[Mattfish]

Our new setup was done by a great group of people in Milpitas, CA. They're sticklers on details, and FWIW, I though I'd pass on some of their recommendations as a guide, since I know that when I started (only 6 months ago, so I'm still a newbie), I went back and forth on all sorts of things.

Water changes - ours is a 130 with a maybe 50 gallon sump/fuge. We were told we should do 20 gallon water changes every week for the first 3 months, then, if we wanted to we could fall back to 20 gallons every other week, although weekly was still better.

Cleaner Crew - 36 hermit crabs, 36 turbo snails, 10 nassarius snails for the tank, replaced every 3 months, and 12 each of the hermits and turbo's for the fuge, nassarius optional for there, again, added back in every 3 months, to allow for die off.

They used very well cured rock - for our original tank we used uncured Fiji and thought we were doing great. When they emptied our old tank, we found some incredible worms, large crabs, etc. I learned a lesson that store-cured is much better - the unwanted hangers-on were causing (crabs) and would have caused (worms) severe problems as we kept going if we hadn't changed.

Temperature - 77 to 79 degrees - no higher. Now that there's a chiller in the system, we don't have to worry about it going over. During last summer, we had daytime spikes up to 85 degrees that undoubtedly hurt our corals.

Rock arrangement - originally, we put about 140 lbs. into a 125 g tank. This one probably has more like 70. The difference is a whole lot less places where nitrates build up. The sludge we saw when the tank was emptied was amazing - there were places we just couldn't get to for cleaning, making serious problems.

Sand bed - at least 3" deep. Our last tank was probably 2 1/2" but we didn't know to clean the sand better, plus with so much rock, we couldn't get to most of it.

Sorry Native - another book on the forum, but these were important lessons learned for us. I probably need to go back and revise my Zen List someday too....