I know it's probably not what you want to hear..but 15 lbs of kp aquatics premium live ocean rock delivered to your door is $300. You will basically skip the cycle and the problems that dry rock will bring along with it. If you stay around for a year or two..you'll look back and kick yourself for not biting the bullet now. It was two years before what I consider my dry rock to be what it is now....and it cost more money to get it to this point than just getting ocean live right from the start. You can grab rock from other reefers if you want but for a 20 gallon 15lbs of the kp is all you need.
Eh... thing is that's
yet another $300, and I'm already pushing the edge of my wife's patience/acceptance with the $1200 of stuff currently in my cart. There is *maybe* $200 worth of stuff in there that isn't precisely essential - a "glass lily" outflow, an opaque backing for the refugium, a better light for the 'fuge, a feeding syringe, a few other minor things, and, technically, I could get by without a protein skimmer (the best affordable and workable HOB/in-tank option I could find is a Tunze Comline 9001, which is still $130), but I'm not going to. The other ~$1000 is essential just to get the tank up and cycling properly.
If I didn't have so many
other things to spend money on, I'd probably also be doing a full sump with bigger skimmer, etc. But that's not in the cards right now, for more reasons than anyone here cares to read about (first-world problems), so unfortunately fish must be towards the bottom of my list of priorities. I
don't want to half-*** it (which is why I'm getting the skimmer, even though I could
probably get away without it if I do a 10% - 20% WC weekly, given I'm seriously over-filtering the tank with a canister rated for 80 -160 gallons). Soooooo many things to spend money on. Ugh.
I'm also not in any kind of particular hurry: I've been without (but dreaming of) a reef tank since 2008 or so, and could always add the rock at a later time, when I hadn't just burned a hole through my non-essentials budget. I'm just glad for the gift of the lights, which at least lets me finally put a LITTLE priority on getting a reef together again, sooner than later.
Trust me I feel you though. I've looked really hard at KP and IPSF's offerings. But I'm planning on taking it slow. Honestly, the
only fish I plan on putting in the tank is a Mandarin, once said tank is fully mature and stable. MAYBE a clown, if my kids insist. Everything else is to be corals and inverts. With GARF no longer around, I figure it'd be easier (and cheaper) to get some biodiversity from and and rubble from established tanks (I'll renew my ARC membership as soon as I am ready to put water in the tank), and why would I pay $40 (not incl. shipping) for chaeto online, when there is probably someone local enough to me with an established tank willing to sell it cheap or give it away?
