Water + Marine Salt = Sea Water!

Since the last picture of the empty tank, there's been a lot of hustle and bustle going on. That ridiculous amount of money spent, together with all the late night fiddling and fixing. Setting up an aquarium is always an exciting task. With each aquarium you build, you leverage on past experience and you try to improve on the new aquarium. I've gotta prioritize between school work and this little project. I refuse to stay home this couple of days. Somehow's there's this strange phenomena that happens. Even though its an empty tank, I can't help but just gaze into it, day dream and idle precious time away. You can imagine what it'd be like when the fishies get here. So these afternoons and evenings I try to hold myself in school to finish as much as work as possible because when I come home, I'd be tweaking about the aquarium, checking for leaks, making sure all is well. Very very distracting!













Now more about the technicalities. From my earlier sketches, you'd see how i intended to suspend my lamp and now i've put it in action. All thanks to a very helpful uncle who got me the chains to suspend the lamp, I think it's pretty neat.

I initially filled the tank with freshwater and got the filter running. Its always important to do that first to check the tank for leaks. Its always easier to clean up a fresh water leak then a salt water leak. Now that everything seems fine, I've dosed couple of kilos of a marine salt mix in to convert the fresh water into 'sea water' NOTE! you DO NOT just put any salt into the tank. You put marine salt. Salt that has been specially treated or rather preserved to keep its 'sea-water properities'. Alternatively aquariusts can buy real sea water from aquariums but that's only feasible for small tanks. How would you expect me to carry 100L of sea water up to my deep blue sea in my 5th story HDB? If you observe the bottom of the tank, there's some white residue. Just like how you'd only get 99.999% Gold, you can never get 100% seat salt that dissolves 100%. Its inevitable to have some impurities, maybe specs of sand, dust etc.

2 posts ago I talked about water circulation. The water is running throught the filter, shouldn't the residue be all floating around? Why does it seem like they tend to settle down only on some parts of the tank? Its exactly what i've talked about previously. It is very important to be able to have a filtration system that removes all physical waste from an aquarium effectively.