Tokie's 280G Build

tokielad · Aug 5, 2017

Hello everybody and welcome to my thread. I created this thread to show off my tank and also keep a journal of the tank and my own progress into the hobby.

Fish have been part of my life since the age of 5 and I have always had a pond or a fishtank since I can remember.

I live on a fishing resort in rural Thailand and getting marine equipment is somewhat of a difficulty for me, so I have had to make certain compromises along the way.

My tank is 2 meters long, 70 cm deep and 75 cm tall (277 gallon water volume) and sits on an oak frame that matches the rest of the furniture in my house.

The filtration system sits on the left side of the tank and flows into a set of 3 filter socks, through porous filter medium and then into the return chamber. From hear it is pumped to the far right of the of the tank, at which point it splits into 2 return flows with adjustable flow rate. 1 nozzle is set to just above the surface lever to provide plenty of surface movement. The other points at a 135 degree angle from vertical to provide good flow through the aquascape. I also have 2 wavemakers, 1 either side of the tank.

The aquascape consists of artificial corals and some dead corals that serve as a place for live rock to eventually culture. I will also be adding in some more porous rock to the area at the back to provide additional strength to my biological filters capabilities.

I know the artificial corals might be considered sacrilegious by some puritans, but I have a very limited space to work with and this is one of the compromises I have made in order to not set myself up for failure.

The sand is local beach sand that I bough from a kid for about $5 and then washed it. I also got the kid to walk out 10 meters or so and collect me a bucket of wet sand to help kick start the critters. The water there is pretty clean and its a long way from any major settlements, so no real risk of pollution.

At this moment in time my tank is on its initial cycle, its about 3 weeks into it and I am just putting half a mackerel's tail in 1 of the filter socks every couple of days to give the bacteria something to feed on.

In the picture below you can see I have enough space for an algae scrubber to help with my phosphates. I made a version 1.0 scrubber to see if it would function in the space provided. It worked but I need to make some improvements to the design and maintenance of it before I put version 2.0 in there.

Thanks for viewing. Looking forward to your input.

jsker · Aug 5, 2017

Great build. I am looking forward to watching you build go forward

Natedogg559 · Aug 5, 2017

I love it. It's almost comical how great it looks, yet so simple compared to identical "real sps" tanks. Well done. Where or what brand are the fake corals?

tokielad · Aug 5, 2017

Thanks for the kind comments.

I got the corals from Jatujak Market in Bangkok, the set consists of 4 large pieces and 2 smaller pieces (the "clay" pots) - The large pieces cost 10,000 Thai Bhat each and the smallers ones cost 4000 each. As far as I know they are custom made, as the guy said he would need to order them if I wanted anything different from the pieces he had in his display tank. So i just cleaned him out and took everything he had in his shop.

Next time I go in, I will try and find some info on his supplier and I will post it in this thread.

Dogtown · Aug 6, 2017

Very nice rock work and I like your focus on strong filtration and PO4 control. Following along!

tokielad · Aug 6, 2017

I have 2 x 18 gallon quarantine tanks cycling right now.

jason g · Aug 7, 2017

Great looking setup.

tokielad · Aug 15, 2017

I got my first fish today.

1 Pinktail Triggerfish - 3 inch
1 Koran Angelfish - 4 inch

After a 3 hour taxi ride they arrived yesterday evening. I put each one in a 10 gallon bucket with the water from the lfs and then dripped another 7.5 gallons of tank water into the buckets over a 4 hour period. At the same time I would be topping up the tank water with replacement pre mixed saltwater I had stored in 6 x 2.5 gallon water bottles.

Both tanks had already been dosed with Chloroquine Phosphate and also the water in the 6 x 2.5 gallon was dosed to match the tank water.

So today is day 1 of 21 days of CP treatment.

I checked my water today and everything is at 0 in terms of ammonia, nitrate, nitrite. I kept 2 bags of bio balls in my display tank for the last week and kept putting some mackrel tails into my filter socks to give my bacteria something to feed on. Those bags of bio balls are now in my QT tank. It looks messy but its helping keep my water clean.

This is about 2-3 hours in and they are looking well

This is them the following morning, they got through the hardest part of the journey. I just hope they make it through QT and into my DT.

Over the past couple of weeks I have come to realise that I bought the complete wrong tank for a saltwater setup and I have so many limitations. So I have decided to continue and use this time and tank to stock most of the fish I want to have in my new tank in my new house once its finished in a year or so.

My new house will be a huge open plan design with a tank thats 4 meters long x 2 meters wide x 1.2 meters tall as one of the main focal points of the design. Complete with an entire room to handle the sump. This is all still in the planning phase and I need to wait for my builder to finish another property he's doing for me before we get the ball rolling on this other design though.

So for now this 280 gallon tank is just going to be my stocking tank for something much bigger.