This is Matt's third reef tank after outgrowing the first one, and having the second one go BANG in his left ear!

I'm very glad Matt came to me when setting up this tank, as he was very open to the idea of trying out T5 lighting, and I was very keen to preach the benefits of T5s, based on my own 5ft system at that time. The theory is simple - halides have more punch close to the bulb, but I noticed that when I used eight T5 tubes that the tank was overall much brighter than a halide system.

The reason for this is two-fold. Firstly the lights themselves illuminate the entire tank simply by being the size of the tank. What's more interesting is that the light from the tubes overlap more and more as you go deeper adding a lot of energy mid-tank and even at sand level. This gives the aquarist a lot more flexibility when aquascaping. (People have been overlapping large numbers of tubes for at least 10 years, they just didn't have high enough output tubes to be able to keep SPS, which is now very easy indeed).

This tank is also a good example of aquascaping, being a carbon copy of Ed Miller's 12ft super-reef (I will try to get Ed's tank on here for you to see, as it's one of the few "original" reef systems ever seen).

The system has no skimmer, using live rock and an algae-based sump for filtration. It's a very "live" system, with the only drawback being a lot of particulate matter in the water which is unfortunate.