10 gallon

[snkbyte]

i have a regular wal mart 10 gallon tank that I made a canopy for and retro fitter a 96 watt quad pc in. Will this be sufficient for a hard coral tank?

[RayAllen]

I do not think its will be sufficient for SPS if that is what you meen by "Hard Corals" you best bet will be softies and LPS. With LPS though the filtration needs to be spot on.

[ErikH]

Water changes every other day would probably be a must, and they would need to be perfect everytime. In a tank as small any change could leave you with a crashed tank.

[snkbyte]

would it help if I ran a 10 or 20 gallon sump??

[marshall.read]

I think technically this would be possible, but as scorpino stated there would be virtually no margin for error. A sump would definately be better, if for no other reason than it would be doubling or tripling your water volume. Personally, I think in the long run you'd be more pleased with a 10 gallon tank filled with some really good lucking zoanthids and a few choice softies. It may not be the look you're going for, but I think this will be a lot less stressful and slightly less maintenance. Either way you decide to go, I wish you best of luck and keep us updated.

[coraline79]

20 gallon sump + 10 gallon tank would put you at about 20 total gallons of water after all the rock sand and such. You could go to 7-10 day water changes if you went that route. I have a 3 gallon long w/ a 10 gallon sump, and I do water changes every 10-14 days, with skimmer and fuge in place as well. I do 5 gallon water change.

That being said, if you have a small bioload, you could stretch those out if you go with a 20 sump. (only 1 or 2 fish)

w/ 96 watts of pc light on your tank, you will be topping off at least once a day by the way. You might try a single 70watt metal halide or 2 t5 ho's w/ a good set of reflectors.

[VoodooMach]

If you could retrofit some sort of light hood with a 70w or 150w MH and 2x24 actinics you'd have a pretty killer sps tank... Just run a chiller.

I've seen some nano sps setups with big sumps (it's still strange to me to have a bigger sump than DT), ATO, skimmer, phosban reactors, and big fuges to export phosphates and nitrates.