinsing repeatably. I also did some research on the proper lighting I would need to keep the live rock purple and full of Coraline that I was going to be putting in. After visiting a few individuals who were selling their equipment, most of them were home made style lights or the king that you put into a great big fish tank cabinet, I decided to order a brand new hood for my tank that came with four sets of 65 watt true actinic lights and two 250 watt metal halides lights and for moon light effects it had 6 blue LED lights and to keep everything cool it had a fan built into the hood. So I ordered that hood through e-bay and bought it from a business in Texas, that was the first major purchase I had ever made through the Internet and man I was nervous. I ended up paying three hundred for the hood and eighty for tax and duty to bring it into Canada for a grand total of three hundred and eighty dollars, that same light hood was selling at one of the other pet stores for eleven hundred dollars, saving me seven hundred and twenty dollars. That next Monday I went to my nearest bottled water store and bought a couple of five gallon water bottles for twenty bucks each and started filling my fish tank with pure reverse osmosis bottled water, each water fill cost me a two bucks. After making seven trips to the water store throughout the week after work each time, my tank was darn near full and ready for some live rock and fish. That next weekend I went down to the store and bought my first round of live rock and put them into a couple of old plastic 5 gallon milk bones containers which I washed with vinegar water and rinsed thoroughly, the first round was 35lbs which I got for half price which worked out to $4.50 per pound. I ended up going back to the store two more times that day and cleaned them out of all but one or two rocks for there fish to use. In one of my trips I noticed a small little fish at the bottom of my bucket, I added her to the tank not thinking she would make it, but what the heck I had nothing to lose. I named that little fish Zena because she looked like a zebra only purple and grey. All in all I now had 80lbs of Jakarta live rock and six Mexican turbo snails, and a six lined wrasses, which the sales clerk never charged me for, all for $360.00. So my total investment up to date was $229.00 for the filter, $380.00 for my lights, $360.00 for my rock, and about $100.00 on miscellaneous things like water bottles and heaters, food, salinity testers, fish nets, ect. All I needed to do now was let the tank cycle.