New tank setup

[nc bubba]

I have keep freshwater fish for about 4 years, but I have always had a facination with the saltwater tanks in the stores. I now would like to start a saltwater tank and have read some books and surfed the internet looking for information. I have purchased a 44 gallon glass corner unit from a local pet store and would like to setup a reef tank. What i would like to know is what would you recommend for the amount of rocks, would you use live sand or crushed coral, type of filtering system?
Any help would be welcomed.

 

[templar]

For a reef tank, you need strong lighting. And if I'm right a 44g corner tank is a high tank? So research what kind of corals you would like to eventually keep and then buy the appropriate lighting. As for a substrate go with a 4"+ deep sand bad. Natures ocean live sand works great. You'll also want around 50 lbs live rock. Maybe more even. You can get a nice deal online for an order of 45-50 lbs of LR. You should also add a refugium below the tank as your filtration. You will need a smaller tank, such as a 15 gallon, with an overflow box on your main tank to feed water to the refugium. Inside the refugium you add a deep sand bad, some live rock and macro algae. What it does is create a huge bio-logical filter that will keep your nitrates very low to non-existant. Inside the refugium you'll need a return pump to pump water back to the main tank. Only other thing I can think of right now is a protein skimmer, probably something small you could actually put in the refugium, some type of hang on design like a Prizm would work nice.