My Elos 160 XL Build

mnat · Oct 20, 2012

I wanted to make a thread over here as well as my local board as it is always nice to have a backup of everything. So here is my long time coming big tank build. The display is in my living room and the fish room is in the basement.

Equipment:
Elos 160xl tank (5ftx30.5 inchesx22 inches) and custom stand
Mazarra P LEDs (4 fixtures for now might add a fifth)
2 mp40s (might go to an mp60 later depending on it)
Custom acrylic sump (4x2x2)
Reef Octopus XP5000 with neck cleaner and top off container with auto shut off
MTC Calcium reactor
2x MRC XL media reactors
2x return pumps
Deep Blue rimless 85g tank
ATI dimmable sun power 6x36 bulbs (All ATI)
180GPD Spectra Pure RODI
1x 65g recirc tank
2x 65g one for fresh water one for saltwater

mnat · Oct 20, 2012

Here are some pics of the fish room. The fish are in the 65g recirc tank. I needed to break down my 57g tank to make room for the new tank so all the fish went in there. For those of you who don't know a recirc tank is essentially a water change tank. There is a valve on the manifold to disengage it from the system, then you use a mag to drain the tank, pump in another 65g and turn the valve to add the recirc back to the system and boom you just did a 65g water change in 5 mins.

mnat · Oct 20, 2012

The tank came in yesterday:
Getting shimmed and leveled:

lawnman · Oct 20, 2012

Shaweet gotta love those Elos

bige · Oct 20, 2012

That looks real nice.

kingator · Oct 21, 2012

nice set up ..... good luck with it

Bigfish93 · Oct 21, 2012

Excited to see your build. Im getting ready to build a similar setup so I may have some questions for you down the road. Good luck!

wysiwyg · Oct 21, 2012

looking good

revsgirl · Oct 22, 2012

Lookin' awesome! Following!

reefsandrotts · Oct 22, 2012

I see in the pics a rare Wobbegong....LOL

mnat · Oct 22, 2012

Yes you do, he is doing great work for Elos now.

mnat · Oct 22, 2012

Here is a pic of the preliminary rock work the wife did while I was at the Giants game (Go Gmen!!!). We will be adding more rock and a sand bed, we are just waiting for our local LFS to get the rock and sand in. The rest of the rock will be the real reef rock stuff (fake rock) to just add a bit more depth.

PolandSpring · Oct 22, 2012

wow, love the tonga branch. Thats gona look awesome! Keep up the good work, it looks great so fAr!

mnat · Nov 20, 2012

Sand is in and this is pretty much the final aqauscape. We got some more tonga branch for the back corner part but we are going to leave it pretty open.

Right side:

Left side:

Couple of new live stock photos. We have not transferred everything over because we do not have the mesh cover on that, but the piece for that should be here very soon. Ethan and I are going to try something pretty cool so we will keep you all updated on that. The corals we are just letting get used to the system down in the frag tank under T5s which is where most of them came from. Once we are confident in the water quality we will adjust everything to the lights.

We will be upgrading to the mp60 soon as well.

KLR · Nov 20, 2012

Really nice build and your scape is sweet! I wish I could find branch rocks like yours...

mnat · Nov 20, 2012

My wife did the scape top to bottom while I was at a Giants game. We had a local LFS get in a bunch of the branch so we just spent time cherry picking the rocks we wanted for the tank. We spend a lot of money there so they are generally pretty nice to us. They have another ~20 pounds waiting for us to cycle a bit more and then we will be completely done.