360 gallon logistical nightmare and no spare time!

[nsamouroux]

Oh, I see what you're saying now: get the cans (most likely the Rubbermaid Brute models?) only to make the first batch of water and then return them. Sorry, was under the effects of sleep deprivation and wasn't reading it correctly . Thanks, I didn't think of that! It'll probably be my best option if I can't find anything permanent before the weekend. I've got a couple of submersible pumps that I could use to dump them into the sump as the return pumps that water up to the display .

 

[nsamouroux]

Soooo... Anyone available at some point this weekend in Tacoma to help move this sucker? It's doable with two people if necessary, but three is optimal. It only weighs about 300 lbs, I've moved it a few times alone with some supporting devices on the other end but that won't work to get it into the house I need the tank moved into the house so I can start breaking down the 100 gallon setup and move it out of the way to complete the plumbing between the sump and the tank.

 

[nsamouroux]

Woohoo! It's in the house now! (and taking up over half of my living room area... yikes). Thanks to Menace78 and his brother for helping out! I'm going to drain the 100 gallon "nano" tank and move it to a different wall so I can put the new tank in it's place and connect all of the plumbing. Once the new tank is all hooked up, filled with water, and the sand calms down I'll transfer everything over from the 100 gallon and then get rid of it

This was such a big room before!

And now I can't even see my TV

Plumbing for drains and return manifold:

Close-ups of return manifold, one return on each side of the tank using 1" schedule 80 bulkheads. I'll have a street 90* fitting on each bulkhead pointed diagonally across to the front of the tank to provide more surface agitation:

 

[nsamouroux]

Plumbing connections in place where the new tank will sit for the basement sump:

The wall where the new system will sit and the "nano" tank that I have to get out of the way:

Side-by-side:

 

[nsamouroux]

Well, that wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be... I drained about 3/4 of the water out of the 100 gallon setup into a 150 gallon rubbermaid tub and then moved it stand and all over to the adjacent wall. I then plugged the power strips back in, pumped all the water back into the tank and turned everything back on. Took about 30 minutes total, and everything is opened back up and looking good. I decided to get everything set up now so that I could add a new electrical line (three 15amp GFI duplex outlets under the tank to run powerheads and ballasts, the rest of the equipment is in the basement ) and test all the plumbing dry.

It all connects up, this sucker is ready for water now! Tomorrow after work I'm going to be washing out the 340 lbs of Marco Rocks aragonite sand and adding it to the tank, then will pump the contents of the sump (pre-mixed saltwater) up to the display. I'll start re-filling the sump then with RO/DI and mix more salt into it, then when it's done I'll pump half of it back up to the tank. Once that's done, and once the sand settles down I'll transfer the contents of the 100 gallon tank and pump over all of the water in it to fill the rest of the 360 gallon display. I will not be re-using the sand from my 100g in the new tank, although it might become a remote DSB or a substrate in my 55 gallon refugium. After that, everything will be up and running! Depending on my work schedule, this should be done by next weekend

And a pic of the rugrat standing between the two tanks for a size comparison. The 100 gallon tank is 60" long:

 

[nsamouroux]

Ok, last pictures of the day, I promise! The plumbing is all connected, the new tank is in position, all the electrical is connected, and my RO/DI unit is WAY too damn slow! (only 100 gpd ). The tank is perfectly level with about 100 gallons of saltwater in it, and the floor joists show no deflection / settling at all with the massive support beam I used directly below the front of the aquarium.

This is the return and drain plumbing all connected together with unions for easy of maintenance. I can crawl underneath the stand and reach upwards to fiddle with ball valves, disconnect plumbing, etc.

Feeling good about things, I decided to go ahead and wet-test the plumbing and tank, which basically boiled down to me turning on all the circuit breakers, choking the return pump's output ball valve about halfway, flipping the switch, and running like heck back upstairs to frantically watch with a high power flashlights for leaks. Thankfully my mediocre plumbing skills came through for me and all of the glued joints held, and all of the threaded fittings were leak-free. I won't be able to test the Beananimal drain system (for those of you who read Reef Central) until I make a LOT more water, but that should only take a couple more days. I snapped a few pics of the return flow at 1/2 strength:

I didn't think to take any pics of it, but I trimmed down the street-90* fittings that I used for the return ports by cutting off the end of the fitting right at the threads. Effectively it's a straight fitting right now with a large hole in the side, which I believe should make the output flow fan out rather than blasting the heck out of everything in it's path with 3,000 gph of water.

After sending about 40 gallons to the display tank at 1/2 power, I decided to go ahead and go for broke and open it up all the way. Sort of hard to tell from the pics (and since the return nozzles fan out the water so much), but the water flow is VERY strong. I can't wait to see what it looks like when the tank is full! I drained the 150 gallon rubbermaid sump from 2/3 to almost empty in as much time as it took to run upstairs, take two photos, and run back downstairs to shut off the return pump before it started sucking air. Probably 3 minutes total

Since things were going well to that point, I figured I might as well take the Koralia Magnum 8 powerheads out of their boxes and give them a whirl. One powerhead is currently operating in my 100 gallon tank, so I only have three running in the big tank:

Underwater:

I can't really express how much I like these Koralia pumps... These Magnum 8s might even be too strong for this tank . I'll know better once it's full and I can see how things go with the sand. As it is with about 120 gallons in the display (about 8" deep?) the water looks like a frothing / boiling vortex of destruction. I'm very happy with the pumps, I have them sitting about 1" below the water surface currently, and they're not sucking in any air at ALL. Looks like the problems I always had with Koralia 3/4 pumps and vortexes sucking in air are a thing of the past with the Magnum line, they're almost dead silent (just a slight humming noise, can barely hear it over my 100 gallon display's cooling fan), and they're pushing a LOT of water. I'm confident that I won't have any dead spots whatsoever with the open rockwork that I have planned, these powerheads are covering the entire tank (have some debris in the tank and it's not settling anywhere) and I don't even have all four of them running. We'll see how my luck holds out with the Marco Rocks sand...

 

[Saltyfish]

I run 3 K7's on my 300 gallon and I might change them out to K6. I am just trying to give them 6 to 8 months before I do that. I noticed with the K4's after about 6 months it seemed like they did not push as much water but still a great deal.

My K7's (two at top and one in middle) still blow certain spot of sand around, which makes no sense to me. I have tried over and over to figure out which one was causing the sand to move in that area and I finally gave up

Well it looks great keep up the great work. On a side note depending on how much water you have from your 150 gallon you might want to wait a little bit before moving everything over.

In the 150 do a 15% to 25% water change every other day putting the old water into the new tank. If you put 150 gallons into your 300+ gallon system it might just be like starting all over again.

 

[Chichas01]

Looks really great! I thought I recognized that overflow setup. One of the things from that design that I can remember was that there was some concern/criticism with running too much flow through the sump and it's effect on not allowing enough time for the water to get cleaned up by the skimmer, filter media, etc. Not that I'm criticising I thought BeanAnimal had a great setup. Will you be running it in the same high flow manner?

 

[nsamouroux]

I don't really have any concerns of re-cycling with using the water out of my 100 gallon setup, since I'll be using all of the rock from it anyways. On the other hand, that tank is long overdue for a water change, so I am almost better off just making an extra 80-100 gallons of new saltwater... In the grand scheme of things another 100 gallons of fresh RO/DI is only an extra day and I won't have to worry about depleted trace elements in the old water.

The tank / sump will be fairly high flow, if based on gallons per hour anyways, but I'm going to be using a large downdraft or beckett skimmer. In terms of total turnover, I'll only have about 6x system turnover per hour going through the sump. Total system volume right now between sump and tank is 500 gallons (not counting displaced volume of 250 lbs rock / and 2" sand bed) and I will be adding a 55 gallon refugium later on. The pump is rated for 5500 gph at 5'; I've got at least 12' of head pressure on it (10' vertical run plus the 90* fittings on the return manifold) so I'm probably only getting 2500-3000 gph out of it at the display. Beananimal if I remember correctly had the plumbing set up on a much smaller tank (50-ish gallon?) and was using 1" bulkheads w/ 1.5" drain plumbing and was sending 2,000 gph through it. All of my plumbing is 1.5" including the schedule 80 bulkheads so I believe it can handle much more than I'll running through it I had originally planned on using a 300 gallon rubbermaid stock tank for a sump, but that ended up being a bit excessive and didn't really serve any purpose since I'll have a seperate refugium. I probably could have gotten away with a 100 gallon sump, but I found a great deal on an unused 150 gallon stock tank so ended up buying it instead.

When planning my skimmer, I didn't take the sump volume into account when matching processing capacity to tank size (oops) so I bought an ETSS 600 and had plans to modify it into the specs of the ETSS 900 (taller downdraft tube is the only difference between them) which would have been able to handle the 360 gallon display. Of course I'll have roughly 600 gallons in the system, so that won't really be adequate! I'm currently looking into buying a larger beckett skimmer, but might end up building something along the lines of Matts125's dual stack beckett that he put together for Salty there. I'll probably make a single tower beckett / downdraft with two or four mixing towers similar to an ETSS 1400. I could use my ETSS 600 as a base for it and just add some extra plumbing for the towers and probably extend the bubble tower a foot or so. I won't be able to come anywhere close to the craftsmanship the Matt / Salty monsterskimmer, but I can make one that at least holds water. It'll be in the basement, so it doesn't have to be pretty! :lol:

 

[nsamouroux]

Well, I had to tinker with the plumbing a bit (had a few drip leaks at the bulkheads) but got everything fixed and tightened down. I also had to cut down my overflow box 1" because the operating water level was too high (1/4" away from top panel of tank) so that when the mega-powerheads were running the rippling surface currents would splash against the top panel of the tank and run over the edge onto the floor if the particular wave was strong enough. After cutting down the overflow box with my table saw the water level is now 1.5" from the top panel which gives me plenty of room for 13,000 gph worth of flow from the powerheads and 3500 from the return pump :badgrin:

I picked up the two additional Icecap 250w halide ballasts I needed to complete my 4-lamp setup. Now I will have my dual 400w hamilton ballast and the pair of 250w Icecap ballasts running XM 20k bulbs. Ahhh, bliss!

The water is still extremely cloudy... Haven't managed to find a sub-100 micron filter sock yet locally. I'm currently looking into a filter bag setup built for Shop Vacs that converts them into a drywall vacuum. These filters are about 20 micron and should be reef safe according to the specs, so I'll probably pick two of them up and start filtering out all of this silt from the gobs of aragonite sand. Even with 5x per 40 lb box rinsing it still turned the tank and sump into a milkshake. I've got a piece of live rock, a 1/2 cup of live sand from my old reef tank, and some fish food cubes here and there to induce some bacterial growth which should help settle the sand down while I filter out the silt / fine particulate matter.

Also, I realized that I have to add vertical supports to the stand as it is bowing 1/8" on the 8' length (front and back). The stand and tank remain perfectly level, but there is a small gap between the middle support and corner supports. I'll be picking up four more 1.5" x 1/8" wall steel square tubing and use a bottle jack to raise the sagging spans and further brace them. I'll then coat the edges with some industrial cold weld (JB weld or similar) which should be more than strong enough for just a vertical support with no shear / side pressure on it.

 

[nsamouroux]

Woohoo! I just did the math and realized that I'm at 45-47x tank turnover and only using 350-375 watts of power! This is excellent, because the 600 gallons of RO/DI water and 1300 watts of halide lighting will probably be the death of me when the utility bill comes

 

[nsamouroux]

Ahhh. Isn't it beautiful with that crystal clear water? .

Doesn't really look like it, but this is about 17,000 gallons per hour worth of flow running through the tank in this pic.

Overflow box in operation at normal water level. It has about 3" more water depth to go before the emergency full siphon drain (center drain) starts making enough noise to wake the dead. Who needs water level alarms when I can hear this thing sucking in air from 20' away from my house?

Side shot of overflow (durso drain pipe shown closest to camera, which is secondary to the main drain on the far right side which is a full siphon. Drain in the center is an upturned emergency full siphon)

Normal operating water level 1.5" from the inside of the top panel to accomodate the rogue waves from the Koralia Magnum 8 powerheads

I'll need to reinforce the stand with four new vertical steel supports (1.5" square tube) but that should be done this weekend and then all I have left to do is run some filter socks to get rid of all this sediment / silt that's clouding up the tank, then connect the lighting to the canopy and move everything over from the 100 gallon tank and some extra rock out of my stock tank sump. It lives!!

 

[roscoe]

Looking great bro!!

 

[nsamouroux]

Thanks! I just got back from picking up the square steel tube from the only steel supply store in Western WA that is open on the weekends. I'll have to rig up a post / platform for my hydraulic jack to raise the sagging beams, put the new reinforcements under them, then slowly lower it back down. Once it's solidly in place I'll line the joints with JB weld cold weld epoxy stuff to hold it in place. I figure if my truck jack can pick up my truck for a tire change it can lift a section of the stand under full load enough to slip a support in since the tank only weighs about 2/3 what my pickup weighs :lol:. I didn't want to spend $200 on stainless steel square tube to match the material in my stand, so I got normal steel and will just coat it with enamel appliance paint / rustoleum to keep it from rusting.

I also found out that polyester felt can be purchased in large sheets for about $10, so I'm going to make a buttload of filter socks to get rid of all the silt Everything should be done in a day or two and ready for rock / fishies!

 

[fatboyt123]

your not going to be putting the fish in anytime soon though are you?

 

[roscoe]

Be carefull to not raise it up to high and put stress on the other end of the tank.

 

[nsamouroux]

I only need to raise it about 1/4" or so on each sagging span to get the supports under it, shouldn't cause any problems. As soon as I put together these filter socks and get the water cleared up, then I'll transfer the live rock, fish, and coral out of the 100 gallon tank. There's no need to cycle a setup when using rock exclusively from an established system

 

[nsamouroux]

I was feeling somewhat motivated (or bored) last night so I hauled out the hydraulic 2-ton jack for my truck and put in the additional braces. Everything worked out fine, I put a layer of JB weld between the new supports and the sagging spans, and then coated the outside of the joints with another layer to hold them in place. Everything is still level, and there's no longer any gap / sag in the unsupported spans. I now have a vertical 1.5" steel square brace (1/8" wall) every two feet along the front / back of the stand.

I also hauled out my old Magnum 350 canister filter and bought some micron cartridges for it to turn it into a water polisher. The Magnum plus the ETSS skimmer are helping get rid of the silt, but it'll probably take a few more days. Blah.

 

[nsamouroux]

Captain's Oversize Reef Tank Log: Day Four

Water still cloudy. May have been a bad idea to run 17,000 gallons per hour over 340 lbs of sugar-grain aragonite sand. Filter socks not fine enough. Magnum canister with micron polishing filter clogging every 15 minutes. Parrot making squorking noises at me, appears to be mocking my efforts to clean the water without just flushing it and starting over. Pondering recipe for Parrot Buffalo Wings for the next football game.

I took a few pics of the new supports added to the stand

Before:

And after:

Price for four 27" long 1.5" square steel tubes (1/8" wall) = $24
Price for industrial strength cold weld to make sure they don't go anywhere = $10
Price for band-aids to keep my crushed finger from bleeding everywhere = $1.00 and counting

Knowing I'm not going to have a Noah-esque flood in my living room due to a sagging stand with 5,000 lbs of reef on top of it? Damned near priceless :badgrin:

 

[Saltyfish]

Hey you are to put water in the tank not Milk!

Stand looks great!