Buying a tank.
First step was negotiating with my wife as to the size of the tank. I’m sure for seasoned reefers a 4 foot long tank seems tiny but for a newbie it seems enormous.
I looked mainly at the Waterbox and Red Sea Reefer lines, specifically the RSR 425XL and the 525XL and the waterbox 130.4
What with Covid times everything was sold out online for a long time. I was hoping to pick up a tank on Black Friday but couldn’t find them in stock anywhere.
Eventually I went to a local fish shop near me and had a good chat with the guys there. They said they had a supplier and could get me a 425XL within two weeks if I ordered that week but the 525XL was out of stock and the Waterbox tanks are impossible for them to get.
This pretty much settled it for me, I would get a 425XL.
For those that don’t know it is a 112 gallon system. The display tank is 88 gallons and the sump is 34 gallons. It has an overflow built into the tank interior at the back middle from which it has two overflow pipes that run down into the front right corner of the sump. The water from there gets pushed through some filter bags then through another two compartments separated by baffles and then finally into a little section that the return pump sits in. The return pump sends the water back up the return pipe and out a little adjustable nozzle into the tank.
I kind of understood this stuff before getting the tank… but not really. Still, the 425XL got good reviews all over the place so I decided to go with it.
Promo shot of the tank. Disclaimer - my house is not quite as white as the background of this image.
I called the LFS to order the tank but my contact had left for the day already. I jumped on to BRS to see if they were back in stock there and lo and behold they had 3 in stock. I’d rather support my LFS so I waited until the next day and chatted to my contact. He said they were unable to get any so I pulled the trigger on BRS.
So for those thinking of getting a RSR 425XL from BRS here is some information about the shipping process:
They use a dropship method of shipping where the tank gets dropped at the curb outside your house. It comes inside a wooden crate that is pretty big, I would guess it’s around 3.5 feet wide and maybe 5 feet long? It’s huge though. It won’t fit through a door and there is no way you will be able to move it without a pallet jack or something like that so plan carefully.
The crate is held together by metal strips that wrap around the whole thing. I managed to get these open by using a chisel and rubber hammer to basically slice the metal clasps open. I would recommend having some tinsnips or something handy though as it took me ages to work out how to do that and the chisel looks a bit worse for wear as a result.
On each corner/side the crate has metal brackets with screws drilled into the wooden sides. I used a power drill to remove these, it was fairly straightforward.
RSR didn’t actually get in touch with me about the shipping so I waited around for a week or so to get a tracking number before reaching out to Bulk Reef Supply. The BRS support staff were really helpful and the contacted RSR about the order and cc’d me. They sorted me out with a tracking number and it turned out the tank was already in South Carolina on its way! Giddy up!
Then the waiting began. It was around Christmas and a storm blew in on the east coast so shipping everywhere began experiencing delays. The delivery window kept pushing back day by day which was extremely frustrating. I could see the tank was sitting in a warehouse in Jersey, 20 miles away, but I couldn’t do anything to hurry it up or get an accurate delivery window. Fortunately I am working from home due to Covid so I was here anyway but if I had been going into my office I’d have been raging. Eventually i ran out of patience and got in touch with the shipping company who gave me a firm day and said a driver would contact me.
It would be delivered on New Years eve. What a great NY present to myself.
The day rolled around, I was pretty excited. I got out of bed, got the kid ready for school, went outside to walk him over and discovered it was absolutely dumping rain and was really cold. Ah jaysus, this is going to be a nightmare.
The driver got in touch 30 minutes before the delivery window and turned up right on time which was nice. It was still puking rain as we got the pallet off the back of his truck using his pallet jack. I was a bit shocked at how rough he was being with it, he couldn’t get the pallet up over the little curb of our driveway so started just ramming it back and forth into the curb until I asked him to stop. By the time we got it to my door the pallet had a bunch of broken slats and the whole thing was looking pretty limp. The guy made me sign then said “be careful, it’s glass” and walked off. Thanks a lot mate, I know it’s glass.
I didn't get a shot of the whole crate unfortunately, it was a bit too hectic at the time to take photos. This is the pallet, the crate overhung the ends by a foot or more. So you can see it was a beast.
I live in New York and my house has an entry directly onto the street at ground level. I was going to put the tank in my living room on the ground floor which meant no stairs fortunately however there was no way I could get the pallet inside my place without pulling it to pieces. This is why I listed that info about the shipping up above, anyone wanting to order one of these needs to know that there is no way to get it through a door and shifting the tank itself is really heavy.
It was still absolutely bucketing rain and i could see the bits of wood making up the pallet soaking up the water so I quickly set to work trying to get it open. As I mentioned I am no handyman so I muddled my way through opening the crate as best I could using the few tools we own. I used a drill to undo the screws holding the wood together, used a chisel and rubber hammer to open the metal strips wrapped around the whole thing and I used a claw hammer to pry open the sides of the whole crate as they had also been nailed shut in addition to the screws.
Once opened the inside of the crate has the sump and stand separated into four boxes IIRC. They are fine to move with one person. The tank is wrapped in foam and also plastic cling filmed. It’s really very heavy, my wife and I tried to lift it with just the two of us and we couldn’t do it. We brought everything in except the tank and stood around scratching our heads as to how we would get it in.
I measured it, it would fit through the front door at least. We just had to work out how to get it over the threshold and we could slide it down the hallway. We grabbed a few of the bits of wood that were used to make the crate and put them between the edge of the pallet and over the lip of the door and pushed/pulled it along and into the house. It had probably a centimeter of rain in it by this stage as it had been pouring the whole time. We laid a removalist rug I had bought a few days beforehand specifically for this and slid the tank over the door lip and onto the rug, this meant we could move it around the house by pulling on the rug and it would smoothly slide. I highly recommend this to anyone that needs to move a big tank around their house, trying to carry it or sliding it directly on the floor would have been pretty tough.
These are the boxes that the stand bits come in. That's the display tank at the back in front of the piano.
There was foam wrapped around the outside of the tank and inside it were pipes and the box of screws etc. It felt pretty well packaged to be honest.
My wife was a little shocked when she saw the size of the display tank. These pics don't really do it justice, it seemed enormous when it first arrived. I've had it a month or two now and it seems not so big now. ;Playful
Once in I started looking through all the boxes and checking everything for damage. Unfortunately one of the packages had been damaged during shipping and the door of the stand had a big ding in it. I really really wanted to start building but I knew I couldn’t look at a damaged door so I got in touch with BRS about the damage and they put me in touch with a RSR support rep. They were really helpful, I filled out a quick form and they let me know they would get a replacement door out to me as soon as they finished their annual stocktaking, it would be in a week or so.
Dinged up door. Unfortunate. I was genuinely surprised anything managed to get damaged inside the crate even having seen how careless the delivery man was with it. It seemed like pretty sturdy packaging.
In the meantime my wife and I started to put together the stand. Here is what you will need if you are doing this for the first time:
Phillips head screwdriver
Hammer
Rubber hammer
Drill with phillips head attachment
I also used my leatherman but I use that for everything, you don’t need it.
Assemble these things before you begin. Our toolkit was pretty basic in all honesty, fortunately we have a home depot nearby though.
The instructions seem really daunting at first glance but they are actually pretty good once you get started. My wife and I split up the steps as the individual sides need the pegs and screws put in before they all get assembled together. I don’t recommend doing this as there was a bit of confusion and we attached a piece incorrectly, it was a massive pain to get apart and redo.
It took us probably 4 hours in total. It might have been faster but my son wanted to "help".
To get the tank up on top I had a couple mates come around. Four of us got it up there with no problems, took us 30 seconds.
My son is very excited about it all.
I have decided to put it in the corner of our living room blocking the door to our garage (that we don’t use). We had a big mirror leaning against the wall there that I have since relocated to the other side of the room so now I need to work out a plan for covering the door as it is pretty unsightly. Possibly a large piece of board I will paint white and attach to the wall? Or even a white canvas or a big fish anatomy print or something like that. I’m still thinking about it.
If you made it this far through the post well done. Obviously I tend to get a bit carried away with the talking and typing, i'll try to keep it more brief in the future.
Next post I will talk about the other bits and pieces I purchased while I was waiting for the tank to arrive.
