Jason's 102G Mixed Reef Build

[Jason_J]

This all started for me back on Christmas morning of '95. I had been fortunate to have and maintain several freshwater tanks up to that point, but waking up to find Santa had brought a used 90g tank, stand, hood and hang-on-back DAS filter was a dream come true for thirteen year old me.

The tank was a lesson in patience as my parents would buy me $200 worth of live rock every time I brought home straight A's in school; at $10 a pound in those days and the rule of 1-2 pounds per gallon in those days, it took over a year for me to get the tank filled with rock. That was the good ole' days when you could get real Fiji rock and despite having nothing but rock to look at for some long, I loved it. There was so much life that came with the rocks and little creatures to keep me entertained. I spent most of high school working at a fish store and doing maintenance on tanks. The tank was pretty good for a reef tank in those days considering it was lit by four T8 bulbs and had four MJ1200s for circulation. It came down at the end of high school when I left for the military.

I had several tanks after the military while I was in school (a 40g breeder SPS tank and then a 20g AIO I made, some pics below but many of the good ones have been lost). I never had quite the time or money to devote to the hobby and so ended up tearing the last tank down 3 or 4 years ago. Thankfully, I am in a much better position now and with two small children I want to help expose to the hobby, it’s time to set up a real tank again.

 

[Jason_J]

At the encouragement of my wife and children, this tank will not just contain “colored sticks” and will be a mixed reef tank with mainly LPS and SPS corals, although I am a sucker for green polyped toadstools, so there will be at least one soft coral. We have not yet settled on the fish, but there will certainly be a pair of clowns in the mix for my daughter.

The tank dimensions are 40x30x20 and the tank is currently being built by Crystal Dynamic Aquariums (I had planned to use Reef Savvy but their wait time and customer service led me elsewhere). I was planning to do a larger tank downstairs in the study, but my wife really wants it on the main floor where we could have the most interaction with it (which I agree with). I am a big proponent of aquascapes that exhibit depth and utilize negative space well, which is why I wanted at least 30” front to back. Like many others who have been around a while, I have always been inspired by the aquascaping of the “OregonReef” and have really been impressed with the focus on aquascaping by the hobby in the last few years.

A very important aspect of this build for me is redundancy and failsafes. I have lost and watched others lose tanks too many times from failed equipment. As a result, I will strive in this tank to use well regarded equipment and always have redundancy (and double redundancy in some cases). Between my various hobbies, I have learned it is much better to buy great equipment in the beginning, rather than buying something cheap that you later upgrade once or more. As a wise person once said, “cry once when you buy something, rather than crying every time you have to use it.” I will discuss the equipment in depth in a later post.

I am not fully sold on the Triton method yet, but this tank will utilize a lot of the same philosophies as that method. I will be using Triton 34 sump by Trigger Systems to have a large chaeto based fuge. The tank will be setup using primarily live sand and live rock from Tampa Bay Saltwater and may be supplemented with something like the real rock where needed for aquascaping purposes. Alkalinity and calcium will be maintained with limewater, at least initially, and may be supplemented by 2 or 3 part on dosers as needed.

The one area I have been unable to make a decision on yet is lighting. The front to back dimension of the tank makes it almost certainly necessary to use multiple fixtures. I am not certain I want to rely 100% on LEDs as I very much dislike the disco effect and the extreme shimmer some exhibit (I ran diffusers on my LEDs back in 2011/12, so it’s nice to see it finally being utilized in some commercial products now). I am thinking I will end up with a combination of primarily T5 with some LEDs to supplement, but am not certain yet. I have also thought about having just a few T5s and then supplementing with LEDs directly over where the rocks/corals will be to try and create some shadowing in the negative spaces and add more visual interest. I may get the tank all set up and then make a decision as I believe in letting tanks mature for a few months before adding fish or corals.

Thanks for joining me on this new journey.

 

[Jason_J]

Here we are coming up close to the one year anniversary of this thread; I may actually have water in the tank by the time of the one year anniversary. Although the full system is not yet up, here is a quick snapshot of the work that has been going on behind the scenes. We will start with the room where the fish tank will be.

The tank is going in our living room on the second floor of the house and all the equipment will be housed in the basement. Neither room was ready for this. When we bought the house two years ago, the previous homeowners were in the middle of redoing the living room and had taken the flooring down to the plywood subfloor when we made an offer on the house; they weren’t actively marketing the house. They requested we pay for any additional work on the living room and we declined at the time, unsure of what we wanted. So the living room has had a plywood subfloor for two years.

The tank will be sitting in the corner of the room against the outside walls of the house. The first floor walls are concrete and the stand will be sitting across 4 floor joists and be tied into the studs on the second floor wall. Although I was comfortable the floors would hold the weight of the tank and stand, we decided to pull the subfloor up and add cross braces and additional reinforcement in the area where the tank will be for extra comfort. I also used this time to run plumbing down to the basement; 3 drain lines, 2 return lines and an extra pipe to run electrical wires to and from the tank and sump.

We knew we wanted to tile the floor in the living room but struggled to decide on a tile we both liked. Late last year my wife and I took a trip to Mexico without the kids and had an amazing time. We fell in love with the architecture and were inspired by some of the tile at the resort, so decided to go with something similar that would always remind us of the amazing time we had together. We also decided to do everything ourselves as a project together and to learn something new as we had never tiled. We started by leveling the floor with a thin concrete leveler. We then thinset down a ½” concrete backer board. Once that was all screwed down and the edges taped and filled, we painted two coats of waterproofer over it to help protect everything in the event of a flood or spill. We then chose to lay the 8”x8” tiles at a 45 degree angle because we preferred the look. That added a lot of extra work having to cut all the angles around the edges, but we love how it came out! We also wanted the tile to draw your eye directly to the corner where the tank was going to go.

My amazing wife installing the last piece of tile. It took us almost two weeks of working a little bit each night to finish the job.

Then came all the finishing touches for the room. I added new baseboard and door trim. We also removed the trim and plywood siding around the windows and had that drywalled in for a cleaner look. I then built a teak window mantle to match the teak that will be used on the aquarium stand. One of my other hobbies is woodworking, so I always treasure the time my hobbies collide. We wanted the tank and floor to be the focal points and so painted the room a nice off white color. We then picked a new sectional that would allow some good family cuddle time and come up right next to the tank so the kids could stand on it to look into the tank while they are still small. We also got them involved in helping with the room as much as possible.

 

[Jason_J]

The next phase of the project was building the stand. This ended up being far more complicated than expected. I really love furniture design and wanted something that didn’t just look like an aquarium stand. I sought inspiration for the design by searching through numerous threads on here and looking at furniture designs for credenzas, buffets, TV stands, etc. from designers I really like. I pulled together a group of 30 or so pictures to share with the better half to get an idea of what she was thinking. Many of the ones I loved she was not so keen on, and vice versa. Nothing was really inspiring us. After a number of discussions and visiting various furniture and building stores, we finally agreed on a stacked stone look. I wanted to find a balance of making the stand a beautiful piece of furniture in its own right while also not distracting the viewer from the most important thing, the aquarium itself.

However, there were a number of factors important to me in a stand that this complicated. Although the vast majority of the equipment will be housed in the basement, I wanted to be able to get into the stand to store various fish related items and to have access to the electrical and plumbing. Part of the aesthetic challenge was that I wanted the stacked stone to have a clean and uninterrupted look so I couldn’t just add a standard door in the middle of it or have visible hinges on the side of it. Additionally, I knew the stacked stone would be heavy and so I needed to build a structure strong enough to hold the weight and still allow it to be opened relatively easily. This became even more of a challenge when my refusal to allow visible hinges was combined with the weight as it required the hinges to be inset several inches inside the door. I knew I wanted a completely uniform front and I wanted to have the rock wrap around to the side of the stand for an inch or two to give the desired look. This meant I needed a hinge that would swing the door 5 or 6 inches away from the stand while simultaneously allowing the door to open.

I spent an hour one day at the local woodworking store discussing hinges and options and at the end of it they didn’t think I would be able to achieve all my goals without making some changes or sacrifices. I then spent several more days researching hinges online and couldn’t come up with anything that would work. Finally after seemingly reaching the end of the internet, some inspiration struck. Instead of trying to find a single hinge that would accomplish two functions, I figured I could use multiple items each performing a single function. The biggest challenge was dealing with the weight of the door as it would weigh close to 100 pounds with the rock and concrete back board. After more research, I found pocket door hardware that could handle several hundred pounds. I decided I could use the pocket door hardware on the top and bottom of the inside of the stand running front to back to allow me to pull a square made of 2x4s far enough away from the stand. I could then add a standard heavy duty stainless hinge to the edge of the square that the door would rotate against. Because the door was so heavy I needed to add a caster at the far end to help support the weight and not have to rely on just the hinge to support the weight as that would put a lot of racking motion on the pocket door hardware, which it was not intended to handle.

Another design element that was important to me was to have a toe kick at the bottom of the stand as I wanted to have a visual separation between the rockwork and the tile floor. This meant I needed to inset the base of the stand a few inches while still ensuring the stand was strong enough to support the weight of the tank at the edges. As a result I well over-engineered the stand and it could probably hold a tank 3x its size without issue.

I wanted to cap the top of the stand with a ledge at the top. I have found this to be very useful from a daily operations standpoint as it allows you to have a place to set things down when working on the tank, etc. I used teak to match the window sill because I love the look and the teak will hold up well against the saltwater. I also built drawers inside the stand and used this teak across the front of them.

Finally, I decided to add some LED lighting under in the toe kick and under the top ledge to help accent the things I wanted the viewer to focus on with the stand. If you have made it this far, thanks! Here are some pictures of the stand being built.

Funny, scrolling through the pictures that although these were taken over the course of a month, our youngest was wearing the same pajamas in each picture. Apparently he likes those!

 

[Jason_J]

Once the stand was completed, I then turned my attention to basement, where I am still working.

Basements in this part of Texas are rare as we have pretty rocky and clay filled soil and our water table is high. Surprisingly this 1978 house was built with a basement. We were told that it originally had geothermal heating and cooling and all the equipment for that was housed in the basement; sadly, that equipment is long gone. The basement has been largely used by the previous owners and us solely as storage for waterproof items as it has flooded a couple of feet in the past in heavy rains. The basement is a wet basement with a sump in a corner that pumps the incoming water out as needed. I have added a large dehumidifier to the room which has done a great job of holding the room at a steady 45% humidity while the room stays a pretty constant 64 degrees (which makes me contemplate some cold water setups down here…).

Here is a picture of the corner where all the tank equipment is going at the start.

I started by upgrading the sump and adding a backup pump in case the primary pump gets overwhelmed. I then went about using a waterproofing epoxy coating everywhere. This also helped seal up a few places along the walls where there were slow leaks. Once that was done, I started building out the stands. For the main tank, I am going to be running a Triton 34 sump. I liked the large refugium compartment this sump provides, although I won’t be using the triton method. I will also have attached to the system a 44g Rubbermaid trough full of live rock to provide additional filtration and act as a cryptic zone. I will also have a 48x24x12 frag tank plumbed in. I am in the middle of building this, here is where we are at today:

I raised everything off the floor and built it on cinder blocks just to provide additional protection in case the basement ever floods again; I am very big on redundancy and taking protective measures were possible. The Rubbermaid trough will sit on the raised section to the left. The sump will set on the low section next to that with the intake side sitting against the side wall and the return side near the trough. Above that you will see a large grey plastic box that will house most of the electronics to help ensure they cannot get wet (I will have to work out how to cool the area.) The middle raised section next to that will be a stainless steel work area for fragging, testing, etc. The stainless steel top will open to the large funnel below to allow easy access for pouring salt into the 30g water container housed in the stand below. The highest section on the right will house the frag tank and will have 3 x 30g water containers that will be for RO water. To the right of the frag tank section will be a sink and above that will be the RO system. At the opposite end of the room (25 feet of so away), I will built a new fish and coral observation system and have several QTs ready if necessary.

This week they are redoing the electrical in my shop connected to the house and I am having them run 2- 20amp dedicated circuits in the basement for these systems, you can see the blue tape on the wall marking the spots.

 

[Jason_J]

While all the house construction was going on over the last few months, I also used this time to get a head start on the rock and tank inhabitants.

Having set up tanks over the years using both live rock and dry rock, I am a big proponent of real live rock. Although there are pests and nuisances that come along with live rock, I think the benefits it provides far outweigh these concerns. Similarly, I think the microfauna in our tanks are important in providing long term stability and sustainability. I have run really sterile tanks before and found that the tanks did not thrive as well as I thought they should and were more prone to crashes. On the flip side, dry rock provides a number of advantages when it comes to aquascaping. And as I discussed a bit in the stand thread above, aesthetic design is really important to me. So, I settled on a mix both.

Back in November I picked out 30 lbs of dry rock, a mix of pukani and shelf rock. I power washed them and then put them in a brute trash can in freshwater and bleach for six weeks to remove any organic matter that may still be attached. During that time I found another 40 lbs of Real Rock and Caribsea Life Rock that I liked. On December 20th, I set up my 44g Rubbermaid trough with saltwater, 40 lbs of Caribsea special grade sand (more on the sand later as the tank will be barebottom) and the 30 or so pounds of dry rock.

The next step was the live rock. I wanted true live rock like I could get 20 years ago that was teaming with life. I had heard great things about Tampa Bay Saltwater over the years and wanted to give them a try. I had also heard a lot of positive reviews of the rock from KP Aquatics. I decided I would order rock from both places but start with rock from Tampa Bay Saltwater. The order of 50 lbs of rock arrived on January 4. The rock was wonderful with lots of sponges and colorful macroalgae, a sea cucumber, a small sea urchin and a few red mithrax crabs. I did find a couple gorilla crabs that were pretty easily removed and did not find any mantis shrimp, which was a welcome surprise. I mixed this rock in with the dry rock in the 44g trough. I set this up with a couple of Tunze power heads, two heaters and later added one of my GHL Mitras lights and a Deltec skimmer recommended by Adam at Battlecorals (the skimmer will later be used on my 25g fish acclimation tank).

On February 5th I received my order 60 lbs of live rock from KP Aquatics, which I set up in the 25g acclimation tank to cycle. The rock from KP Aquatics was absolutely beautiful; great shapes and really nice coralline algae coverage. However, it had a large population of worms, mantis shrimps, urchins and starfish that largely all died off from being shipped in wet newspaper rather than in water like the Tampa Bay Rock. I had to do nearly 100% water changes daily for the first week to keep the ammonia at barely acceptable levels. This was in stark contrast to the Tampa Bay rock that only took a couple of small water changes to keep ammonia in check as there was very little die off.

Here is an email I sent to both companies sharing my thoughts after ordering from both. I give Philipp from KP Aquatics a lot of credit as he called me the next day and we talked for 30 minutes about the business and the feedback I provided. He even made a few changes to the website to address the issues I noted, so some of the items noted below will no longer be relevant.

Where KP Aquatics had the advantage:

- The rock shapes are super interesting and the varied sizes were fantastic. Every piece was a piece I would have picked out of a giant vat and been happy to use. Of the 50 lbs of rock I ordered from TBS, only a couple rise to this level. As aquarium aesthetics are very important, the quality of the KP rock cannot be emphasized enough here!

Indifferent/yet to be determined:

- The TBS rock had substantially more sponges, a bit more coraline algae and more porcelain and mathrix crabs (despite comments I had heard from others, I found no mantis shrimp or pistol shrimp in the rock, which was nice); KP rock was loaded with worms (and the die-off immediately and continuing within the first 12 hours was substantial), pistol shrimp (found at least 5 dead pistol shrimp in the first 12 hours, assuming more living), a mantis shrimp, 5 or 6 beautiful starfish and a couple of urchins. Overall it seems like the KP rock has more life but also more life that makes me a bit nervous (giant worms, mantis, etc.); I am very interested to see how the KP rock is in a month once it has cycled to get a better comparison

Where TBS had the advantage:

- Communication; TBS reached out without prompting to tell me when they would be collecting and worked with me to find a shipping date convenient for my schedule. I was very surprised to receive no communication from KP Aquatics prior to being told the rock would arrive the next day. Luckily our nanny was at home to handle the delivery and placing the rocks in the water, otherwise the rock may have sat for numerous hours before it could have been attended to

- Die-off; I am not sure if it is the difference in the rock being shipped in water or just the difference in the level of organisms in the rock, but the TBS rock had very little die off and did not cloud the water. Despite doing 40% in water changes yesterday, washing the rock off in separate buckets twice, adding ammonia remover, adding carbon and adding a mechanical filter, the water from the vat with the KP rock is still very cloudy. I will likely perform two additional 40% water changes today to try and prevent the water from becoming too toxic

- I expected the KP rock to be shipped in water and was very surprised it wasn't. This does not seem to be clearly stated anywhere on the website (that I could find, this may be on the packing and scheduling page (which page doesn't work) linked on the rock page). Additionally, I was surprised the rock wasn't shipped air freight since that seemed to be what the website suggests on the rock page (not sure it mattered since it seemed to arrive in roughly the same time as the TBS rock); Finally, the newspaper wrapping was impossible to remove all of so I have been fishing newspaper pieces out of the tank constantly

- Price- 50lbs of TBS rock plus airfreight shipping was $365 ($7.30/lb) versus the 60lbs from KP for $589 (9.82/lb)

Overall, the shapes of the rock from KP were vastly superior but most other factors tend to go in TBS's favor.

As mentioned above, I think the microfauna is very important to the long term stability of our tanks, so in addition to the liverock, I added the following items to the trough:

- Garf Grunge 5 lbs received on 12/28/18

- AlgaeBarn 5280 pods received on 12/28/18

- AlgaeBarn 5280 pods received on 2/6/19

- ISPF Order received on 2/8/19 of bristleworms, chaeto, 6 Strombus Grazers, 6 nerite, 6 littorinid, 6 microhermits, 3 adulthermits, 25 reef amphipods, podmat, 6 Mamamia worms, 6 ministars, 6 Comet Stars, corallinealgaebooster, 1 pinky cuke

 

[Jason_J]

Next up on the discussion block is the tank itself.

Tank: After a lot of research and discussions with several manufacturers, I chose to have Crystal Dynamic Aquariums build the tank. The dimensions were 40x30x20 with ½ glass, three sides starphire, diamond-edge polish on all panels, a bottom perimeter brace, a Synergy shadow overflow and vertical seam reinforcements. The tank arrived last May and was stunning. The craftsmanship was excellent, and I couldn’t have been more pleased with the tank.

The tank sat in my shop for 9 months in the crate. It was nice to have it there to look at occasionally but a constant reminder of how long this process is taking! Once I completed the stand early this year, it was finally time to move the tank. Because of my plan to put the tank in the corner of the room, I decided I wanted to go ahead and paint the backside of the glass on the side that would be against the wall (I had the manufacturer paint the back wall already). I took the crate apart and painted it sitting on the pallet it came on. Once that had a couple of days to dry, everything was finally ready to bring the tank inside! I grabbed my pallet jack and slid it in with a little force to get over the bottom edge of the pallet. What I didn’t realize was that I had slid the tank a bit on the pallet when painting and the tank was now sitting proud of the pallet. As the pallet jack slid home, it made contact with the tank before the pallet. My heart sunk.

After nursing my wounded pride for a day, I sent the pictures to Crystal Dynamic Aquariums to get their take as I was conflicted. On the one hand, I wanted to still use the tank. The chip wasn’t that big and the tank had substantial bracing in that area between the perimeter brace and the vertical seam bracing. On the other hand, was it really worth the risk? The cost to replace the tank is a fraction of the cost of the planned livestock and the cost to remediate the damage that would be done to the house if 100 gallons of saltwater spilled. CDA counseled that they would also not recommend using the tank and generously offered a modest discount if I wanted to have them build another tank. I took them up on their offer and the new tank should be shipping any day.

Since we had to build a new tank, I took the opportunity to rethink the dimensions and see if there were any other changes I wanted to make. As I spent the last year really getting back up to speed on the hobby and looking at numerous tanks I was a little concerned that between the bottom perimeter bracing (with starboard) and the distance of the water from the top of the tank that I was really only going to have 17.5” to 18” of actual water height. That seemed a bit shallower than I really wanted from both an aesthetic standpoint and from a flow perspective. On the flip side, I didn’t want to go too tall and add too much more weight since the stand was already pretty heavy, so I ended up adding an additional two inches making the dimensions of the new tank 40”x30”x22”. To keep the cost the same, I changed from starphire glass on the side that will be painted to regular glass. This limits the possibilities with the tank in the future, but I imagine if I have the need to move this tank it will only be because I am moving houses and moving to a larger tank.

Updating our basement progress, I was able to install the last few braces last night and put the first coat of paint on everything. I am painting everything primarily as protection against water damage. I like to paint all the framing before adding the plywood to ensure full coverage just in case water ever gets between the layers. The wife and I are heading out on a short four-day vacation on Saturday, so I may not have any new work updates for a bit.

 

[Jason_J]

CDA just sent me an email telling me the tank is complete!

 

[Jason_J]

A few updates to share.

The new tank arrived on Friday and once again was very well packaged in a purpose built crate. A friend came over Saturday morning to help me carry it up the stairs and then load it in place. Having the glass suction cups helped tremendously, but it was still pretty hard work getting it up with the two of us. I got a little nervous the last couple of steps up the stairs as the fatigue was becoming visible.

After a short break at the top of the stairs, we were able to slide it into place without much trouble. The kids were very ecstatic and wanted to get in the tank, so the obligatory mermaid and merman pictures ensued. It was an awesome moment to finally see the tank in place. I am also really happy about the additional 2 inches of height added to the new tank; I was surprised at how much that changed the dimensions in a positive way for me.

I am ordering additional curtains for the patio doors to block out any light. The window to the left of the tank is northern facing and so sunlight never comes in. I will wait to see how the tank responds to it before deciding what to do there.

Work has been continuing down in the basement as well. The electrical work was finished last week and I now have 2-20a dedicated circuits to work with. I have finished the initial stand construction for all the equipment, although I will go back in later and add doors and walls in a few places. I have also started the slow and tedious process of plumbing everything. Once I get the plumbing finished, I will turn to installing all the electrical raceways for wire management.

The top left platform will house the 44g Rubbermaid trough that will hold additional live rock and act as a cryptic zone. The lower platform to the right is the sump and return pump area. The mid level area on the right side will have a starboard top and serve as a work area. The top will also be hinged and will lift up to cover the large funnel you can see in this picture. In the area below will be my 30g salt reservoir used for AWC. I wanted a large funnel to make it easy to pour salt into the reservoir since it was hidden under the bench. The top platform to the right will house the frag tank. I am currently planning to run a zoo med low boy frag tank (48 x 24 x 10), but haven't researched it much yet. Underneath that will be 3 x 30g RO reservoirs that are all plumbed together. Just to the right of the frag tank will be a sink and the RO unit will be mounted on the wall above there.

I have two Iwaki pressure rated pumps plumbed into the sump. Although I only want 300-400gph of flow between the display tank and the sump, I needed a powerful pump to push the water up from the basement to the second floor. The purpose of two pumps is to have a main pump and a backup pump that is already plumbed into the system and can be brought online by simply opening the intake and outlet valves and flipping a power switch. I also plumbed it with two intakes to the pump section so that I could run multiple strainers and try to minimize the chance of a single intake getting clogged.

I would have liked to avoid plumbing so many 90 degrees right after the outlet to avoid adding additional restriction, but my thought was that the pressure rated pumps would handle it fine given the low turnover I need them to actually provide. I will likely have my skimmer mounted above these pumps, so I wanted to have as much room as possible to work with above the pumps.

Although I don’t care too much about noise in the basement, I wanted to try and minimize noise that would come into the house so added vibration damping pads under the pumps and a short soft tubing run to try to eliminate pump vibration through the pipes (the pipes run up through the corner of a closet in a first floor bedroom).

Here are a few pictures of the rock vat, which has really become a mini tank at this point. At some point I will buy a real camera and set the lights to picture taking mode so that I can get rid of the blue look, which I am not a fan of.

 

[Jason_J]

She holds water!

I was able to finish up the main plumbing this weekend and do a leak test. I needed to tighten down a couple of bulkheads and one screw fitting a hair bit more, but otherwise she was leak free.

The picture below shows how everything came together; I still need to take it all back apart so that I can paint the bare wood. I purchased the Trigger Systems Triton sump last year before I settled on using the Clarisea roller mat, which don't easily plumb together. I could have gone with a different sump but I liked the compartment dimensions of the TS sump so decided to make them work together. The easiest way I could come up with was to put the roller mat into it's own small tank and then have that tank drain into the sump. For redundancies sake, that tank also has two drain lines leading to the main sump.

The one other item I spent some time thinking about was how to make the Clarisea work with two main drain lines from my Bean Animal style overflow when it only had a single inlet (I wasn't worried about the emergency drain running through the roller mat). I debated modifying the inlet tubing so that it had an inlet on each side of the unit, however that became more work and would make the unit harder to fit in the tank I purchased for it to sit in. Ultimately I decided to plumb the two main drain lines together where they entered the basement and then have that single line go into the unit. I figured the two story drop with 1" lines would be more than sufficient to handle the expected flow through the drain lines with ample head room. I also know I had the emergency drain if for some reason something ever happened with that line. Thankfully everything worked perfectly as hoped in testing, including running the pumps at full power (guessing around 1000gph compared to the normal 300-400gph I will be running). I also tested bringing the backup pump online and it was as simple as hoped, the changeover can be done in 15 seconds.

Pictures below of the progress. I love my laser level and find it really helpful for plumbing and having reference lines for measurements.

Next up is adding plastic raceways to run all the electrical in, draining the tank, plumbing the drain line from the frag tank (LFS was having a 20% sale this weekend so I went ahead and picked up the Zoo Med Low Boy) and moving the rock vats down to the basement now that most of the pvc glueing is done. I have had the two tanks running in my shop and it is starting to warm up and will get too hot for them up there soon. Then I need to plumb all the water vats together.

Hoping to have saltwater in the tank by April 18th to mark the one year anniversary of this thread. I leave for vacation with the family on Wednesday so I won't get much more done until early next week.

 

[Jason_J]

I was able to get everything moved down to the basement tonight without issue, although moving tanks is always stressful! I was happy to see the polyps all back out almost immediately and the fish swimming around their new aquascapes. Time to get all the cords organized as they are driving me crazy.

 

[Jason_J]

Everything fared well while we were away for 5 days with my brother in law daily tossing in a cube of mysis in each tank and dosing B-ionic 2 part. I did a test of the basics Sunday night when we returned and everything was looking good: Alkalinity at 8.4DKH, Calcium at 450 and Nitrates around 15. I didn't bother testing phosphates as there has been no undesirable algae and the color on all the corals looks good, but I will probably test it sometime this week to get a baseline.

I drained the tap water out of the tank now that we have passed the leak test and cleaned it up last night. I need to work on plumbing the drains for the rock vat and the frag tank to the sump and then the plumbing will be finished.

I spent last night working on the substrate. The tank is going to be bare bottom as I don't want sand to dictate the amount of flow I can have or slowly accumulating waste over time. Like most things, it is a compromise as I truly love the aesthetics sand provides. I chose to go with an HPDE layer as I prefer that look over bare glass and to give the bottom of the tank a uniform height since I have perimeter bracing around the bottom. I have always felt white starboard looked even more unnatural than necessary because the white was so bright against the corals and rock. I have seen black starboard used as well and while it provides a really interesting look, it is not the look I am going for and I like that the lighter starboard will help reflect light back up to the undersides of the corals. I spent some time researching on here and the web for alternative colors people have used and while there wasn't a ton out there, it seems like the color "seafoam" was the most popular other option as it was more like the color of sand. This was perfect and what I was hoping for. I called my local plastics dealer and was able to order a sheet of 3/4" SeaBoard brand HPDE in the seafoam color. It was exactly the look I was hoping for.

I chose 3/4" as I would need to remove material in a 4" section around the edges on the underside to clear the perimeter bracing. I wanted to do it out of a single piece (versus laminating two pieces, which would have been easier) because I thought it would give the thinner outside section more strength and help keep them from warping (as I have heard HPDE can do occasionally). I also was concerned with finding a glue suitable to laminate such a large piece that would be completely non-toxic and didn't want to ever have to worry about the lamination failing.

The next step was cutting the HPDE to dimensions and the removing the material on the edges. To remove the material, I used my track saw to cut the inner border of the section that needed to be removed. I then tried using a router to start removing the material. I quickly decided that it was a difficult operation to do with a router and would be very time consuming. I decided to throw a ¼” box cutting blade on my table saw and cut it that way instead. This worked great but was also time consuming as it took 16 passes on each side to remove the material, including the time to adjust the fence on the saw between each pass. However, this was a much easier process than using the router and turned out great. Here are a couple of pictures on the cuts with the track saw and the final product in the tank, I put my watch in there just to help give a size perspective.

I am really happy with the color choice and will add a little bit of sand around the edges to fill in the gaps. It was necessary to leave a little gap to allow me to be able to remove it later if necessary.

 

[Jason_J]

Mission [almost] Accomplished! She has saltwater in her on the [day after the] one year anniversary of starting this thread. My mom had an emergency surgery last night so I missed it, but everything is well and she is doing great.

 

[Jason_J]

The aquascape is largely complete. The corals have been moved up to the display tank. The first fish, a pair of Banggai Cardinals, will be coming out of QT in the next few days. The tank went through a small diatom bloom when I moved everything into the tank but the snails largely handled that within a couple of days and it hasn't returned; still a few batches they need to get to.

The rockwork is five separate islands, although it looks like the three right islands are connected in the pictures. The left two islands will largely be LPS and soft corals and the right three islands will be largely SPS. After playing with numerous pump options and locations, I have currently settled on two Maxspect Gyre 250s running on LTC up to 60% and a Vortech MP40 on Reef Crest running up to ~65%. One gyre is at the top middle of the left side of the tank in a horizontal configuration. The second gyre is at the bottom and back of the right side of the tank in a vertical position flowing along the back wall. The Vortech is at the bottom and middle of the right side of the tank flowing between the two islands on the right and across the middle island. I have been incredibly impressed with the flow from the gyres, they move a serious amount of water. I have an Ice Cap battery backup on the Gyre's as well. There are currently three places detritus is accumulating in front of the islands on the left. I don't think I am going to move the pumps around to address this as it is very easy to clean those couple of spots and the LPS are already blowing around quite a bit.

I used Aquamaxx Reef Welder and a bit of superglue to build all the structures so I could largely do it with the rocks still submerged. It was my first time working with the product and I really liked it after I figured out a few tricks to using it: (1) get the hot water to almost a boil and then the product liquifies in less than ten seconds and gives you a few minutes of working time (I used a butter knife to get the product out of the water and then could knead it with my hands after a few seconds of cooling); (2) the product is not sticky like epoxy (although epoxy is not very sticky) and I had the best results by forming it around multiple sides of the area I was trying to fasten so the rock would be locked in place once the Reef Welder hardened (I couldn't rely on it to hold strong if I just put it on the underside like I would with superglue or epxoy); (3) use multiple smaller globs of the Reef Welder in various areas to attach rocks; and (4) once you have the multiple globs in place, go back around and push them all down one more time to make sure they are tight against the rock and then hold everything still for a minute or so as the Reef Welder hardens; movement of the rock allows gaps to form and the structure doesn't hold together as well.

I have been slowly working on the basement side of things as well and have the Rubbermaid vat plumbed into the sump and working as part of the system; the frag tank is not plumbed in yet and is acting as the QT for a group of 7 green banded gobies. I have the plumbing on the RO and salt water stations almost finished and am looking forward to having that system up and running. After that, I will turn to plumbing the frag tank and then getting the controllers setup.

 

[NinjaTiLL]

Do you have a picture of your "pinky cuke" from IPSF.com? I also ordered from them and included the pinky cuke in my mix-and-match package. I didn't take pictures or get a good enough look at some of the bags. (I had 2 helpers that night, a 2yo and a 4yo, so my mind wasn't fully on what I was doing during acclimation. So now I don't know what I'm looking with that pinky cuke. I found another pink worm which I'm pretty sure is a bristle worm from the Live Sand Activator or Wonder Mud. There are some mentions on the internet of persons ordering from IPSF but never any good photos or videos. I should have taken pics but, again, 2 little helpers.