Would love to have a salt water tank one day. I imagine they require alot of upkeep.
It depends on what you have in the tank. My grouper tank requires very little maintenance. The grouper basically eats everything in the tank, I change the water, we both watch TV.
Reef tanks can be extremely labor intensive depending on your setup. My large anenome died not too long ago. I missed it for the first few hours it was dead. That basically set off a chain reaction until the entire aquarium shit the bed. It looked like a nuclear holicost and smelled like stinky rhino ass for a few days. I lost my breeding pair of maroon clowns, my coral beauty, about half my leather corals, most of my mushroom polyps, and a few other things. I've got the tank back stable and am rebuilding things, but the death of that one animal was pretty bad for the tank.