200 dollars, what would you buy?

saltn00b

Active Member
ok here is the situation.
my LFS offers rewards via a point system. i am around the corner of hitting the 5000 point mark (1:1 $ ratio
), at which point i am eligible for $200 dollars of anything in the store, all at once.
the short of it:
my tank is a 150g mixed reef with sps. i have a ~30g fuge underneath. and all the flow i could need.
last summer i lost the majority of my fish and now only have a GSM clown, lawnmower blenny, and a green mandarin. so i clearly need to restock my fish.
i am always looking for pretty new corals.
i could use a few new inverts, such some emerald crabs to keep a few bubble algae bubbles at bay, a bunch of snails to keep the tank clean, maybe a skunk cleaner shrimp.
to keep up with the calcium , alk and mag, i dose with the 2-part solution technique, and it is something that i finally found that works great and is very cheap, while also being easy to implement.
the problem:
the thing with this store, i really dont trust there livestock, fish usually are sick with one form of disease or another and die within a few days. i prefer to purchase fish from online or other, better stocked LFS. Their corals are usually sub-par at best, and it is always a crap-shoot if they have anything even slightly worthwhile, and when they do, it is way overpriced.
so what to buy? inverts and some equipment? what equipment? a calcium reactor? an RO/DI unit from them? the RO/DI's if they have them, might not be what i want / need. any other ideas?
 

stdreb27

Active Member
lol if you've dropped 5000 dollars at the store it can't suck that bad! What I want right now is a chiller and a ca reactor.
If nothing else just tell em your fish suck, I want them right off the air plane. So they don't touch the tanks.
 

saltn00b

Active Member
ha, alot of that money was spent in the first year, on equipment and etc, QT tanks...
the fish i did buy from there always had some sob story. one time i tried something like you suggested, they had a bunch of CBBF's just in , sitting in a QT tank. they were slowly acclimating them to higher pH. something about during travel, the pH gets drastically crazy low, so they needed to raise it up. they were not for sale yet, but i managed to purchase one. i acclimated over something like 4 hours. the fish had ick, which was quickly subdued in hypo. a few days later it developed black ick, and then a bacterial infection at the same time. i bought the formalin online (it got difficult to find locally) and didnt even get a chance to use it.
 

stdreb27

Active Member
Originally Posted by saltn00b
http:///forum/post/2686522
ha, alot of that money was spent in the first year, on equipment and etc, QT tanks...
the fish i did buy from there always had some sob story. one time i tried something like you suggested, they had a bunch of CBBF's just in , sitting in a QT tank. they were slowly acclimating them to higher pH. something about during travel, the pH gets drastically crazy low, so they needed to raise it up. they were not for sale yet, but i managed to purchase one. i acclimated over something like 4 hours. the fish had ick, which was quickly subdued in hypo. a few days later it developed black ick, and then a bacterial infection at the same time. i bought the formalin online (it got difficult to find locally) and didnt even get a chance to use it.
I'm not sure exactly how, but it has something to do with the fresh air hitting the water surface when you open the bags up.
 

saltn00b

Active Member
so can you or someone give me a quick breakdown of calcium reactors?
they are probably gonna cost in the 500 ish range new from the store, no?
i would need a CO2 tank, and need to get it filled occasionally? i have no more room under the DT really, so it could get big and ugly...
 

nano reefer

Active Member
i would say, instead of 200 bucks of credit, why not 100 cash? if they say yes i would go downtown and get some brewski's.
 

sepulatian

Moderator
If you do not trust their stock then, sure as heck, don't ask to buy it from their distributer!! That is where the bad stock is coming from. It isn't as though you would get a discount from them. $200 in mysis? It will go bad long before it is used. I hope that it isn't the only diet. I would go with the salt mix or something else that you need.
 

stdreb27

Active Member
Originally Posted by sepulatian
http:///forum/post/2687476
$200 in mysis? It will go bad long before it is used.
I hope you understand that was a small joke.
Also there is a lfs here, who has a decent enough vender however their tanks are riddled with ich, just because of the turnover and really unless you tear down the system once you have ich it will never go away. I'd buy a fish from there if I could get it out of the bag, but not once it touches their water. However if it sucks from the vender...
 

saltn00b

Active Member
haha monk...
i think salt buckets is most likely my best bet.
maybe 3 buckets of salt, and 50 bucks in inverts.
 

sepulatian

Moderator
Originally Posted by stdreb27
http:///forum/post/2688215
Seriously though, if it is frozen how can it go bad?
Are you messing with me again?

It does go bad. I have had different kinds of frozen go bad over time. It was stuff that my fish didn't really like.
 

stdreb27

Active Member
Originally Posted by sepulatian
http:///forum/post/2688217
Are you messing with me again?

It does go bad. I have had different kinds of frozen go bad over time. It was stuff that my fish didn't really like.
Seriously, when we lived by the coast we had a freezer full of fish, that we would eat over the course of the year some of it I'm sure was older, eventually the taste and texture would suffer (gumbo yum) however it really never went bad. But regularly we'd eat fish that had been in the freezer for 6 mo to a year.
 
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