540 build thread

D

DrDNA

New member
I've never done a build thread before but I might just do one for my new project. Last summer I bought a used 540g truvu tank for about $600. The top seam had mostly separated but all the others looked fine. Anyway it's been quite a journey since last summer and I'm gonna add some pics and narrative as I find the older pics on my phone!
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Had a steel stand made and then powder coated in copper vein

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And bought a 160g one piece sump from Pentair

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Had a steel stand made and then powder coated in copper vein

68a12434840dfba6c1d6399007bdbbc5.jpg
68700a8f6d776654459b64aa2dbb1280.jpg


And bought a 160g one piece sump from Pentair

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988827a5bbaca3e105a6691e6347df61.jpg
7b111fea3ad7241e3be277970188f545.jpg


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So the tank was also pretty badly scratched inside, not unexpected for a used and abused acrylic tank. I probably spent about an hour a day for a few weeks with a palm sander and buffing compounds. I ended up using a palm sander and started with 400 grit sanding discs, then moved up to 800, 1500, and finally 2000 grit. I decided to sponge down the inside between each round of sanding. Following that, I think I did 3 rounds of buffing with "heavy scratch remover " and 2 or 3 rounds of fine scratch remover. It still has areas that could use more work but I just over the whole buffing and sanding thing! As mentioned earlier, the top seam had separated. I ended up using 3/4" square bar stock to reinforce the inside top seam. I ended up needing to use several large furniture clamps to make everything line up and get a good bond.

Here are some pics of the endless sanding and buffing process:

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"Moving day" finally arrived and fortunately I had a lot of help from our great bunch of local reef nuts! Moving it was a bit tricky but with furniture dollies and some sawhorses we got it in to place!

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I put a horse stall mat under the stand to protect the flagstone floor and then levelled the tank and stand with a bunch of composite door shims.

Since the floor is actually a wood deck, I have since slithered up under the deck and added some 4x6s and Ellis mini screw jacks for added support

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I've thought a lot about filtration and skimmers etc and decided to try and keep this one as simple as possible. My current skimmer on my 300 is an older deltec ap1004 that is getting harder to find parts for, plus the replacement needle wheels run $100-200 each and it has three of them. I really like this skimmer but it's getting harder to get parts for, uses 3 eheim pumps plus an iwaki wmd30 so it's an energy hog. After a lot of debating I decided to go old-school with a big ol' venturi skimmer and ended up getting a Lifereef VS3-72". I know it's "old" technology but use of one pump vs 4 and no moving parts other than the feed pump sealed the deal for me. Plus Lifereefs stuff are rock solid.

Here it is next to the tank

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Lighting is another big decision to make on such a project. The blue or 20k led spotlight thing has grown on me since I have a few kessils on my 300 (along with the galaxyhydro 165w chinese s-boxes). I actually stumbled into a great deal on two used 120w ecoxotic cannons on ebay that a public aquarium only used for a few months. These aren't dimmable so I looked at some other options that weren't really expensive but could do dusk and dawn. Ended up getting four of the aquatic life Halo units off Amazon.

Here is one of the ecoxotic fixtures:

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And one turned on:

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bfliflet said:
Awesome. Is this going to be a reef tank? Scratch that. Now I see your post on lighting.
Click to expand...
Fish mostly, with a few lps and anemones. I'm keeping my 300 for higher light "sticks " and will move my bigger fish to the new tank

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Here are a couple more pics. Have a couple hundred pounds of Marco rock and a 50 pound piece of dry branch rock from BRS. Some of the marco rock was from an older tank of mine. It was sun dried and then soaked overnight in diluted muriatic acid and rinsed and dried again.

Once the tank finishes filling, I'll probably just let it run for a month or so with the lights off. Probably will use lanthanum to precipitate out the phosphates that leach out instead of doing a bunch of water changes

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