Well it is finally running and I have not been doing a good job of keeping up with this thread up to date so here goes.
February 20th, I started filling the tank with water. My plan was to fill it as much as I could then aquascape it. By this point, my rock had been curing for a little over 12 weeks and I had been ghost feeding it here and there. I didn't want to loose what beneficial bacteria had built up on the rock.
While my RO unit was working overtime, I built out my sump. I am going the Triton method on this tank so the refugium is before the skimmer (Skimz SM201 - I wanted the DC version but ordered the wrong one. By the time I realized my mistake, I decided it wasn't worth loosing the 10x points I got on the brs r2r group by and paying shipping back so I kept it.) Plumbed in my vectra m1, herbie drain, and made some stands / screens out of a light diffuser. The idea with those screens is to keep the macro algae out of the places I don't want it.
Next I built out the canopy for the lighting. I went old school with metal halides / t5, I know people are having success with led's, but after all the struggles I had with the other tank, I wanted to go with something that has a long track record of success and my wallet hurt just looking at the radions. I'm running 250w radiums with 2 ATI Aquablue Special right now. Eventually it will be Aquablue special and Blue Plus, but I broke the Blue Plus (funny thing, t5's don't react well if you drop a cordless drill on them) and then I bought the wrong one at the store.
As the tank got full (lots of mixing 10 gallons of salt at a time, should a picked up at least a 20 a the $1 a gallon sale for mixing) I started aquascaping. I used the Aquascape Fix from Fauna Marine. This stuff is pretty awesome, took me a little bit to figure out how to use it. Works better if you fashion it around your rocks like hooks, stays more stable while it hardens. I also figured out while it's hardening, take some of the rubble you have an embed it in the joint, it will hide the joint really well.
My aquascaping did not turn out how I wanted it. I had one piece of rock that was really long (almost 24 inches) and was kind of mushroom shaped. I wanted to turn that into a tower for one side of the tank with some smaller rocks in the sand around it, then do a standard mountain on the other side. When I tried to cut that mushroom shaped piece to make a flat bottom it fell apart. There was no way it was going to be stable even after gluing it to the glass. I cut it down some more to be stable, then when I put it in the tank it wasn't tall enough to look right. After a full panic of what plan B was....I ended up with this.
It turned out ok, just not what I wanted. I made a second arch in the middle, but it shifted after I put it in and didn't catch it so you can't quite tell it's there.
It sat like that for about 3 weeks, ghost fed most of that time. After I put the sand in and I took out a rock and put in the rock from my older tank that was almost 4 years old. Also moved over my Gyre XF 130 and cranked it up to full speed. Also attached the MP40. Then moved the survivors from my other tank over. This is what it looks like as of today, ignore the diatom bloom I'm currently having. HA!
My sump needs some work, it's a lot more of a cable mess than I wanted. Same with the halide ballasts on top of the canopy. As time started running short, things started getting connected and put together anyway they would fit. I can't stand a half finished project when I have everything I need to finish it. I'm back to work tomorrow, but next set of days off is going to be some serious cable management, then you'll get some pictures of that!
Will be purchasing first batch of a bunch of fish Sunday (most likely), went "pre-shopping" today. That store is a little farther away, but they do have a good selection of fish and good prices.
So tell me what you think, any suggestions, ideas, comments, tell me I'm an idiot, whatever!
