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Hey again all.
I hardly saw any of you salties on the temp forums I set up lol.
Anyhow, to the matter at hand... I'm starting up a shop in the next 2-3 months, have been planning it for the last 6 months, and we still can't decide, should we have a big display marine tank or not?
The current plan will have about 950 litres of marine holding tanks and about 600 litres of sump.
We've been thinking of getting a 2000 litre tank (10ft x 5ft x 2ft high) that we want to keep one or maybe two juvanile banded bamboo sharks in, plus a few fish.
Is this sort of size tank going to be hard to keep? (access from two sides). We should be able to afford it (in the shop's startup budget) and the extra upgrade of filters it'd need (aquamedic turboflotor 5000 twin with trickle tower and sand filter - around 6ft tall for the hefty 10,000 litre capacity skimmer).
It will be a lot of extra hassle to get it made, put in a concrete or breezeblock base etc, and may have to possibily knock down a small false wall and rebuild it 6ft further down.
It will nearly tripple the volume of water in the system, but will also increase water changes and evaporation (will have an auto fw top off hooked up to a 300gpd RO/DI filter).
Are there going to be big algae problems? will it be too difficult to keep the sand sifted around enough to stop slime algae from holding on etc? (have a problem with this in my 60x20x20 at the moment even with a sand sifting gobbie)
We are probably not going to be able to afford to pay for much liverock for a tank that size, so will a tank virtually all sand and a few liverocks going to look too plain? (with one or two baby sharks and maybe put some other fish in.... my gf was thinking of a big shoal of blue-green chromis, and a few tangs)..
The second question will obviously be, if it is worth it, what should go in it other than sand and 1 or 2 banded bamboo sharks (if eventually they get too big, one would be relocated)
So, is it worth the hassle of building it all, the extra water in the water changes (that should hopefully be mostly automated anyhow), and the extra expense (bigger filters, extra lights, supports, more salt for mixing up water etc.)
Obviously it'd be a display tank only, as it would be way too impratical to catch fish from.
I'll attach some rendered pictures we made of the way the shop will look if anyone's interested

From the front of the fishie area (see the shark tank in the back room)
from the back of the fishie area:

from the front of the shop (will be some tanks/vivariums at the front here):

reptile room (will probably be different from this):


Last edited by worley at 30-Sep-2004 13:52[/font][/font][/font][/font]

my lfs put just put in a huge display tank, and while it looks great i don't think you should go through with it just yet. A buisness has enough problems getting off the ground to worry about an extra exspense like this tank. My suggestion is to put the money aside for an emegency. My store just opened up 6 months ago and we found a new leak in the cealing, had to re-wire some of our outlets, put up new celing tiles, have new tiles installed, among other things. My suggestion is too wait a year until you are on your feet.


chris

Thanks, we've been talking it over, and I think we will probably wait, it would probably be a good 2 week's worth of work to get it all setup anyhow, and we don't need that extra time when we're trying to get setup before christmas!
What do you think of the design? (appologies for the large images). The marines are probably going to be 6 x 48x15x15 tanks instead of what I've got in the images. Cheaper on racks (going to get aluminium ones made), tanks, and plumbing and can easily divide them up into 24" and 2 12" tanks.
Think it's worth getting an invert tray? We'd be getting the AquaMedic Reef 2000 for the lower volume, has calcium reactor, nitrate reductor, fw water top-off, skimmer, biological/mechanical media etc. Should the invert tray be run off a different system to the fish? (there would be isolated quarantine and treatment tanks from the system should fish need to be treated, and we'd probably keep one or a pair of cleaner shrimp in almost every tank with the fishes).

From a customer standpoint and a business owners standpoint, I have pretty much the same opinion. Get on your feet first, but put aside that money.

A LFS here recently came under new ownership, and as a customer there I have noticed myself more willing to buy from there as they have significantly improved the store cosmetically inside.

Later down the road, I will however say that nice "display tanks" that can be purchased out of for an elevated price perhaps, are a HUGE boost to the atmosphere of the shop.

Since they improved the shop so significantly, you have many people coming in for the "public aquarium" type atmosphere, and buying things and getting into the hobby from the experience in your store.

In short, display tanks = good down the road. But for the time being, the most important thing is a clean and friendly atmosphere, with hellpful people that know what they are doing and very nice fish =)

edit -- And for the love of God don't overprice your equipment >><< LFS here is very nice, but, their equipment is OUTRAGEOUS! 80 bucks for an Emperor 280? I dont think so, heh.

Last edited by TexasBetta at 30-Sep-2004 14:41

oh yeah, what can be done about phosphates in a large system? We were looking at the aquamedic (might as well get everything from them as we'll probably get a nice discount) Antiphos FE media, but haven't had any experience with it. Infact, we've not really had a huge amount of experience with corals either, but have kept various snails, shrimp, starfish, sea urchins, and a few anemonies. With two nitrate reductors running (one already completely matured) hopefully it should keep the nitrates down really low (currently at about 2ppm in one tank here) but not sure if it'll be low enough for the corals etc. Also, would have to dose more addatives in a system connected up to the rest. We've been advised to get an invert tray as they're fairly low maintenance and high profit compared to fish. There is a LFS about 15-20 min away that does already have two invert trays however (hooked up to their main system).

Tell me about it, the LFS I mentioned above seriously overprice all their dry goods (they did get me started in the hobby though, ironic huh?). However..... I can finally see why they are priced this high, you simply *have* to price everything with about 40-50% profit otherwise the shop looses money (have to pay people to work there - well my girlfriend won't really get much pay out of it, but in normal circumstances people ould, plus there's electricity and water bills, mortgate or rental, telephone/internet bills, *shudder* taxes *shudder* etc etc.)
The only reason we can afford this shop is that I'll be working full time on my current IT job (from home, above the shop) so should we not sell anything at all, we can still pay the bills.
It also depends on the area, some charge more for propteries and tax etc. So don't be too harsh on your LFS, they do need to make some money to feed themselves lol.
Hopefully after about 10 months we'll be breaking even (from our estimates that we've been working out for 4+ months).. and that's with my girlfriend working in the shop for virtually nothing.
One thing I've found out over the last few months, it's not easy to start up a shop, it's expensive and takes a massive amount of time, to get nohting for at least the first year.
But hey, it means we can carry on our ever growing hobby and have all the equipment we need to hand

Just decided... we're going to leave the tank for about 3-4 months, when we should hopefully have enough time (and if the fairly pesimistic projections are right, still more than enough money), however, we're going to go for the larger filter system, it can cope with 5-10,000 litres (yes it's massively overkill, but the water quality ought to be extremely good lol), the larger filters are only about 15-20% more than the smaller one which is only for 1,500 litres (which would be nearly at full capacity). This way we won't have to change the filter system to cope with the larger volume/more fish etc, and we can partition off the room we wanted to put the big tank in until it's ready.
So, it should save quite a lot to start with, and not have to change anything (other than maybe the return pump from the sump to cope with the larger tank). Best of both worlds well a good comprimise anyhow.

few questions for you:

how big is your new store, and will you only be carrying salt water fish. One of the biggest problems i find with small business's is that they do not cater to enough people. Now pleasing everyone is difficult but this is something that has kept my friends store in business for 6 years now.

good luck with it, hope all goes well.


chris

Thanks..
It's roughly 500sq ft shop space over 3 areas, and 150 sq ft storage + more in the flat above.
We're going to be keeping FW fish/inverts/plants, SW fish/inverts/liverock, reptiles, amphibans, insects and a reasonable range of associated equipment/tanks/medication/food/books.


Last edited by worley at 03-Oct-2004 05:30

sounds like you have everything thought out well. good call on waiting for that bigger tank, you never know where an unexpected cost will come from. Came in the other day to find 2 front windows of store busted out.


chris