sbash's 220 Gallon Through-Wall Build

[sbash]

This is about the seven or eight month mark. Since the tank was still looking a bit empty, I cycled a few more rocks for a couple months. Here we are with the new rocks, a much fuller look:

As you can see, the giant rock covered in GSP was removed. All the polyps retracted one day, for about a week, so I pulled it and put it into QT. The polyps came back shortly after moving it, but slowly died back for some unknown reason.


This picture is an interesting one. This little frag sat dormant for about a year, then six months inside this tank, it completely encrusted the plug. In a few posts, you will see it on the left island (I will be sure to point it out).

Next up, the unthinkable happened and changed everything...

 

[sbash]

I just realized I haven't posted in a while. So, I thought I would share the cabinetry. The basic facets are simply 14" painted plywood. Which I think I mentioned above, one side is a solid black and the other is a brown that was colour matched to our Ikea entertainment unit. In fact, I bought a bunch of the doors to integrate them together:

It took forever to find the correct gas lifts to hold these HDF cabinet doors properly, lol, this was the highest I could get it (without spending $200 for a lift). My head barely clears it, so it is good enough. However, after about 18 months, the pressure from the lift broke the hinge on that side. So I had to replace it, I anticipate the same thing next year. I hope my body-builder brother-in-law is in town when it happens again - he is a tank and had a hard time holding the door up, lol. Another challenge I faced with bridging the three door panels together was the curving. I had to use 1/2" square U channel to keep it straight. A piece of wood, or L channel would not cut it... Even then I probably should use 3/4"...

Also, this side is missing two pieces of trim to go on both sides of the tank to shore up the ledge to the door. I have the parts, I just need to make the time to cut the current trim back a 1/2" to fit the pieces in, nice and snug.

The other side though, was easier. It still took a couple attempts to get the right gas lift, the build was much simpler. I used the 'cut out' and simply framed it with trim and used a piano hinge. It works awesome and is nice and light:

I might put some trim under the ledge to create a fake door look, instead of a random flat black panel, lol...

Lastly, I must mention this for comedic value. The ledge is simply a finished 1x4 with the cheapest crown molding I could find underneath; to cap the ends, I just used a carefully cut piece of cereal box (and painted it and glued accordingly)...

 

[Ubergroover]

Thats awesome!

 

[sbash]

Thats awesome!

Thanks!

 

[JBKReef]

Next up, the unthinkable happened and changed everything...

Am I missing something here? Did a post get missed... what was the unthinkable and where are the photos?!

 

[sbash]

Am I missing something here? Did a post get missed... what was the unthinkable and where are the photos?!

Oh, my bad... I kind of trailed off with the cabinetry post... Sorry about that... Thanks for bringing this to my attention

I will have to dig up the photos and carry on with the story!

 

[Kayotic5011]

Wow thats epic! Ive always wanted to do this. Amazing job.

 

[sbash]

Wow thats epic! Ive always wanted to do this. Amazing job.

Thanks!

 

[sbash]

Here is the next photo, the prime, the best it has ever looked... This was about 2 years ago:

The Xenia on the left has filled out those tonga branches, the hammers are nice and full looking (1,2,3,4), the fox is huge (6) and the candycane (5) is splitting like crazy. Most of the SPS is not visible in this photo, but they are starting to really grow too (That red monti cap on the left is giant now, lol, anyway)...

I was making adjustments to my auto feeder, which currently looks like this:

I had to fix the acrylic tubing, as there was a flaw in my original design. So I had rigged up a temporary hopper. It was fairly full and it vibrated itself loose and fell in the tank.

So, I came home from work (thankfully I was not out of town) to the fish acting funny. After about a half hour, I realized why. There was a softball size mound of food in the tank. Disaster mode kicks in and I am scrambling to find my scoop, gloves, vacuum, buckets, etc (It also landed on the carpeted side of the tank, lol). After getting 90% of the mass out, the other 10% was too soft or too scattered to even vacuum up, I sat back in relief. It could have been so much worse...

The ammonia did rise to detectable levels for about a day, and this also means the nitrates shot up as did the phosphates.

The fox coral (6) was the first to show signs of stress. It faded out, I almost lost the whole thing. However, I did save most of it. BUT it broke while I was moving it around, so I put most of it in another tank and kept 1/3 in this tank.

Next, the algae blooms. At first it was manageable; I was doing giant water changes two or three times a week since the ammonia was detected. But when the hair algae started, everything went down hill. Despite the water changes and running GFO and manually cleaning it out, I lost control.

Even at this stage:

It had started to creep up the rocks and, as you can see, every surface it could. Also keep in mind, it is a 30 inch deep tank, so I can barely reach the bottom - certainly did not help... So after batting the above picture for about a year, in combination with having a baby, travelling for work regularly and generally trying to have a life other than picking algae out of my tank:

This photo is actually a little newer than the time implied above (i.e. 1 year ago), it was not quite this bad. By last April, I had it to the point it was not expanding. I had to cull every week if I could. At this point, I had lost corals 2,3,4, half of 5 and half of a large birds nest and a good jag of the smaller corals not visible in the picture (some encrusting montis, polyps and so on). The larger sps at the top of the was still growing, but the bottom inch on them or so died back (where the algae was touching them).

I have very few photos from the last two years, especially tank shots, as it looked awful. I am still digging for good algae shots, but I can't seem to find any.

Next up, we have the wild ride of me managing the tank, but only home for three days a month! (This will cover from April 2017 to December 2017).

 

[Mjl714]

Wow, home three days a month, keeping a plant would be a challenge, let alone a reef tank. I can imagine how this will turn out.

 

[Ultra Aquatics]

Cool build, my advice would be to get some Mexican Turbo snails in there, they'll start chomping away at that GHA in no time.

 

[sbash]

Wow, home three days a month, keeping a plant would be a challenge, let alone a reef tank. I can imagine how this will turn out.

Haha, yeah, I lost a bunch of plants too... But standby, I am travelling through Arizona right now, but will post up some more next week!

Cool build, my advice would be to get some Mexican Turbo snails in there, they'll start chomping away at that GHA in no time.

I add 5-10 a month, and yes, they do help, but it is (well was) way too much for them to keep up with. They are also $5 a piece where I live, so it is not really economical to add a lot at once.

 

[sbash]

Alright, where did we leave off? We're about a year behind now. So just to recap, GHA went crazy and choked out some nice colonies, but I had it under control.

However, my wife took a 6 month position about 800km away, so I took some time off work and we 'moved' away for 7 months (starting in May). At the time, dosing I didn't factor in automated dosing while I was away. At the time, I was only dosing every couple weeks as needed, between that and regular water changes, I didn't really think much about the chemistry.

All was well for about 3 months, however the growth hit a critical mass and it started consuming alk much faster than I was returning home to dose. Suddenly, the alk had dropped, to 5.8 (from dosing up to 9) and I only had a couple days to get it back up. Needless to say, things started to look rough after two months of these drops and sudden corrections.

By august, I had set up an alk doser and things stabilized from there, calcium was still a bit wonky, but basically, I was very unprepared for the consumption of minerals in a tank this size. We returned in November of 2017; any SPS that wasn't dead was completely browned out or left with very little tissue.

I'll leave you with this photo of the acro in the post above (https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/sbashs-220-gallon-through-wall-build.319549/page-2#post-4004028). Which was also my very fist acro. I'm not sure if this is the one on the right, or left, either way, they were both this size and both died. I soaked this one in bleach overnight to clean it up. Makes a great conversation piece!

And here is my late hallowe'en crab. He was in this shell for about 2 years. He actually killed my other fighting conch, took its shell for about a week, then switched back.

 

[najer]

Sorry to read that, hope things pick up quickly for you!

 

[Flippers4pups]

Tough time to go through. Hopefully things have improved.

 

[sbash]

Sorry to read that, hope things pick up quickly for you!

Thanks! This was a year ago, I started this build thread last August, right in the middle of the latest post. The system was launched in October of 2015, so we're coming up on three years. I just want to get the story down and am trying to catch up so I can post current developments.

Tough time to go through. Hopefully things have improved.

It was super disappointing to have to leave after a few days of seeing the suffering system. I admit, I did worry about things quite a bit between visits home. Once I got my raspberry pi doser up and running, it was a lot better.

The next couple posts will catch us up to today. I only have to cover off how I got rid of the hair algae, and when it came back, lol... I don't think I have added any SPS since then spring of 2017 though. I actually didn't add anything until probably this spring. Anyway, more to come!