Its been a while since I posted an update. I wont post a ton of pics in this post but I will kinda outline what has happened since the last post.
Since the last post I forged ahead with getting the 40B refugium and 20 long sump up and running. I acquired some sheets of acrylic from my work while back so I decided to use those for dividers in the sump and my fuge. I drilled 2 holes in the bottom of the 40B for the drains, one for constant siphon and one for emergency just like on the 50 cube. I decided that I would not do an overflow box and instead just stand pipes to try and conserve space.
I did some research and I decided to use GE silicone to hold the dividers for the sump and the fuge in place. After spacing everything in the sump out and siliconing it in place I did the same to the divider on the fuge and let it all dry for a few days before installing the sump into the stand. Once the sump was in the stand it was time to redo all of the plumbing on the 50 cube to the new sump. This ended up being a very long process of measuring, cutting and gluing pvc pipe. After what seemed like an eternity I was finally able to get the new sump and fuge wet.
Once I had all the new salt water made up I started filling the 40 and the sump. I got a little crazy while filling the 40 and ended up nearly blowing out the divider by putting too much in one side and not balancing it on the other. After getting everything full of water, there was nothing left but to fire up the pumps. We started looking around all the PVC joints and around the bulkheads checking for leaks, we found no leaks first try!
I thought it was all good but then after about 30 minutes I started noticing that the corals started to look like they were not doing so good, I thought it might have just been from sitting without much circulation for so long or something. After a few hours it became very obvious that something was not right, my wife ended up asking about the silicone I used as she saw something that I completely missed. It seems that I had purchased the wrong GE silicone, the stuff I had contained mold killer which was now contaminating my entire tank. We quickly shutdown the pumps and started trying to figure out what to do.
It was decided the only way to try to save everything would be to drain the tank, put all new water in and setup my canister filter and hope for the best. We drained the tank down until my chromis dorsal fin was out of the water(about 1" in the bottom) I didn't have any spare water on hand so I stayed up all night making new water on the fly to add back into the tank, meanwhile my wife was running new water over the corals to keep them wet which at this point had skin coming off. By the time I got all the water back in and started the canister with a ton of carbon in it there were corals that were clearly dead.
I removed all the components that I put the silicone on and razor scraped it off the glass. Aqueon aquarium silicone was purchased online and I went forward with rebuilding. All said and done I lost 3 corals and a fish.
The rebuild went pretty quick since I had done it once before.
Here is a pic and a walk around video of the finished setup taken pretty recently.
