Proposed Set Up

No, I am not stealing underpants... But it is a good South Park episode.

Today is the big day where I reveal my totally awesome, blow your mind plans! Maybe that would be a good starter if I was more experienced. But since I’m not, my plans are actually not mind blowing, but I’m excited all the same.

Remember I said I’m doing this on a budget of $30 a month that is slightly flexible. It is slightly flexible because I can take out advances. So I can technically spend $60 dollars for September but I will not receive $30 for October. We really are trying to pay off our wedding and cars. Also, later on hubby wants to build a custom stand in which case we will be combining our respective fun money and our joint fun money (joint fun money is for dinners out and dates and stuff). But that too will be done on a budget… I hope… That is sort of his project so his rules are different than mine. Now that I've explained the money, lets get on with the plan!

As I said before my tank will be a 10 gallon set up similar to this:

You can read more about this tank at Advanced Aquarist

The basis for my project will be a Walmart freshwater set up that you can get for $30 in store. It is not available online.

This set up comes with the tank, hood, and aquaculture 5-15 filter which I may change later depending on how my project comes along. Now, this is a freshwater setup, so the bulbs are not up to par. For bulbs I plan on using two Coralife 50/50 20 watt compact florescents.

While price shopping I also found a bulb called ReefSun 50/50 sold by PetCo. However, I noticed that the ReefSun was 6500k while Coralife is 10,000k. Which there is a difference, I will post a separate thing on that. My new friends at Nano-Reef.com (see Reef Resources in sidebar) were kind enough to point me in the right direction and tell me Coralife is the way to go. Once again, there will be a separate post on that later.

Once acquiring my "basic" items, I will also be buying a can of blue spray paint, white spray paint, and a piece of acrylic to cover the bottom of the hood to save my electrics from water exposure and my fish from my electrics. I will be following the videos posted on YouTube by Indo-Pacific Sea Farms. I made a nice and easy playlist for y'all to navigate through :)

Happy swimming!