Justin's New Baby

[jleoni]

So came the big the "lift"! My wife told me to get people to help me, but lets be honest, one I'm someone who loves to figure out how to do things myself and two, how long do you all think it would take for me to coordinate off days for say 3 to 4 other grown men to help ... not to mention the beer I would owe them for breaking their backs!! And the last picture was from December 3rd ... for my birthday I cleaned out my tank (Dec 2nd)

 

[jleoni]

As you can clearly see I used a hydraulic car jack and landscaping blocks and wood to achieve the lift 6 inches at a time and side to side to keep from stressing out the acrylic joints.

 

[jleoni]

finally I made a wooden bridge and just slide the tank onto the stand that I custom fit a 1/2" thick piece of plywood.

 

[jleoni]

So for the next full week I spent most of my free time buffing sanding polishing buffing sanding polishing ....

 

[jleoni]

Finally after completing this I wanted to illustrate the job I had done this picture is completely THROUGH the aquarium from one side to the other!

 

[jleoni]

and yes I hand picked that edition because I love Cephalopods!

 

[jleoni]

By December 10th we had a cleaning party, me, my daughter, her bestie and my son!

 

[jleoni]

Now came the fun part ... plumbing!!!! I started with my overflow boxes.

 

[jleoni]

large pipe in the first box is the electral lines so you can literally walk all the way around this tank!

 

[jleoni]

next came the underbelly!

This was around December 15th!

 

[jleoni]

Then I had to figure out filtration So I built this:

I used 1 1/4" pipes between them ... not enough flow ...

version 2, I installed 2" pipes between them ... to much weight on the paper thin walls and we had leaks ...

But totes have gotten cheaper and cheaper over the years with thinner and thinner walls

 

[jleoni]

So I ended up going with two 50 gallon Rubbermaid stock tanks (was my first choice but I talked myself out of it opting for fancy 4 chamber system)

This was done on Jan 22nd 2014.

What can I say if I'm not 100% happy I'll redo something until I like what I have.

 

[jleoni]

So now that all of the intial plumbing was done, I filled the tank again with junk water turned the pump on adjusted valves etc etc and was happy!

 

[jleoni]

So owning a shop, I decided I would shop around for sand, looked through all of my vendors and low and behold because of shipping I found it cheaper to buy it as a consumer so I promptly order 300 lbs of BLACK SAND!!! And while I waited for it to arrive here at the house/shop I though I would make a reef rock skeleton and start drilling rock:

 

[jleoni]

Zomgah!!! It's BLACK and I'm LOVING IT!! This was 2 days ago on the 27th.

Nothing like STANDING in your own quazi Hawaiian beach!!!

 

[jleoni]

So i started building my base reef with rock i've been collecting and my skeleton!

 

[jleoni]

In typical Justin fashion ... I HATED where it was going and ripped it all out on the 28th and built this:

Keeping my live rock live, since I spent the last 5 to 7 months on most of it curing it, QTing it keeping it in hords of other aquariums around the shop! I would spritz, water, douse etc them every few hours and before bed and after getting up. I also laid two heaters into the sand bed and turned on the RO system! This was Yesterday ....

 

[J062682l]

Looks great. In following and gonna check out the beginning. Im gonna have questions !!

 

[jleoni]

Which finally gets us caught up to today ... today the RO unit is STILL running and has been for about 27ish hours now, i've been adding salt to maintain SG levels using my refractometer of course (see my article here on R2R about refractometers) 1.025 to 1.026 to ensure the live rock stays good and healthy. This morning I had enough water to place 4 hydor pumps to get heat and salt circulating in the system!

 

[jleoni]

Again typical me and I'm NEVER satisfied with default, I wasn't happy with the water level when I had it filled with junk water so today I cut and welded up some overflow barriers to raise the water level another good inch to inch and quarter! Safety first!!!

And finally my cuts, cemement etc