Thanks for the warm welcome! Very happy to be here.
As my "hi everyone" post, I'll go a little into my background to today. I look forward to learning a lot and sharing some of what I've picked up over the years.
I first got into fish keeping when I was about 4 or 5 years old. My mom took me to (and I'm going to age myself here) Woolworth and we got a 5 gallon tank.
I became so infatuated with the fish I was keeping that the 5 gallon turned into a 10 gallon pretty quickly.
Eventually I used my Christmas money to buy a 38 gallon tank and kept community fish for probably close to a decade.
I've kept nearly everything in freshwater that was commonly available at the time...African cichlids, SA cichlids, piranhas, discus, angels, and various oddballs like snakeheads and freshwater barracuda.
During that time period I did try live plants, but like most around that time, they just melted. This was back in the early 90's.
Around freshman year of high school I was introduced to saltwater and I completely took the tank down, cleaned it, and then set up my first saltwater tank. At this time I worked at an LFS so I had access to whatever fish I wanted at wholesale prices, along with dry goods. I picked up a wet/dry, then bought a 29 gallon and had two marine aquariums running off the same system. Corals began interesting me so I decided to try a reef in one of the tanks. That failed miserably because the only successful reef keepers were people who could afford MH or HPS lighting. I decided to return the tank to fish only.
I eventually went back to a community tank and at some point wanted oscars. I kept them for a few years and after moving I picked up a 46 gallon bow front tank. I moved the oscars into that tank and eventually they outgrew it so I had to get rid of them. I picked up parrot cichlids because of how colorful they were and kept them for a number of years until they had grown large enough and were making tank maintenance a nightmare because they were aggressive and attacked you when you were vacuuming the gravel lol. It didn't hurt, but it was startling enough to make a mess on the floor with the water you just splashed onto it.
I went back to a community tank and I think it was sometime in 2009-2010 that I began really taking an interest in planted tanks because of how many people were having success with them. I bought the very first Fluval Edge and the tank did great. After that experiment I decided to go full blown planted with my 46 gallon. I picked up a T5HO light fixture, CO2, and went at it. This tank ran for about 3 years.
In 2011 I started getting interested in reef tanks again seeing how people were also having success there, and converted the Edge to a nano reef, that eventually turned into a 10 gallon reef, all the way to taking down my 46 gallon and buying a 60 gallon reef ready cube. At one point I had 3 reef tanks going at the same time.
Fast forward to July of last year and I bought a house and needed to tear my last reef tank down. I had no intention of setting it back up after moving so I remained tankless until February of this year having bought a 30C and set up a small high tech planted tank. It did well so I quickly bought a UNS 120U and here I am today.
I plan to start a build thread, likely this evening, but I'm very much looking forward to learning, and contributing where I can. I've done a lot of great things over the almost 40 years of keeping aquariums, but also a lot of dumb things that can hopefully prevent someone else from having to deal with.