1600gal tank - Stand and Water Questions

[bdickens]

I am looking at a tank that is about 1600 gals. We would be putting it under the house, on the concrete pad. I had started doing the research on this, but I'm running out of time for a decision.

Any my apologies up front, I don't plan on putting much of a reef in. I have a nano reef inside the house, so this would be a FO tank.

The tank is 6ft x 12ft x 3ft. So a rough guess says this will be about 20,000 lbs and about 280lbs a sq ft. I don't want to lay it flat on the pad, I'd like to have it up about 3 ft. I've seen the concrete stands on a couple of your projects and presume that if I use the same construction, but add a few legs (say every 3 ft) for a total of 12 legs, that shouldn't exceed the compression strength of the blocks. That seem reasonable ?

Also; I live next to a lagoon with saltwater. But it is has some tanin in it. My plan was to pull the water from the lagoon, filter it with something like purigen, then introduce it. I would filter about 40 gal every 2 days ( 1 day to filter, 1 day to recharge the filter) and it would be a 1% water change every day. This would seem to be enough. Does this seem like a good idea ?

Thanks

 

[spazz]

does this lagoon have a source to the ocean or is it pretty much a pool that is refresehd at high tide? depending on the quality of the water you might be able to run it through a big skimmer than filter it through a 1 micron filter sock. if this is possable then i would say go fir it. but you might want to test the wate with some cheap sps frags and see how they do in that water. you might no be able to use it if the water is too tainted with organic material.

for the tank stand i would consider using steel to build the stand with. whne its finnished you can epoxy coat i 2-3 times to make sure it is sealed very well.
this sounds like a very interesting project.
the other thing you may want to consider is using that lagoon as a cold water supply if it is large enough. you would have to test the tempature of the water during the hotest part of the year to see if it is below 80 deg. if it is below 80 deg you could pump the cloder water through a heat exchanger to cool your tank.

 

[tedu]

What were you planning to do with your waste water ?

 

[bdickens]

Spazz: The lagoon has a permanent connection to the gulf, and the water is pretty decent in terms of consistency ( a bit towards the brackish side after a rainstorm). My wife leads the water quality group on the lagoon (I can identify more phytoplankton than I would like to admit) so I've got the temperature and salinity for a while back. The disolved organics (except for Tanin) are pretty normal. And the critters that live in the lagoon are the ones I will likely stock. So I think the 1 micron mesh might do it. We are near the entrance from a freshwater lake and tanin from the leaves leaches into the water. So I have a clarity problem. Purigen seemed to remove enough to make it work, and it is recyclable.

Stand - I think I agree. Steel would be safer. Got to thinking about hurricane flooding and "lateral" stress. Not a good block application. Welded steel would seem to be it. Thinking 3 inch sq steel.

Cooling - Brilliant. I had missed that. Here I was worried about heat with a big radiator next to me. The water does not get above 83 and even that, not often.


Tedu - Darned good question. I hadn't thought about that at all (scale defeated me) but at 100% water changes every 100 days, thats a lot of water. I suppose i could put it back into the lagoon, but I'll have to think about that.

Thanks

 

[tedu]

Putting it back in the lagoon is probably a bad idea from a pathogen perspective.