Oooooooooooo, I am SO jealous! 250 Gallons!!! Wow!!!!!! Don't worry about the salt! Just give your tank a good rinse, doing the final rinse with RO water so that you don't leave minerals and fluoride and stuff in there (though a small amount wouldn't hurt anything). Since you're all new, you should read every single old post on this forum. This will give you tons of information and probably answer all of your questions. Also look on the gallery side for some inspiration. And DEFINITELY check out the Dutch Vivariums. They are all on the same large scale you would be working with, so you will be able to see what you can do. Decide if you want a waterfeature or not (I would SO have one in a tank that big! You could have a very complex one with multiple waterfalls and streams and pools and. . .), and what kinds of plants you like. Do you have any experience growing houseplants? Because your tank is so big, you won't have to stick to miniature plants, though you still won't be able to put any palm trees in there. =) Oh, except for parlour palms. They stay nice and small, and are very pretty palms with fine foliage. Anyways, I don't want to ramble on and get into too much detail, because you don't have a firm idea of what you want yet. What kind of light did you have on your salt tank? There is a good chance that you will indeed be able to use the same ballast, and perhaps even the same bulb (unless it needed replacing by now). I guess you had a halide or two?

Here is a link that might be useful: Dutch Vivs.

Hi
With that much space there are many things you can do
Check out the sites that Sahoyaref gave you as well as the Black Jungle site.they give step by step instructions.
I would think most of your equipment could be used for the terrarium but would probably have to be scaled back. I suspect Halides and Actinics would put out too much light.
There are sooo many things you could do it's hard to make suggestions. Would assume you'd want a "tropical forest" or maybe a paludarium??
Note that you're a fellow Floridian. Did you're SW crash fom the storms??
Gary

Thanks guys! I will check out the posts here and the galleries and let you know what I am thinking I might do... I am totally novice to this and the thought of having waterfalls and min-palms sounds wonderful. Anything would be better than the sad state it's in now!

The tank was neglected terribly when I bought my house... and I overhauled it when I moved in to no avail... apparently there was a disease in the water that could not be treated with antibiotics so it needed to be comepletely drained (this i discovered after purchasing some beautiful fish once i thought the wwater was stable enough... silly me!)... so it's been dry for about a year now... it's time for something new!

Ok another question now that I am totally inspired to go plant shopping...!!! Since I live in South Florida and am around tropical plants here in abundance... can I gather plants from my surroundings? If so... is there prep work I need to do in order to make sure I am not adding something harmful to the terrarium environment? I have quite a variety of landscape at my disposal... as I am close to the everglades and the beaches...

First of all, to the best of my knowledge the everglades are a protected area, and any collection of wild plants is generally considered to be illegal (at least here in Canada it is). You also would be running a high risk of introducing molds or other fungi or parasites of some kind or worse, snails and slugs, into your terrarium, so it's really not worth the 'free' material! Most terrariums, even the most beautiful ones, are largely composed of common houseplants, which are really quite cheap. You can buy the little pots for $1, and they will grow very quickly into large plants in a terrarium because they just love the humidity so much! (If you have enough light). BTW, what kind of light did you have on your salt tank? And take your time planning this, because it was a lot of work for me to re-do my 85 gallon terr to make the waterfeature work and the landscape more interesting, and it would be 3 times that amount of work if you ended up re-doing your tank because you rushed through it the first time! One thing you could do now, besides reading, is visit a good greenhouse or nursery, or even a Home Depot with a good plant department near you, and look at all the plants and write down which ones you like. Then research them on the 'net to see how big they get, if they can take being constantly moist, etc. Good terrarium plants: stay small or are easily trimmed back without ruining the appearance of the plant, love high humidity, are not invasive (unless you don't mind trimming them back frequently), have interesting leaf shapes or patterns or colour (though you also need some 'plain' stuff, or the terrarium becomes too 'busy' and you don't appreciate the unique plants), like a constant moisture level (no drying out between waterings, except for plants mounted up high, close to the lights), and do not require extremely high light levels. Anything that needs full sun in nature is a bad choice for a terrarium unless you have a metal halide bulb, but that can cause problems with overheating if you're not careful. Since you're in Florida, humidity isn't exactly a problem, so you should listen to everything gary says about needing fans, not needing a cover for your tank, and how to cool your tank in the very hot summers (fans).

Well first of all what I meant by being close to the everglades and the beaches is that in my surroundings (my neighborhood etc) there are canals and foliage all around me that I can "pick" from... If you've never been to Florida it's amazing the amount of wonderful plants and exotic birds, reptiles and landscape right in... literally... my own backyard. Around my house alone there is a lake and a canal... many palms and mosses... ferns, ficus... it's the same stuff i am seeing to purchase at Home Depot and the nurseries. That is why I asked.

Currently I have two 48" Coralife 50/50 lamps (a mixture of 50% 6000 Kelvin natural daylight and 50% Kelvin Actinic 03 blue)along with a large Eheim filter and pump system, which I am assuming I will not use. I would however love to have a waterfall or at least some flowing water in the tank but would like to incorporate what i currently own if possible. Any suggestions?

My dilemma at this point is that this tank is absolutely huge, and of course open only from the top. It's so deep that reaching the bottom even standing on a ladder is difficult for me (I am 5ft tall) and it will be a strain to plant the tank's lower portions. I want to build a wall or at least an interesting background but can not of course lay the tank on it's side to glue anything or move it at all. It is mounted in the wall in my living room. I have been reading these forums as well as Black jungle and some others... but have yet to find any answers for my background issue. I would like a lot of wood (Cypress) and height. Any suggestions on how to build up inside this tank?

I have a ton of plants at my disposal, I saw too many to choose from at Home Depot today... but there are no rocks or wood available there or anywhere I found around here... and no terrarium stores of any kind except Petsmart or salt aquarium stores. I purchased some charcoal and red lava rock for the base layer, and some coco "brick" and panels for the substrate. I figure I can start out layering that stuff in and see what inspires me.

Hi
I think the first thing to decide is how much water you want and what you want it to do. Do you want pools or streams seep walls or cascades?? You definitely have room for any or all of these. You can use your Ehiem for the power source. Is the tank drilled on the bottom?? If so you could add a sump eliminating the false bottom. The tough part is how to get the water to fall without splashing
and to head in the right direction. No problem with seep walls but cascades are difficult. I use a Magnum 350 with the water released from a spray bar . The "falls " are 24 inches wide by the depth of the tank 23 inches.
I used "Great Stuff" expanding foam for the rock work.Painted with acrylic paint. This will also hold your wood in place. It can be done on a vertical surface but of course gravity is working against you. Much more difficult but not impossible. I've recently been getting some negative feedback on this material used for this purpose.
They say it will deflate in time and lose it's adhesive qualities. Caused a tremendous controversy on a SW forum
including the manufacturer chiming in. He says it is not necessarily biostatic nor should it be used for this application. Mine has been in use since last Feb and none of these thing have happened so far. I recently used some to make rockwork for a Rift Lake tank and it looks great right now.
At last i thought I'd found the ideal material to make backgrounds lol Sigh. As far as I can tell there are no negative long term results in FW.from anyone I've contacted.
I do know from my own setup that there have been no pH swings nor changes in KH. I have yet to lose a fish.
The stuff has so many advantages over other methods I'd given up using other types.
Gary

Everglades, that's where you grow QLD swamp paperbark isn't it? I'm sure you have some lovely understory plants you could buy from a local native plant specialist. With a 1kL tank you could practically put an entire ecosystem in there!

Looking forward to photos.

Since the lighting is so little and the only filter is an Eheim, it was probably a fish-only tank, not a reef tank. The lights probably need replacing, since they only put out effective light for about 6-12 months. I also doubt that the tank was drilled. I would do a false bottom though, because it will help to raise the bottom for you. Because your tank is so big, you will need a stronger pump if you do a waterfall, and stonger pumps are bigger pumps, and they need to be totally submerged in the water of the false bottom, so I'm guessing you'd need a false bottom to be about 5 inches deep. And go return that charcoal and lava rock right now, because it's useless. You want a false bottom, not a so-called 'drainage' layer. Trust me, I used to have that in my terrarium, and it sucks. It also makes the tank a lot heavier.

Two bulbs will also be way not enough lighting. I'm guessing your tank is a standard 250 gallon, which makes it 6' l x 2' d x 30" h. Depending on what you want to grow, you will need to get VHOs or compact fluo's, and they will need to cover the whole length of your tank, not just 4' of it. And I would not just start throwing stuff together! In a tank that big, you don't want to have to re-do it, so I would come up with a definite idea of what you want. Coco-panels can degrade quickly, and you can use other things, like the expanding foam gary suggested, or cork bark, or cork tiles sold for flooring (very cheap, and work very well), or tree-fern root panels (expensive, but last a very long time. Can be environmentally unfriendly, so make sure you know what kind of fern root they used). Oh yeah, I didn't realize that the plants you were talking about were on your own property. Of course you can collect those! As for creating height, you can build your substrate up by simply mounding it, or invert some plastic plant pots to make hills. Do you know what substrate you want to use?