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Setting up a Pacific Coast Aquarium

There are so many possibilities when it comes to choosing a marine aquarium system to set up. There are biotopes of varying current, lighting and food availability; specialty tanks emphasizing one species or a group; and breeding tanks for producing specific algae, invertebrates or fish. What are often left out of these choices are the nontropical possibilities: cool- to coldwater setups. After all, the majority of the world's oceans are not tropical. What's more, United States aquarists have two coasts to choose from with a plethora of life forms to enjoy and study. Here, we'll explore the basics of what it takes to have a "local" coldwater system with animals from the West Coast, including gear, setup, fixing common problems and choosing livestock.

I can't emphasize enough how important it is to study, gather data and ask for other folks' input before purchasing equipment for coldwater systems. If your tank is not matched to the chiller, filtration, circulation, lighting, etc., the tank will fail. So, start by asking yourself a few questions. What species do you want to keep? What kind of display or theme do you want to create? And what do you want to do with this tank (breed fish, frag corals, grow algae, etc.)?

Let's first talk about chillers. All cool- to coldwater setups require a chilling mechanism. Even the largest volumes will drift too much thermally without a thermostat-controlled device to keep your water at about the right temperature. For the majority of setups, commercial chillers resemble and operate like home refrigerators. They have a compressing pump that pressurizes a coolant to make it convert from a gas to a liquid, an area allowing for expansion and hence cooling, and a "heat exchanger" providing for this loss of energy to transfer to the circulated system water itself. The last can include "drop-in" coils that are inserted in tie-in sumps. There are other types of coolers, and cooling that is employed at certain times of the year, including ground/earth and other heat-exchanger technology, as well as more technical gear. (Ground/earth technology, for example, includes digging a hole in the ground, and placing a tank and length of tubing, as well as circulating system water through this or an exchange bath to both cool or warm the water; this works because "dirt" temperature is constant throughout the year in most places where humans live.) These cooling methods are for either very large or very small systems.

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