I live in Staffordshire, England. Yes England, that coral keeping backwater of the world. However, I was lucky to get into CompuServe's Fishnet forum shortly after I started keeping a marine tank. This has proved a good move, because 12 years ago, the UK was not exactly brimming with great reefkeepers.
Sure, Stuber, Wilkens et al. were only a couple of hours away in Germany, but suffering of the average English disease (mono-lingual), they might have been on Mars. Therefore it was the chaps in the States that were kind enough to share their experiences.
It seems strange now that there was a time before live rock based methodologies. However, we were all using trickle filters and air pump based skimmers. I don't remember who started introducing the 'Berlin' method to the Fishnet forum, but do recall having a long thread with Charles Delbeek trying to convince me that a trickle filter was a bad thing. In those simple days, zero nitrates was the be all and end all as far as I was concerned. I had a trickle filter and zero nitrates , so why change? Well eventually, I bought into the idea and as normal, Charles was right. However, and I don't know how related this is, after that change, I've never had great success keeping LPS corals.
I will mostly skip the intervening 10 years and move onto the present. Suffice to say my job took me abroad on a frequent basis and I probably had 2 or 3 tank crashes due to neglect, which probably explains my pursuit of automation nowadays. At least that's my excuse for the profusion of tubes and cables :-)
My current tank is now around 100 gallons (48x27x24), is utilises twin Durso standpipes to drain water into a below the tank sump, which is returned via two Deltec HLP4040 external pumps (they are similar to Quiet Ones). In tank circulation is achieved via 4 Tunze pumps, 2 of their internal 4000 lph models (7410/2) and two of the external models (4002), all controlled via the Tunze wave controller.