20L frag tank build

TavisB

Pastafarian
I'm putting together a 20L frag tank thats going to share a 30gal sump with my 46 bow display.

I practiced drilling on an old scratched 15 gal

drilling4.jpg


Came out good so I drilled the new 20

20drilled.jpg


Next up...paint the back/bottom of the tank and weld up a rig to hold the lighting...
 
looks good I did the same thing. make sure you use proper bulkheade and not those DIY ones made from PVC adaptors, I used the Latter and cracked the tank when I screwed them down, I only tightened it hand tight. good luck.
 
This rickety looking thing is going to hold up the light fixture.

lightrig.jpg


Now that I'm done welding/grinding, I can start painting.
 
Looks good. I have been talking myself in to starting a dedicated frag tank, maybe a 20g long like that would work good in the space I have.
 
Got the plumbing pretty much finished. Tank has some water in it. Guess I'm done for the night, gotta wait for the glue and paint to dry then Ill finish filling her up and hook up the return pump then I'm pretty much done! :)

fragtank2.jpg
 
Fired up the return pump and discovered a few things (luckily not a leak).

1. The drain is noisy

2. I had to move the return pump to the other side of the sump (the same side where it drains). There was too much flow thru the fuge the original way.

So I'm going to have to play around with the drain plumbing a bit more to get it where I want it.
 
figured out that the noise at the top of the drain was because of one to many holes in a pvc cap. Getting a lot of bubbles (and corresponding noise) at the sump end of the drain though.
 
I got rid of 99% of the bubbles in the sump thru the use of a Rube Goldberg-like set of PVC pipe bubble trap apparatii...I don't even want to post a pic...its crazy :p

Doing some logging of temp changes with the additional pump/lighting before I call it done. Stay tuned...
 
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10511885#post10511885 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by b0bby1
might have missed it, but what is your lighting system?

Thanks, guess I forgot to mention the lighting :)

Its a 250W XM10K SE bulb.
 
Ok, here's what I have going on with the temperature:

temps1.png


The T5's are running 11:30 am to 11:30 pm. MH ran from 3 pm to 10 pm.

I wired up a 120mm DC fan blowing down on the sump and put it on a timer to run from 11am to 11pm . I'll try to check the temps tomorrow as much as I can and see if it helps. Adding a fan really helped even out the temperture swings on my nano...hope I get the same results here.
 
Yeah, I just discovered that my tank was a little over ninety when my biggest acro colony started to bleach. I put a pedestal fan on the display and that took care of the problem.
 
Had some issues today because of a power outage :( so I didn't get to log the temps with the fan going. I'll try again tomorrow.

Moved some of my frags and some extra live rock into the tank yesterday, I'll put up some new pics soon.
 
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