by Finn Gardner, age 12

In my previous post I wrote about my tank and how I got it, but one thing I didn’t really talk about is my gear. So today I will be talking about all of the gear I use for my tank and where I got it.

To start out I’m going to talk about the light I use. It is the “Noo-Psyche K7” and the reason I like this light so much is because you can easily adjust it for the needs of your corals and/or fish. I’d say the only downside to this light is that it can be a bit confusing setting it up for the first time because the instructions are hard to understand and you need the app to correctly operate it. I was gifted these lights from Sarah Golden after she won them in a raffle so I am not exactly sure about the best place to get them. Overall, I think this light is great and I would definitely recommend it.

The next peace of reef equipment I would like to introduce is called the “Jecod Cross-Flow Wave Pump”. I think that this is a great option if you want waves in your tank or even just a small current. I use this to give my tank a small current because the waves would be too intense for my small tank. Like the lights on my tank, this can be a little hard to set up for the first time but is very easy to operate once you understand it. This does have an app to go with it, but I have not used or set up the app because you can easily operate it using the control panel it comes with. I really like this wave pump and I think it’s great for reef tanks.

In our house we usually don’t use heaters because we keep our house the right temperature for tanks. But my room gets cold at night, so we needed to put a heater in my reef tank. My dad hates most aquarium heaters because he says they suck. For now, we decided on a 25-watt preset heater from Petsmart.

The last device I would like to talk about is my filter. I started out with the “AquaReady HOB 1.5” protein skimmer which is a good device, but it was causing a lot of bubbles to fill my tank and was generating a lot of salt spray in my room, so we moved it to a bigger 40 gallon tank (in our fish room) where it works much better. So instead of the protein skimmer we put a “Fluval AquaClear HOB Filter” which is working much better for my tank. This filter is easy to set up and use and I can’t really think of any downsides to it. I think that the protein skimmer and/or filter you use depends on the type and size of your tank.

Thank you for reading my article and stay tuned for more reef updates!