Tips

A tank in the living room should be a calm thing to sit near. A return pump that hums through the cabinet door is the fastest way to ruin that. The good news is that pump noise almost always comes from one of a handful of causes, and most of them cost nothing to fix. Work through these in order, cheapest first. 1. Vibration through the cabinet This is the usual culprit. The pump itself is quiet, but it sits hard against the sump or the cabinet floor and turns the whole stand into a speaker. Slip a piece of...

Clownfish are one of the few marine fish that will spawn readily in a home aquarium, which is exactly why so many people try breeding them and exactly why so many give up after the eggs hatch. Getting adults to spawn is the easy part. Keeping the larvae alive for the first ten days is where most first attempts fall apart, usually because there was nothing small enough for the babies to eat sitting ready on day zero.This guide walks through the process in litres and Celsius, the way it actually plays out in a Brisbane lounge room, not a...

Every new reefer wants acropora within the first six months. Colour, growth, bragging rights. But acropora is usually the coral that ends up bleached white on the sand bed while a montipora three rows down is still growing happily through the same rough patch. If you are picking your first SPS coral for a Brisbane tank this winter, start with montipora.The difference comes down to tolerance. Montipora species, especially the encrusting and plating types, handle small swings in alkalinity, temperature, and light far better than most acropora. Acropora wants alkalinity holding within a tight band, day after day, with barely...

Filter socks and roller mats catch waste before it breaks down into ammonia and phosphate, but they only work while they are actually catching things. Leave a sock in past its use-by point and it turns into a nitrate factory, dumping everything it trapped straight back into the water column. This is a numbers problem, not a feel problem, so here is a rough schedule based on micron rating and how heavily stocked your tank is, plus what it costs to run properly through a Brisbane winter of steady indoor temperatures and normal feeding.What you need 200 micron filter socks...

Brisbane winters are mild compared to the southern states, but an unheated fish room can still drop a tank from 25°C to under 20°C overnight, especially in a garage or a tiled sunroom. The generic pet shop rule of "5 watts per litre" was written for houses that never see single digit nights. If your tank sits in a cold room with tiled floors or a draughty window, that rule will leave your heater running flat out just to hold temperature, with no reserve for a genuinely cold snap in July or August.What you need A heater rated for your...