cilyjr's 180 in wall...ummm journal

[cilyjr]

well its been over a year now since i built this tank and its been up and happily running for a bit but i think i will go back to the beginning for a sec...
we bought our house about 4 and a half years ago. it has a finished basement (quite common in our corner of the usa) well 1/4 of it was segmented out into a finished room i should say. this is my area really to do what i want. i had been keeping a 46 gallon tank for about a year at that point. so i quickly set it up in the basement and plumbed a few rubermade tubs to it and threw a bunch of dry rock in them. the idea was to go bigger once we settled in a bit.....

this is about 1 month after moving in (rubermade tubs hidden here.

so the next move was to a 90 gallon you will notice in the picture above the old owners had some sort of 1980's wild west themed bar thingy down here. the bar was where the tank is. well we updated. and i got a bigger tank.

getting things ready...

just after getting the new floor in

after upgrading to mh lighting...sump lives in a fish room behind the wall

 

[cilyjr]

ok dinner time ..more to come after

 

[cilyjr]

a few fts of the 90 which ran for about 3 years.

 

[cilyjr]

in march of 2010 i decided i wanted to build a 180 into the wall in the space where the bar area had been. i had some extra money and i consider myself pretty handy so i went out on craigslist and started tank shopping. i found a 180 that was not drilled for 200 dollars and got to it.

the 180 dirty but in my basement...took 5 guys and some careful maneuvering to get it down stairs.

a quick concept of what i thought i was gonna do

 

[cilyjr]

first was to clean and drill it and build the overflow.

 

[cilyjr]

i had drilled several tanks for members of my club at this point but this one posed a challenge as i had to do it while the tank was sitting regular. so i set up a 5 gallon bucket with cold water and had it drip through airline tubing to keep the contact area cool... the next big step was to take the 90 down and move it across the room and set it back up it took 1/2 a day and i had 2 friends help me. there no pictures of this because i was trying to do this as fast as possible to keep things alive..

 

[cilyjr]

since i was moving the 90 and it would be on basic life support for the duration of the build (no sump...much smaller hob skimmer...no ca reactor...ect) i wanted the main part of the build to take about a week. in order to accomplish this i did as much as i could in advance. 1st i built the stand in another room. 2nd i decided to dedicate 2 gcfi circuit breakers to the tank....

stand done in other room

the plug box (aka wire birds nest) i built

keeping the 90 alive...barley

these times 2 running on opposite poles in my electrical service

 

[cilyjr]

with the 90 was out of the way and stuff in place, i could start the demo of the wall that was between the finished room and the fish room (my wife calls it the laundry room ). who doesn't love demo.

you can see the fish room here.. the tank with the black bag around it is where i mix my salt.

 

[cilyjr]

ok getting the stand, new tank in place, and leveled took help but went off easily.

 

[cilyjr]

i dont know if i mentioned the drain is the bean animal system details can be found here.

BeanAnimal's Bar and Grill - Silent and Fail-Safe Overflow System

 

[cilyjr]

i got it all in place and and started some finish work ...keep in mind i was working regular hours at work and coming home in the evening and doing all this. this was about 4 days in so far.. i am no finish carpenter by any means so there is alot of caulking to help hide all my mistakes. i never knew what a pain it is to make and hang 2 cabinet doors from scratch. i learned

 

[underwaterfirefighter]

Great looking set up!

 

[cilyjr]

now for the lighting problem. i wanted lights on a track that i could push in either direction. either back into the fish room or forward into the finished space. the problem is that i did not want tracks in the finished side. and having them be able to be raised was not an option as the main structural beam for the house is right over the tank. after some research and not being able to use garage door sliders as many people do i found heavy duty (able to support over 100lbs) sliders for drawers for kitchens. i bought 2 sets and mounted them to each other one inverted. so when i pull one set of sliders works to take it into the fish room while the set that can pull it into the finished side is locked...and vice versa. mounting them took all day as they needed to be perfectly parallel to work and i was spanning a 6 foot area.
at the time i thought i wanted 2 250 mh lights on the outer area and a single 150 in the middle (for lower light coral) and built it as such... it has since been upgraded twice so now all 3 lights are identical. the pictures below are from when 1st installed.

not me

 

[cilyjr]

Great looking set up!

thanks for looking

 

[cilyjr]

ok so here goes the plumbing part. although it looks like a maze in the pictures its actually pretty simple. there are 3 drains 1 syphon 1 durso and one emergency. the returns are over the top. the tank also has 2 20 gallon long tanks that each have their own drain 1 is a dedicated fuge with about 100lbs or more lr and chaeto and the other is a frag/ grow out tank. the sump sits at a 90degree angle from the DT and flows towards the dt with a large return area to do water changes with out disturbing the display. i can get into that later. but i wanna emphasize that early planning is really important for plumbing as it can be tough to modify later. ya can see my crappy diy calcium reactor here too (upgraded later to a pm)

notice i had started filling the tank as i did not have enough storage for making all the water i needed...

 

[cilyjr]

this is james a fellow reefer who lives a few blocks from me and was a huge help during this build

this was go time...had all the water i needed plumbing done and lights hung. at this time i was using 2 250 mh on a sunlight magnetic ballast and a guissemann 150 in the middle and had 2 4 foot vho for supplement. all were running the corallife 12k coralvue bulb but the center 150 was a de bulb while the 250 were mogul....the difference was terrible...more later on this though.

 

[cilyjr]

i want to take a second to talk about all the light bleed through the doors. i see alot of builds with pictures that has light blasting through all the cracks. i watch movies down here alot and that was simply unacceptable to me. i tried weather stripping and it prooved too thick for the magnetic clasps i installed. my wife suggested felt. it did the trick

 

[cilyjr]

so with the display running and the 90 taken down ...no losses but i truly had some distressed coral. i had time to work on the fuge and frag tanks. in my original i was going to build a tank that had a separater which would allow for to different areas but only 1 drain . when i called around to local glass companies i was looking at about 200 bucks to make it. at the same time petco was having its dollar per gallon sale and since 2 20long tanks were almost the exact size i wanted i decided to go this route. the trouble was extra plumbing going to the sump...heres what i ended up doing. these tanks use the hoffer drain system. i used it because of the space saving aspece and you do not need an overflow to apply it. here is a link to that. Hofer Gurgle Buster

 

[cilyjr]

oh so let me post a pic of how different the lights were. all the same bulb company. the outsides are 250 mogul coralvue on a sunlight supply magnetic 12k the middle is a 150 de coral vue 12k on a guisemann

[/QUOTE]

 

[cilyjr]

i suppose i will take a second to talk about equipment.

the light were at the install 2x 250 mh with lumenbright reflectors on a sunlight supply ballast (good work horse and now my emergency ballast) and a center 150 de guisemann (now my frag tank light).....now they are 3x 250 mogul in lumanbright reflectors off of lumatek dimable ballast

at install aqua controller jr....currently aqua controller apex

skimmer then and now modded asm g3

i have 3 marine land 300w heaters 2 in display (i dont want a faulty pump to kill my reef) and 1 in the sump all set to 80 but controlled off the apex set to 78. double failsafe as i don't trust heaters.

then diy calcium reactor now precision marine ca reactor with 20 lb tank ans a Milwaukee regulator controlled by the apex. a cant find any pics of the old diy reactor

the pumps were and still are korillia controllable (i used these as i could not fit a vortec on the side where the wall is closest to the tank)...Water Pumps & Powerheads: Hydor Koralia Controllable Pumps & Wavemakers
digital control unit and ac jr pictured