Long Awaited 150g custom Aquarium

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Husker12181

Well-known member
Joined
Jul 5, 2010
Messages
142
Location
Everett Wa.
Hey guys

This has been a long but very enjoyable process, My wonderful wife gave me a 75gal used setup for Christmas 2009, I loved that tank and needed to upgrade the tank to a 90g since it was bowing. As with all used tanks I spent the next 3 years upgrading this and changing that. I got to the point where it was no longer worth upgrading and started the long process of convincing my wife we needed to just get a whole new setup.

About a year later it had worked because she actually came to me while we where Christmas shopping last November 2013 and said lets talk to the guys at Ocean By Design and get a quote! Mike started out talking to me but soon learned that he should be talking to my wife about what SHE wanted in the tank. I got to thank Mike later because it worked and I picked up my fully custom Tank and sump in February 2014.

Thanks to Boeing for making sure I worked almost every weekend for the last four months it took me a long time to get everything together. As annoying as this was it gave me the chance to really think out how I wanted to put the tank together.

The tank is 48x36x20 Star-fire glass drilled for a closed loop. I decided to go closed loop because I never could get the flow I wanted with power-heads. I also decided to purchase a custom sump. I planned for this sump to have all the stuff I will eventually upgrade to anyways. It has a 10gal auto-top off reservoir, three dosing chambers, three reactors, and a huge skimmer. By getting all of it now it looks clean and I save money in the long run.

Here is the picture Mike from Ocean by Design took in his store.

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Here is my stand I had a friend make it for me it is all steel and I painted it with black rust-oleum paint.

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Here is the tank and sump in my house.

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Here is my son "Helping".

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Here is my finished plumbing. This was harder then I expected as I wanted to leave room for a future 20gal refugium/frag tank which I already have attached to my old tank.

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Got the PM about getting the pics to show up.. figure and an example might help..
take this
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[ I M G ]http://www.reeffrontiers.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=45141&d=1397931634[ / I M G ]
[ I M G ]http://www.reeffrontiers.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=45142&d=1397931724[ / I M G ]
[ I M G ]http://www.reeffrontiers.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=45143&d=1397931775[ / I M G ]
[ I M G ]http://www.reeffrontiers.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=45144&d=1397931962[ / I M G ]
and remove the ALL the spaces in the image tag part in brackets... and you get whats below

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Pretty!!! OBD is really amping up those air powered skimmers now. I would love to hear how it works for you.
 
My stand is 32 inches high. All steel it was welded by a family friend who has a welding business in south Seattle I can't remember the name of his company off hand but if anyone wants to know I can find out.
 
Update: I found out I had a couple plumbing issues and needed to replumb the closed loop system. After I redid the plumbing, I realized I had over done it with the lock line and decided to cut my outflow in half. This created waaay better flow and made it so my rocks didn't look like black Octopuses. I will post more pictures as I get them.
 
I had the whole tank running and it worked great the flow from the closed loop was perfect. I am actually really impressed with the sump everything is really well organized the auto-top off test worked great, the media chambers all flowed well. The only issue I had with any of it was that the caps all leaked but was easily fixed after some slight adjustment, Honestly that probably was due to transportation and me not closing the lids properly. I have not run the protein skimmer, The instructions are to let it sit in saltwater 24hrs and I would rather play it on the safe side before I get a chance to use it. All in all I am very happy with the complete all in one of the sump.

I turned off my pumps for the night to wake up to half my tank draining on the floor. I originally thought it was a siphon issue so I tweaked the input plumping but it didn't fix the problem. I noticed at one point that my overflow was draining even when I had broke the siphon. What I found was that the seal had broke between the overflow and the Glass at the wall about halfway down. This could have been done in transport or a manufacturing flaw. But it was easily fixed using an aquarium safe silicone and I decided to add a bead around the whole thing to prevent a future issue it is now water tight.

After cleaning up a lot of water (thankfully it was freshwater) I decided I was going to put a hole in my floor with drainage to my crawlspace. I am currently in the process of working on that and needed to drain everything including the sump to be able to get to the carpet that is underneath. I am lucky that there is clean-out cap for the sewer directly under the tank and I might be able to attach to that to just send any overflowing water straight into the sewer.

Again this process is going really slow right now as Boeing has a Overtime designation policy that has made it very difficult to get the time to work on everything.
 
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