New build, recap of old build and lessons learned

[seattlereef]

I’ve sold my old house and bought a new one. I thought I would give a summary of my old system that I’ll be taking apart and will be updating the thread with a the story for my new build that I’m working with Tim at Barrier Reef on.

The Story
The tank was started about 4 years ago and was my first time running a Marine setup. Instead of going small and upgrading over time I decided to go with Med/Large and go for broke. I utilized a lot of advice from the LFS, Reef Frontiers and Reef Central. This thread is an attempt to give back to the community by talking about what went well for me and some lessons learned.

The Display
My old tank was built by CFI and was 60x25x24 Acrylic around 150 gallons. I had the existing cabinets modified to accommodate the tank and then penetrated the garage wall where all the filtration was. Overall been happy with this but you do get scratches on acrylic and with Acrylic yes you can in theory buff it out but I never did. I thought I was being pretty careful not allowing anyone but myself to clean it but scratches happen. It was never so bad that anyone but me really noticed but my next build will be glass. Which I know is harder but if you get a scratch is permanent but given I never sanded/buffed out will probably be about the same to me.

The Lighting
I started with 3 cheapo Chinese LED specials to start. One of the lights failed after about 6 months and decided to get an Eotech Gen 1 Radion. After running with this for another 6 months I decided to buy 2 additional Radion’s and at the time Gen 2 was the hotness and swap out the cheap ones. I’ve been running this since and have had no problems and even picked up a Reeflink. The reeflink is very much a nice to have. I hardly ever use it to modify things on the fly but its great for when I want to program a new schedule. In retrospect not sure it was worth the premium to have wireless control of the lights.



The Garage aka Fish Room
I decided to put all the life support in the garage for a couple of reasons. Number 1 wanted to isolate the noise from the main living area. Secondarily thought it would make WC etc. easier. Doing this is by far the best decision I made. By having this in the garage I didn’t have to worry about making a mess during water changes, gave me plenty of room to tinker and allowed me to make a mess in an acceptable portion of the house and gave me plenty of room to expand. I seriously doubt I would have kept with the hobby without that and I know my wife would not have allowed me to keep it. Also allowed me to make additions such as ozone, calcium reactor, both carbon and gfo reactors, AWC via Neptune DOS. I really have no idea how you would get all of this under a tank.

I built a two tier stand with some lumber and utilized a pair of 55 gallon tanks that I got from the $1 per gallon Petco sales. I also insulated the stand with some rigid insulation for the winter.

Here is the upper

Here I originally wanted to setup an Algae Turf scrubber on the left side and on the right side a refugium. In the end I took down the algae turf scrubber because it never worked the way I wanted and was causing quite a bit of salt creep. I ended up putting a power head in the right section to tumble cheato and dragons breath algae.

Here is the lower

Here is the lower sump which contains the filter sock, skimmer, pumps, ATO and kalkwasser reactor

Low Lights
Took me awhile to learn this lessons but Quarantine is a must. Bypassing this has caused ICK, more ICK, flatworm infestation, Monti eating montiporia. In addition my survival rate of corals/inverts and fish has gone from 10-20% to 80-90%. A side effect of always QT any additions it has slowed my roll which has allowed me to gradually increase bio load which I believe has greatly increased the stability of my system. I know that some people say it will stress the animals out but if you’re keeping them there for a min of 30 days that’s enough time to allow any stress to pass and if they are not nice and fat in the QT with little to no competition for food they won’t get there in the display. I know you always want to have your newest addition in the main tank but you are doing yourself and the animals that you are keeping a disservice by not doing this.

While I was enjoying the wonderful sun and breeze in Kauai my home suffered a power outage. I had a neighbor checking on the tank and they let me know that it was out but told them to not worry about it unless it wasn’t back on in the morning. Well in the morning the power was back on but 90% of my livestock was gone. Despite having a generator by not having instructions on how to get everything going without me it did me no good.

Key Lessons For me to carry forward:

1. NOTHING good goes fast, NOTHING.
2. Having filtration being remote is the best possible thing for me. Allowed me to experiment and identify equipment / strategies that worked for me
3. Loved having a Neptune APEX for automation
4. LED lighting all day all the time
5. Love AWC via DOS, since I’ve done this my stability has gone up and my time spent on maintaince has gone down.
6. A generator is a must. And having someone who can hook it up when your on vacation too.

 

[1guydude]

U luv AWC (auto water changes?) Via DOS? Wats DOS? I'm sry.
Kool story thxs for the share. BRA is great. Looking forward to ur build.
D

 

[seattlereef]

AWC = Auto Water Change. DOS is a doser from Neptune, its dual head and once you calibrate you just tell it to change 3 gallons or whatever works for you and it goes. I've been running for about 2 months now and my salinity has stayed rock solid (so no real drift for addition vs subtraction).

 

[seattlereef]

The new tank will be located in the family room with the filtration located remotely in a portion of the garage that I will carve out a fish room. The good news is there is plenty of room in the crawl space for me to make the runs. The tank will be 65x26x30 euro-braced ~220 gallons, setup as a two sided peninsula style with 1/2 glass and starfire on the front and right sides. The left side will hold an exterior overflow which I'll plumb with dual 1-1/2 drains setup Herbie style. It will be drilled for 6 returns through the top euro-braces but I'm currently only planning on using two of the return holes and see how the flow looks. The run to the garage will be around 15-20 feet with about a two foot drop to prevent air getting caught in the return siphon. In addition I think by having a dual pump return I can have the first one turn on about a minute before the second to help stabalize the drain before pushing the entire flow through it. The return head pressure is going to be about 90" so trying to decide between dual Mag 18 or 24's.

Here is the tank:

There is around ~45 jog in the wall, my plan is to use this space to house the overflow box and hide all of the plumbing which will be hidden in the left cabinet and my plan is to open up the drywall and drop a total of 3 1-1/2 inch pipes two for drains one for any cables, 2 1 inch pipes for the returns. The reason for running two returns is I want to run two display return pumps for fault tolerance.

Here is a picture of the wall

For the cabinet the area above the tank I will have about 16" of clearance with an internal shelf above that will be used for storage. I will be also venting the top of the cabinet above with a pair of 12x8 vents, my plan is to just use regular floor registers in a hole that will be cut in the cabinet. The primary reason for the vents are for heat issues. Given that I'll be running LED's not as much as a worry as with MH's but my current setup dosen't have this and in the summer you can hear the fans on the lights go into over drive. The tank itself will have a plexiglass cover to contain the humidity. This is how I have things setup today and I get enough oxygenation from the sump and helps make sure I don't damage the cabinets with the humidity. The con of this is that in a power outage siutation there is not enough gas exchange for the fish. I may convert to a mesh top but then have to worry about the humidity and may need to suppliment the passive air exchange with some fans. So not 100% locked on the mesh vs plexiglass cover

The tank will be sitting at bar level since it will be next to the kitchen bar and for visual reasons though it would be nice for them to be at the same level.

Here is the cabinet design

 

[seakingaquariums]

This looks to be a great build I hope you continue to update the thread each step of the way !

 

[seattlereef]

Quick update. The cabinet is in and painted, the tank is in, the plumbing is done, the fish room "bones" are built. The sump is in and in progress of plumbing the refugium. Of course during the leak test some of my plumbing joints are not water tight so had to redo a couple of joints no big deal. In addition insulated the return and drain lines under the house 4 runs of 1 1/2 pipe at 16 ft, times 4 (2 return, 2 drain). During the water test tuned the herbie drain and it was nice and quiet was a little worried because the return has to go up 5 inches to go over the sump but everything works great.

Unfortunately my sump isn't big enough to handle the back siphon from the dual return lines, drain, external skimmer and lines to the separate refugium. So having Jason/CFI build me a ~100 gallon sump which is what I really wanted but was trying to get away with reusing my old DYI 55 gallon sump.

Over the last 2 days I've filled it with RODI and added the salt. Hopefully tonight I'll add the sand and live rock that I've been cooking for the past month.

Fishroom/Sump
https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=A4B297DF7657EF83!296837&authkey=!AOyHOPmCj6otslo&v=3&ithint=photo%2cjpg

Tank
https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=A4B297DF7657EF83!296272&authkey=!ABEsZ73hc24b-OM&v=3&ithint=photo%2cjpg

 

[Pepcrylic]

I have always said " You dont know how you want to run your reef, until you have already ran one" Great planing. Need to see some pics. Your links dont work

 

[NanaReefer]

Great read! Thank you for taking the time to share this with us

 

[seattlereef]

Wow time flies! I finally got most things up and running. All of my fish and corals have been moved out of the garage into the display tank. I got my new Sump from CFI all hooked up and about 90% of the gear up and running.

I had about 3 weeks where I had the tank running off one pump and the small sump. This allowed me to get the sand and rock wet and go through the cycle. I used Dr Tim's One and Only to speed up the cycle.

When I got my sump from Jason I had to "shut" down the fish room for about a week so that I could pull out the old sump and slide in the new one. This required me to re-pipe the return and drains into the sump. My old sump was two inches too tall so the plumbing had to go up and over. With the new sump its shallower so I could dump directly in. To keep the tank up and running I had the display running with a simple heater and some powerheads but nothing running into the fish room. While I was working on the pipe's I noticed some salt creep from slow leaks from some of my joints. In the past I hadn't had this much trouble and I think the issue was with the PVC solvent I used. I tried the "brown" pvc solvent which didn't seem to bond as well. I switched over to the normal purple and clear solvent/primer and all my joints have been tight.

Once I had the new sump in place and plumbed I had a couple of days making some new water to fill it up. The thing is a monster a 100 gallons in its self. Once I turned the pumps back on I immediately noticed a "ripe" smell. The water in the pipes had gotten cold and some die off in there which caused another mini cycle as the ammonia was eaten up. So another week.

I first introduced my clown fish pair and some zoa's. Within a day noticed an ammonia spike as the tank got use to the bio load and the daily feedings. Next I moved the live rock I had in my holding tank and the rest of my stock list. I really should have done this slower but wanted to get everything up and running in time for the Barrier sale. I was really worried about the Rose bubbles that had its feet deep into the rock and the rock being too big to fit in a bucket to acclimate so moved them straight over. They were unhappy for about a day but made a full recovery.

Current Stock
2 Clownfish
1 Leopard Wrasse
1 Yellow Corris Wrasse
1 Yellow Spot Rabbit fish
1 Quixo Parrot fish (my favorite!)
1 Citron Goby
1 Algae Blenny
1 Purple tank (he's in my refugium right now... story later)

Inverts
2 Peppermint shrimp
1 cleaner shrimp
A handful of turbo snails, Cerith Snails, Astrea Snails
1 Money Cowrie
1 Scarlet Hermit crab
10 rose bubble anenomies

 

[seattlereef]

Now some pics

Fish room with old sump


I need to get some new pictures of the fish room stay tuned.

Now the money shots.

Front view of tank:


Side view of tank:

 

[seattlereef]

I currently have the purple tang sitting in the refugium. The reason for this is I would like to add a Redsea Sailfin Tang and a Achilles Tang which I need to get and QT and don't want him setting up his territory and going crazy on the new additions. Hopefully I can pick these guys at Barrier this week. Although I am somewhat tempted to just move him in early since even if I pick them up it will be 4 weeks of QT before they get moved over.

Which touches on my other issue. I originally had planed to setup two QT tanks in the fish room but the final dimensions meant that I couldn't fit two 55 gallon QT's. I wanted the large one because of the desire to have some tangs not be too tight. In the future I might switch to two smaller ones. I have one 55 gallon setup in the fish room and the other 55 gallon empty in the garage. With the sale I would like to have one for fish and a second for inverts/corals. But thinking of a compromise where I put the fish/corals/inverts in the one QT and pray for no ICK and if I do get it setup the second QT to move the non fish to for the fallow period and to treat the fish.

The simple thing would be to just either get inverts or get the fish... but I'm impatient... which lead to ICK outbreaks in the past.

I have an issue with Aptasia on some of the rocks and my peppermint's haven't been going after so what I should do is just get some more peppermints, beef up my cleanup crew etc. This way I can keep ahead of any algae outbreak that will occur and make sure the aptasia doesn't get out of hand but I have Prince (the purple tang) sitting in the refugium.

Whats the communities thoughts?

 

[seattlereef]

For my next steps I need to setup:

1) My AWC system. My plan is to have it pull in new water, push the old water to my QT, and pull from my QT and push it down my drain. That way my param's of my QT should be really close to my display.
2) Setup my UV system. Haven't worried about this in the short term.
3) Setup my Ozone system. Again haven't worried in the short term
4) Setup my leak detectors in the fish room.
5) I installed a bathroom fan in the fish room to control the humidity but haven't run the pipe outside yet. This a time/weather issue. I've noticed condensation in my garage windows so know I need to do this soon.
6) Put a door on the fish room to keep the humidity in and secondarly so that heat that escapes from the sump stays in one room.
7) Setup my web cams so that I can trouble shoot when I'm away and secondarly watch my tank from the office

 

[NanaReefer]

Whole lotta love right there!! Beautiful setup!

 

[seattlereef]

Thanks Nana!