80,000 Gallon Saltwater Aquarium

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kangadrew

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Hey guys,

I'm new here, so go easy on me :)
So, for my marine biology class, I must design an incredibly large aquarium. So, I have decided to go with an 80,000 gallon system. The problem is that I must get feedback and ideas from others, plus get product names, and specific prices/quotes. So, I am coming to the nicest reef forum in the world to get advice! Below are some specific information pieces, plus all of my questions:

  • Display Tank is 80,000 gallons, or 302,834 liters
  • Display Tank is 100 feet long x 10 feet 8 inches wide x 10 feet high, or 31 meters long x 3 meters wide x 3 meters high
  • What should the tank be made of? Maybe 2 huge panes of star fire glass? It would just be on the front. It will also be built into the wall, so the rest may be built out of thick concrete plus some sort of sealant. Thoughts?
  • What size sump should this tank have? I would like one that has three partitions in it.
  • A RO Water Unit and Tank will also be installed. Hopefully one that produces about 4,000 gallons per day.
  • Water conditions will be important. Correct me if I'm wrong in saying this. It's an Indo-Pacific Reef design (I'll get into stock later), so the conditions will be: Alkalinity (7.6 dkh), Calcium (380-400 ppm), Magnesium (1,450 ppm), Phosphate (0-0.02 ppm), Nitrate (0.25 ppm), Specific Gravity (1.024), and Temperature (76.8 F).
  • The skimmer will likely be one rated for anywhere from 40,000 to 115,000 gallons. Any specific products? Looking to keep it simple with 1 skimmer
  • Lighting will have to be super specific. Luckily, T5's won't be necessary, as getting that many corals would run to the millions of dollars (not to mention perfect conditions and how devastating that would be to reefs). There will be coral inserts. Probably about 740 LEDs in total should be enough. Maybe 75 watts each? Super high wattage, but we'll get to that later.
  • Anyone know of any massive powerheads out there? I think 4 huge ones are in order for a tank of this size. I would like ones that can cycle up to 800,000 gallons per hour each. Minimum would be ones that can cycle up to 200,000 gallons per hour each.
  • I would like to go with a single pump running the sump system. Does anyone know of a pump that is capable of a max flow rate of 400,000 gallons per hour?
  • I need to know a good dosing unit. One that is capable of doing approximately 11,000 mL per minute. Custom built may be an option, but is not preferred. For smaller doses, the minimum should probably be around 75 mL per minute. I would like one run by some sort of motor.
  • What's a good top-off system for this tank?
  • This is the hard part - heaters. I would like 2 heaters, preferably about 45,000 watts each. Is there any way to cut down on the prices of this?
  • What's a good brand of UV Sterilizer for the tank?
  • No clue what type of reactor to use? Suggestions?
  • There will be an ORP meter on the tank. What brand to use?
  • Lighting schedule: They will be 185 blues, 185 royal blues, 185 whites, and 185 reds. The blues, royal blues, and whites will be on for 12 hours per day, at 100 percent. The reds will be run vor 4 hours in the morning at 15 percent
  • Three times a day, there will be foods fed. Not sure what types or how much. Also, some sort of "special" food, like a supplement, but food, will be fed twice a week. Again, I'm not sure what to feed for that.
  • Maintenance will be as simple as possible. I will do a 10-15 percent water change every 2 weeks; what salt should I use? Any maintenance with the reactors? The RO tank will be refilled once a week. The front and sides of the tank will be cleaned every 3 to 4 days, and the back will be cleaned every 3 to 4 weeks. The powerheads and skimmer pump will be cleaned every 6 months. Did I leave anything out?
  • I'm not sure what livestock will be yet - definitely some sharks, tangs, and other huge (and some not so huge) indo-pacific native reef fish.
So that's where I stand. I'll come back once I've decided on a complete stock list, and any feedback on this is appreciated. The assignment is to make this as thorough as possible, and to plan it out like I were planning it out to actually be built. Once again, thanks for any help!
 
www.dinkinsaquaticgardens.com
Welcome to reef2reef!!!
...lets see what we can find out for you [HASHTAG]#reefsquad[/HASHTAG]
 
Welcome to R2R.;)
 
Nutramar Foods
Welcome!
I'd go for Acrylic for that size tank.
Good luck with this project.
 
Nutramar Foods
First off, you need to go acrylic. Glass would be too heavy. 80K gallons is pretty ambitious....couldn't you have simply said an 80 gallon tank....that would make things simple.

I think a very good place to start is to look up Bill Wann's tank......he has the largest home aquarium....I think 20K gallons....and now manufactures products for large aquariums. It's been a while since I've looked at his build thread, but I believe much of what he has he built himself. It's not like to can go down to your LFS and order a skimmer taller than you. On skimmers, I think he has three massive skimmers. But again, search Bill Wann....he lives in Wisconsin. You'll learn quite a bit.

EDIT TO ADD: I guess I type too slow....Kevin beat me to it!
 
Redundancy, redundancy, and more redundancy. You need to have at least two of each piece of critical equip. (skimmers, return pumps, heaters, etc.) That way if one fails then you can still get by with the others.
 
redfishbluefish said:
First off, you need to go acrylic. Glass would be too heavy. 80K gallons is pretty ambitious....couldn't you have simply said an 80 gallon tank....that would make things simple.

I think a very good place to start is to look up Bill Wann's tank......he has the largest home aquarium....I think 20K gallons....and now manufactures products for large aquariums. It's been a while since I've looked at his build thread, but I believe much of what he has he built himself. It's not like to can go down to your LFS and order a skimmer taller than you. On skimmers, I think he has three massive skimmers. But again, search Bill Wann....he lives in Wisconsin. You'll learn quite a bit.

EDIT TO ADD: I guess I type too slow....Kevin beat me to it!
Click to expand...

I have read his thread, I actually read it on here before I posted this, and on the original site, I think it was reefcentral, but it got shut down. He has an impressive system. I could've gone with something like a 75 gallon, but I would've only made a D on the project. If I chose something about 50,000 gallons or higher, I have the chance to make an A+ on the largest assignment of the semester. I think acrylic would be the better choice too. How thick would that have to be in order to withstand enough pressure? And Bill Wann does not have the largest home aquarium. It may be the largest saltwater home aquarium though. Arapaimag on MFK has the largest aquarium, at 52,000 gallons. I'm sure there's bigger tanks that nobody talks about though.
 
Orphek OR3 reef aquarium LED bar
birdsnest said:
Redundancy, redundancy, and more redundancy. You need to have at least two of each piece of critical equip. (skimmers, return pumps, heaters, etc.) That way if one fails then you can still get by with the others.
Click to expand...
Good idea, that might be in order. I mean, it's not like I'm paying for it all :)
 
I'm mostly a lurker here hence the low post # but I build $100k reef tanks for a living so I'm probably helpful with "experience" for such a project. I'm just going to address your bold questions to start.

Starphire glass is only available to 15'(I think, maybe it's 20') and at 10' tall you would need quadruple 3/4" laminate, or about a $50k sheet of glass for every 15'. So plan on using 4-6" acrylic, but jointed on site to make your viewing panels about $1k per linear foot. Dow 795 is your sealant.

Tecnicaly this tank doesn't need a traditional sump but rather a series of sumps for each filtration step. Water goes over the overflow and is then pumped from a collection vat to each filtration step, then they all empty into a return collection vat which mostly serves as a bubble trap and flows back into the main tank on a level plane to the main tank. By doing it this way you can run one or two 3hp pumps(10k gph each) to each different filtration and simplify sourcing marine grade equipment and simplify electrical wiring. If you do go sump then about 4-6' wide by 4-6' tall and 50' long with a big refugium in the middle and external skimmers/reactors.

Don't have a dosing pump answer but I would say your in the relm of flow meeters controlling solenoids that switch your "dosing pumps" from recirculating in vats to dispensing into the sump or collection chambers. Also diaphragm booster pumps are a good option, without much head pressure they typically run right at their rated max flow rate and I use them here and there mostly for topping off they run from .1- 5gpm that I know of.

For top off any standard top off system would work, you just run the standard voltage through an electromagnetic relay to run a higher voltage/amperage pump from your top off reservoir. For RO there are many large ro filters, just do some online research, and then run through water softeners filled with cation and anion resin, and each recharged with their appropriate acid/base mix, see resintech.com and look around at strong anion and cation resin for recharge info.

For flow I would run electric trolling motors with custom titanium screens. Wired to high amperage dc converters.

Skip UV and do Ozone, Any sterilization is ineffective in large recirculating water volumes and UV has a number of user/maintenance issues ozone does not, ozotech is a good source, 20-50grams per hour should do it. Controlled by your orp meter and run into the air intake for your skimmer. RK2 is probably the easiest skimmer to find for this size tank, but might not be big enough.

For orp and monitoring in general just use an apex, there are other, worse, more expensive ones out there but an apex will work just fine to control the whole thing with the addition of electrical relays for larger pumps

Reactors could be fluidized bed reactors or pressurized pool sand filters filled with carbon or gfo instead, both will work, Hayward has nice "sand" filters. Maintenance on the pressurized filters will be backwash daily but you can automate this with mechanical 3 way valves, this will also act like a sand filter and you don't need to use micron filter bags so two filters in one. And change monthly.

For lighting skylight is the way to go, or 100w pendants, spaced 2' apart and two rows so about 100.

You don't want a heater, you want a heat pump, heats in the winter and cools in the summer, again used for pools, but you would need specialized titanium heat exchangers...

Most companies will do bulk bags of salt, I think 20k gallons each, instant ocean is easiest in the us.

That should get you in the right direction. Good luck with the project, if you stumble across $10 million I'd be happy to build it for you!
 
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Nutramar Foods
@Epicreefster with experience like that I really hope you join in more on conversations, I personally feel it would be a great resource to the r2r community!!
 
Deltec
http://www.monsterfishkeepers.com


Here is a website that will help you. I would read a lot of the stuff there first, most your questions will get answered that way. This forum is specific to people building tanks of that size, scope, and scale. While you will likely get great info here also, as @Epicreefster showed, there forums have a lot of basic info covered in stickies. A lot of people there have built 10k+ gallon tanks. WARNING: There forums are not nearly as active as these forums, but browsing their forums is more educational to the 10k gallon club. That video gives you some idea of the scale of what you are planning. It is "only" 50k gallons... Also that guy seems active... so maybe ask to interview him for school, and use him as one of your sources for your paper. COLLEGES LOVE primary sources. He was last online 15min ago on monster forums.

I hate referring on one forum to another, I hope it not against reef2reef policy, just seems like that site offers a very rare and tiny nitch of fish keepers specific to what he is looking for.
 

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