;D What can I say? I'm a cheapskate at heart. *blush*
I'll post more tricks I've learned through trial and error later.
I'll post more tricks I've learned through trial and error later.
-
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What other cost saving tips you hiding
- Thread starter sinkingbeach
- Start date
Ok, as promised, more cheapskate ideas from the queen of frugality...
Tank backing or background painting is the CHEAPEST of cheap tricks. It completely amps up the coloring of your fish with color constrast, making even cheap little damsels look really slick. For an added, designery trick, pick your backing based off of the colors you want to enhance. If you've got some awesome Flame Angels, red wrasses, fire fish, or a population that's red heavy, use a black background to amp that up. If you have yellow tangs, lemon damsels, clowns, or anything that's really crisply orange or yellow, you can intensify that with a blue background.
Arag-Alive and other bagged sands can be quite nice, but it's also an easy way to tag an extra $10 per bag onto your cost. Break it down. On the plus side, you're getting bacteria rich sand that's already been rinsed well (really, IMHO, that's all you're getting for the cost of the sand). However, for that extra $10, you aren't getting a good biodiversity of micro and macrofauna such as amphipods, copepods, tiny stars, etc. It's JUST bacteria. For $12-14, you can get a bottle of TLC for Saltwater that will treat a 120 tank and have about the same effect. So, for a small tank, the live sands can be cool. For larger tanks, live sands can be a gross waste of money. Play it by ear when you determine what substrate to use, and weigh your options before commiting to one of the other.
Great cleaner shrimp debate rages on and on, as per what is the better cleaner shrimp to get. The fire cleaner shrimp or the skunk cleaner shrimp. They both make excellent cleaners. However, the fire is significantly more expensive than the skunk (*usually $10 to $20 more). The fire is much more striking, with a sharp, red color and crisp, white markings. Yet, the fire cleaner is a bit more reclusive, usually establishing their territory and "stations" under rock overhangs. It is not for certain that this will happen, but it is more likely that a fire cleaner will be a bit more reclusive than a skunk cleaner. So, weigh this before you purchase one.
Lost your suction cups? Don't fret. Don't buy a whole new kit. First, ask your LFS if they have any. Sometimes, when LFSs install new stuff, the excess parts just end up being jumbled together. Especially suction cups. With many LFSs running sumps, they also usually don't need suction cups from heaters.
Disposable medicine cups can be fairly inexpensive and fairly handy to have around. You can usually find them at your local drug store. The cups have a variety of measure increments on the side, allowing you to measure or mix in them. Very handy when you have to measure things larger than 5mL, and very cheap should they be lost or thrown out.
Large syringes for up to 40mL can be usually found at the drugger or, more commonly, at a feed shop. Trust me, having a big syringe really makes dosing large systems a lot easier. They're not too terribly expensive, often being sold for disposable usage at feed or grain shops (generally sold for deworming horses and dogs). When dirty, just pull apart, rinse, and reuse later.
Acclimating kits are the biggest waste of money ever. I would never spend $10 for such a gratuitous waste of money. It's glorified airline tubing with a valve. You can just as easily use a spare cut of airline tubing with a tight knot on the end for drip acclimating as opposed to buying a kit to drip.
For everyone who, like me, purchases ROdi water, and are frugal, gas cans and camping water jugs are far cheaper than "mixing jugs" sold at your LFS. For about half the cost of those mixing jugs, you can buy an equally sized gas can or camping water jug at your local KMart, WalMart, etc. Slim 6 and 7 gallon cans also fit better into cars, allowing for more water moved on one trip.
Know the distributers that your LFS uses. Pacific coast distributers, such as ERI, give really good prices on Pacific animals. Florida distributers give really good prices on Caribbean animals, like Florida ricordia, porcupine puffers, etc. Know what you want, where it's coming from geographically, and how your LFS is getting it. The shorter the trip, generally the cheaper it will be. Also, knowing that your LFS used distributers that assure no cyanide capture or do same day airfreight is good. Fish from that kind of distributer generally arrive healthier and in better shape. Also, fish from distributers that do not assure no cyanide capture could potentially be getting cyanide fish, which may look beautiful initially, but will suddenly croak after a couple of weeks. Getting the healthiest fish initially, and with the best cost, will save a bundle over time.
Purigen can be recharged. If you run a chemical filter media, you might, just might, want to switch to Purigen over carbon. It's a bit more expensive initially, but Purigen can be recharged and cleaned, unlike carbon, and used multiple times.
Aquaclear filters are HOB filters which come designed in such a way that their media can be REUSED. Yes. Reused. So, if you have a small tank and are considering a HOB filter, consider the Aquaclear. Change your media with a water change. The sponge, you can wring out and clean that way (*but do it in the waste water from the tank to keep from killing bacteria) to get a couple of extra uses out of. The carbon or chemical layer, unless you use Purigen, replace. The bio-media (BioMax cubes), just keep damp, shake any dust or debris free, and replace. Also, as opposed to getting an expensive HOB refugium, many people are looking into modding out the Aquaclear filters due to the flow grid to store heaters and macroalgae there.
Cheapest refugium evah! Critter cages. Yeah. You heard me. Critter cages. If you have a tank large enough, but don't want a sump, you can bodger your own refugium with a small powerhead (*or, for added frugality, Red Sea salts occasionally pack a "mixing pump" into their buckets as a free offer- so keep your eyes peeled for that) and a Critter cage with small holes drilled into it. Place it on a rock shelf at the top of the tank, with the top of the cage open for light and slightly above the water to keep your fish out, and sculpt your liverock around the front to conceal it. Use the small powerhead for circulation. This should cost you about $10-20ish. It'll give you the benefit of having a refugium without having the cost of adding on a refugium, or the labor required to add a refugium onto an already established tank w/o a sump. It'll give you a cheap taste without the overal plunge.
PVC offcuts are awesome. You can use them for a.) pod breeding grounds b.) hiding places for skittish fish c.) breeding caves for fish (*like the Georgia Aquarium used for breeding Catalina gobies), d.) structural caves for digging species (such as shrimp-gobies and jawfish). And, how to get 'em? Go find a place that sells and cuts PVC. Some Home Depots do. Some don't. There, you can usually get a few off cuts for free if you ask nicely. They won't be pretty, but you're basically burying them anyway, or creatively concealing them with liverock. This is also a great trick with small, timid, or juvenile African Cichlids.
Bulk salt can generally be cheaper than small quantities. The bucketed salts are easily sealed to cut down on waste. In addition to that, you can recycle the buckets the salt comes in for various uses. If you have to buy salt in really large orders to get a discount, the buckets are also more convenient to store by stacking somewhere in a closet. The LFS I worked at had a standing rotation of about 10-20 buckets, all with different random uses. Water changes. Acclimation. Bleaching stuff. Moving stuff. Carting liverock about. Chairs.
Make your own spirulina or omega-3 fatty acid enriched foods. Yes, San Fran Bay Brand sells some mighty convenient and seemingly inexpensive frozen Spirulina Enriched Brine Shrimp or Omega-3 Enriched Brine Shrimp. Zoe and Zoecon may be an expensive initial investment, but they really pay for themselves over time, allowing you to enrich things which are generally healthier for fish (*instead of wasting feeding and money on brine shrimp). You can also enrich more food over time by using that for less of a cost than buying already enriched food. It's a long term thing.
Don't buy used lights without checking your info! Check the product info before you buy used lights, especially finding out how old the bulbs are to see if you need to replace them. Some lights are just cheaper for you to buy a whole new system than to pay a used price and have to buy new bulbs to boot! If you do your homework, you can make a really good steal on a used light. If not, you can really get fleeced by some unscrupulous people on eBay (because there's a ton of them there!).... on that note.... just avoid eBay altogether (*it's the easiest way to get scammed)
..... *drained* I'm out of my cost saving randomly learned factoids for one night.
I suppose, then, I will leave you with the cheapest tip of all. Do your homework before getting anything. The smartest decision, with the pros and cons carefully assessed, is often the most prudent decision of all, and generally one that won't require more money to fix later. Like realizing that the Moorish Idol might be outside of your care capabilities, or that the cutie-pa-tootie little Bi-Color Parrot isn't reef safe and will vastly outgrow you tank.
.... can I be done now?
Tank backing or background painting is the CHEAPEST of cheap tricks. It completely amps up the coloring of your fish with color constrast, making even cheap little damsels look really slick. For an added, designery trick, pick your backing based off of the colors you want to enhance. If you've got some awesome Flame Angels, red wrasses, fire fish, or a population that's red heavy, use a black background to amp that up. If you have yellow tangs, lemon damsels, clowns, or anything that's really crisply orange or yellow, you can intensify that with a blue background.
Arag-Alive and other bagged sands can be quite nice, but it's also an easy way to tag an extra $10 per bag onto your cost. Break it down. On the plus side, you're getting bacteria rich sand that's already been rinsed well (really, IMHO, that's all you're getting for the cost of the sand). However, for that extra $10, you aren't getting a good biodiversity of micro and macrofauna such as amphipods, copepods, tiny stars, etc. It's JUST bacteria. For $12-14, you can get a bottle of TLC for Saltwater that will treat a 120 tank and have about the same effect. So, for a small tank, the live sands can be cool. For larger tanks, live sands can be a gross waste of money. Play it by ear when you determine what substrate to use, and weigh your options before commiting to one of the other.
Great cleaner shrimp debate rages on and on, as per what is the better cleaner shrimp to get. The fire cleaner shrimp or the skunk cleaner shrimp. They both make excellent cleaners. However, the fire is significantly more expensive than the skunk (*usually $10 to $20 more). The fire is much more striking, with a sharp, red color and crisp, white markings. Yet, the fire cleaner is a bit more reclusive, usually establishing their territory and "stations" under rock overhangs. It is not for certain that this will happen, but it is more likely that a fire cleaner will be a bit more reclusive than a skunk cleaner. So, weigh this before you purchase one.
Lost your suction cups? Don't fret. Don't buy a whole new kit. First, ask your LFS if they have any. Sometimes, when LFSs install new stuff, the excess parts just end up being jumbled together. Especially suction cups. With many LFSs running sumps, they also usually don't need suction cups from heaters.
Disposable medicine cups can be fairly inexpensive and fairly handy to have around. You can usually find them at your local drug store. The cups have a variety of measure increments on the side, allowing you to measure or mix in them. Very handy when you have to measure things larger than 5mL, and very cheap should they be lost or thrown out.
Large syringes for up to 40mL can be usually found at the drugger or, more commonly, at a feed shop. Trust me, having a big syringe really makes dosing large systems a lot easier. They're not too terribly expensive, often being sold for disposable usage at feed or grain shops (generally sold for deworming horses and dogs). When dirty, just pull apart, rinse, and reuse later.
Acclimating kits are the biggest waste of money ever. I would never spend $10 for such a gratuitous waste of money. It's glorified airline tubing with a valve. You can just as easily use a spare cut of airline tubing with a tight knot on the end for drip acclimating as opposed to buying a kit to drip.
For everyone who, like me, purchases ROdi water, and are frugal, gas cans and camping water jugs are far cheaper than "mixing jugs" sold at your LFS. For about half the cost of those mixing jugs, you can buy an equally sized gas can or camping water jug at your local KMart, WalMart, etc. Slim 6 and 7 gallon cans also fit better into cars, allowing for more water moved on one trip.
Know the distributers that your LFS uses. Pacific coast distributers, such as ERI, give really good prices on Pacific animals. Florida distributers give really good prices on Caribbean animals, like Florida ricordia, porcupine puffers, etc. Know what you want, where it's coming from geographically, and how your LFS is getting it. The shorter the trip, generally the cheaper it will be. Also, knowing that your LFS used distributers that assure no cyanide capture or do same day airfreight is good. Fish from that kind of distributer generally arrive healthier and in better shape. Also, fish from distributers that do not assure no cyanide capture could potentially be getting cyanide fish, which may look beautiful initially, but will suddenly croak after a couple of weeks. Getting the healthiest fish initially, and with the best cost, will save a bundle over time.
Purigen can be recharged. If you run a chemical filter media, you might, just might, want to switch to Purigen over carbon. It's a bit more expensive initially, but Purigen can be recharged and cleaned, unlike carbon, and used multiple times.
Aquaclear filters are HOB filters which come designed in such a way that their media can be REUSED. Yes. Reused. So, if you have a small tank and are considering a HOB filter, consider the Aquaclear. Change your media with a water change. The sponge, you can wring out and clean that way (*but do it in the waste water from the tank to keep from killing bacteria) to get a couple of extra uses out of. The carbon or chemical layer, unless you use Purigen, replace. The bio-media (BioMax cubes), just keep damp, shake any dust or debris free, and replace. Also, as opposed to getting an expensive HOB refugium, many people are looking into modding out the Aquaclear filters due to the flow grid to store heaters and macroalgae there.
Cheapest refugium evah! Critter cages. Yeah. You heard me. Critter cages. If you have a tank large enough, but don't want a sump, you can bodger your own refugium with a small powerhead (*or, for added frugality, Red Sea salts occasionally pack a "mixing pump" into their buckets as a free offer- so keep your eyes peeled for that) and a Critter cage with small holes drilled into it. Place it on a rock shelf at the top of the tank, with the top of the cage open for light and slightly above the water to keep your fish out, and sculpt your liverock around the front to conceal it. Use the small powerhead for circulation. This should cost you about $10-20ish. It'll give you the benefit of having a refugium without having the cost of adding on a refugium, or the labor required to add a refugium onto an already established tank w/o a sump. It'll give you a cheap taste without the overal plunge.
PVC offcuts are awesome. You can use them for a.) pod breeding grounds b.) hiding places for skittish fish c.) breeding caves for fish (*like the Georgia Aquarium used for breeding Catalina gobies), d.) structural caves for digging species (such as shrimp-gobies and jawfish). And, how to get 'em? Go find a place that sells and cuts PVC. Some Home Depots do. Some don't. There, you can usually get a few off cuts for free if you ask nicely. They won't be pretty, but you're basically burying them anyway, or creatively concealing them with liverock. This is also a great trick with small, timid, or juvenile African Cichlids.
Bulk salt can generally be cheaper than small quantities. The bucketed salts are easily sealed to cut down on waste. In addition to that, you can recycle the buckets the salt comes in for various uses. If you have to buy salt in really large orders to get a discount, the buckets are also more convenient to store by stacking somewhere in a closet. The LFS I worked at had a standing rotation of about 10-20 buckets, all with different random uses. Water changes. Acclimation. Bleaching stuff. Moving stuff. Carting liverock about. Chairs.
Make your own spirulina or omega-3 fatty acid enriched foods. Yes, San Fran Bay Brand sells some mighty convenient and seemingly inexpensive frozen Spirulina Enriched Brine Shrimp or Omega-3 Enriched Brine Shrimp. Zoe and Zoecon may be an expensive initial investment, but they really pay for themselves over time, allowing you to enrich things which are generally healthier for fish (*instead of wasting feeding and money on brine shrimp). You can also enrich more food over time by using that for less of a cost than buying already enriched food. It's a long term thing.
Don't buy used lights without checking your info! Check the product info before you buy used lights, especially finding out how old the bulbs are to see if you need to replace them. Some lights are just cheaper for you to buy a whole new system than to pay a used price and have to buy new bulbs to boot! If you do your homework, you can make a really good steal on a used light. If not, you can really get fleeced by some unscrupulous people on eBay (because there's a ton of them there!).... on that note.... just avoid eBay altogether (*it's the easiest way to get scammed)
..... *drained* I'm out of my cost saving randomly learned factoids for one night.
I suppose, then, I will leave you with the cheapest tip of all. Do your homework before getting anything. The smartest decision, with the pros and cons carefully assessed, is often the most prudent decision of all, and generally one that won't require more money to fix later. Like realizing that the Moorish Idol might be outside of your care capabilities, or that the cutie-pa-tootie little Bi-Color Parrot isn't reef safe and will vastly outgrow you tank.
.... can I be done now?
Wow! Nice work. That looks like something that should be stickied somewhere for brand spankin newbies (like I was a few months ago! LOL!)
I also find it really depends on the store and people. Not all LFS are created equal!
It is just like any other store. Some times you find a good one and sometimes you don't. I found plenty of bad ones and I finaly found a good one. Aquatic Obsessions really cares about what you are doing and make sure you are doing it right. They actually told me NOT to buy certain things and showed me the world of DIY just to help me out.
It is just like any other store. Some times you find a good one and sometimes you don't. I found plenty of bad ones and I finaly found a good one. Aquatic Obsessions really cares about what you are doing and make sure you are doing it right. They actually told me NOT to buy certain things and showed me the world of DIY just to help me out.
jazzsam said:
Definitely. Some LFSs are all about the money, as are some staffers at good LFSs. It's just a question of knowing the store and knowing the people.
Prime example: Tropiquarium. Most people love 'em. I love Trop. It's like my home away from Petland-Dunwoody in an LFS sense. But there's just this one staffer that pisses me off to no end, constantly treats me like I have no idea what I'm doing, and ALWAYS tries to see me expensive stuff I don't need (*I asked about ordering a 10-12" 36 watt or higher pc strip, and ended up getting a twenty minute lecture from this guy about how I NEEDED to buy a $270.00 halide or a $250.00 nanocube setup).
So, yeah, I had forgotten that aspect to the "Be Nice to your LFS staff." There are some staffers who just suck, and there's now way around it. Some staffers have no idea what they're talking about, and some staffs can be completely comission driven. It varies, so always start with a clean, pleasant, and polite slate and work from there. It's never good to start on a bad foot on your end when trying to find a good LFS that'll take care of you as a client.