Calcium and bio pellet reactors

[Reef Swimmer]

I've been looking at equipment to get for a 60 gallon cube and I'm wondering if I need to get a calcium reactor and a bio pellet reactor. I plan on keeping some zoo's, lps and a few sps. Mainly montis for sps and duncans, blastos, chalices, hammers, lobos, favias, welsos, brains and candy canes for lps. Zoo's i'm not sure on yet. I know I need to keep my calcium up but I don't want to spend a small fortune on a calcium reactor. Lighting is going to be a hydra 26. For flow I'm leaning toward a mp10.

[jestep]

The first depends on whether the tank can process the available NO3, but it's dependent on your maintenance and how much you stocking / feeding you do. Personally, with a moderately stocked tank, I've still almost always had problems with NO3 unless I'm doing fairly substantial frequent water changes. There's also a chance that something like a marine pure ceramic brick could take care of your NO3 as well. There's a thread here somewhere about them. Based on the few times that my pellet reactor has failed for long periods of time on me, I'm almost certain that these bricks can actually reduce NO3 after they've been established for a long time in the appropriate area.

As far as the second, you may need to replace Ca and Alk, but you might be better off using 2 part and either dosing or manually adding every few days as needed. It would be significantly cheaper to go the 2 part route at first than get all of the equipment for a Ca reactor and unless the calcium demand is very high, the Ca RX might just be unnecessary.

Also, you may want to skip a MP10 and go with a MP40 or equivalent other brand pump. A single MP10 wasn't enough for me on a 28 gallon cube. On my 50 gallon (38x18x18) tank, I was using 1 MP40 and 2 MP10's. I can't see a MP10 being anywhere close to enough flow on that size tank even on 100% which is going to make it super noisy.