Just a little advice

[jimspurs]

Good afternoon and thank you for letting me join this fab site,
Firstly I've had both freshwater and marine setups before but after a 4 year break I'm now setting up a new marine tank in my new home. I,m a little limited for space so have opted for a 180 ltr Juwel Rio tank, I've notice many people discussing the use of live sand and rock to almost instantly seed a tank and use as main biological filtration.
This I haven't tried before but am ready for any new ideas, The Rio has a standard internal filter with a 200 ltr per hr pump, this I'm going to supplement with an external canister filter rated at 1800 lph c/w UV 9watt sterilizer, also fitting a Tunze 9004 internal skimmer.
I'm planning on adding about 30 kg of live pre packed live sand and about 20 kg of cured live rock from my local suppliers, can you please tell me if you foresee any problems with this system, will eventually have about 4-5 fish, hermits, snails, and urchin.
Lighting is a 120 watt LED system suspended about 12" from the surface, this unit has about 54 LED lights rated at 1 watt each.
I would also like to have some soft corals too but was worried about the amount of light I'd be using, Water movement will be by both returns from the two filters plus two 1400 lph power-heads / wave-makers
Thank you for any information, Jimspurs, Lowestoft, United Kingdom

 

[flower]

Hi,
Welcome to the site!
There is no such thing as instantly when it comes to SW tanks. Live rock has some good little critters...that's about all. You still have to let the tank cycle. The one thing we pretty much agree on around here is that a chunk of raw shrimp, pure ammonia, or ghost feeding ... are all better options to kick start the first cycle, instead of using a live fish.
Those sterilizers are not needed, and IMO are a waste of money, the rest of your list seems okay to me. If you are going canister...you plan to have all that equipment in the display? Have you considered a sump with a refugium chamber? We have a few folks here that can walk you step by step to set up a good sump system, I think with the thought of corals on the horizon, you might want to look into that before you make any solid decisions.
I don't know much about your lighting....But I do know that when it comes to corals, there are plenty that can live under minimal lighting, all the way up to the huge Metal halides that can burn your eye balls. So no matter what kind of lighting you have, there will always be certain corals you can keep. When you do your rock work, just keep in mind to create some ledges to attach your corals to.