Okay, so back for more fun!
The goal was simple. Move the 60 cube from SE WI to downtown Atlanta. Pre-planning took a HUGE role in this and made things go off pretty well. In the pre-planning, I had a new stand made from 80/20 extruded aluminum, topped with granite and then skinned with painted wood (which we will snazz up a bit later).
The plan in a nutshell was to take place over the 3 day weekend of the 4th and was to tear down the tank on Friday, load all of the non-living things in the rental van on Fri, load the livestock into the van on Sat morn ~3:30 and make a 4:00am start, driving straight through to Atlanta, unloading and doing partial setup Sat night, then finishing up on Sun/Mon.
All went
mostly as planned.
Here's a shot of the start, tank/stand/sump:
And of course, the all important stats on what we've got:
Marineland 60 cube Reef Ready
~20 gal acrylic sump
Vertex IN-80 skimmer modded with Tunze Hydrofoamer pump
ATI 8x24 Powermodule T5 HO lights
Eheim canister filter
Neptune Apex Controller (w/temp/ph x2/ato/moon lights, etc etc etc)
K2R CA reactor
Vortech MP-40W Powerhead
And of course a few other bits which I forgot to mention.
Livestock is simple:
2 clowns
1 target mandarin
1 lawnmower blenny
1 cleaner shrimp
1 fighting conch
1 rock-flower anemone
Trumpet/torch corals
Birdsnest
Shrooms
Toadstool
Zoas
and then some hermit crabs & snails as CUC.
in the move, our existing rock was pretty bad with red furry algae (geledium I believe) and some green bubble algae so we swapped out the worst of it for some VERY clean but seasoned rock from a guy who was tearing his tank down and selling stuff off.
One downside was that I couldn't make water right off the bat at the new place, so I needed to haul ample water with me to keep everything wet and do the build without reusing coral, fish or rock water. Yeah, that meant carrying ~100 gallons of water down there (can you say a van full of 5 gallon buckets?!?!) with some of the water used to keep rock wet & livestock alive.
We got everything loaded & hit the road. The drive was uneventful and everything did just fine. Temp dipped down to about 76, but held in there. We had corals all bagged separately and the fish & shrimp were supposed to stay in sectioned off areas of a cooler which I divided using eggcrate, but they ALL could wiggle through the eggcrate which AMAZED me because my big clown is 2x the size of the holes. I had a battery powered airstone keeping things aerated.
We got in around 7pm and had to lug everything up 1 flight of stairs before we could get into the elevator and take it up to the loft. Once we hauled ~1000lbs or so worth of stuff up to the loft, I started placing things and plumbing, etc.
I had bought 80# new substrate (fiji pink sea-flor sand) for the tank and pre-washed it, so getting it down was simple. I got that down and ran the tank about 1/2 full before calling it a night.
Sunday morning we pulled out the rock and drilled/rodded it (3/8" fiberglass rods from tapplastics) to create a "tripod" style rock stack. I still need to fill in some of the gaps with rubble, etc to hide the rod but for now I'm very thrilled with the layout of it.
We got the rock in and filled the water up using about 50% recovered water and 50% newly made water which we brought down. It took the night to get up to temp and then on Monday we started putting livestock in.
Opening up my huge rock of prized blue zoanthids (which miraculously a newbie like me managed to have the perfect tank as they grew like CRAZY), I was heartbroken to be knocked across the room by the most putrid smell I've ever encountered (and I've smelled some BAD stuff). Ugh. Despite them actually looking okay, the god awful aroma said NO GO for putting them in. As we opened the rest of the corals, the only 2 others we lost were a large finger leather coral and a colony of sun corals. And the only other loss was 3 mexican turbo snails & my tuxedo urchin. In all, not bad at all.. I was VERY worried about the anemone as he didn't look good at all and just wouldn't eat, but after 3 days he's snatching chunks of food just like he used to. And everyone else is adapting quite well.
So without further ado, here are the pics!
Front of the setup:
Front of tank:
Right side of tank:
Left side of tank:
Left view of setup:
Guts of it all:
Closed up sides:
And here's the RODI setup I did! Excellent use of confined space. In my guest bathroom I was able to put my BRS 5 stage RODI under the sink. I can shut it off with the ball-valve attached to it which is important since I need to disconnect the hose from my storage container before moving it or opening it.
For water collection/storage, I found this "Gamma Vittles Vault" which is a 50# dry food storage container made of food-grade plastic. It is 14x14x20 and holds 15 gallons PERFECTLY which is exactly what I use for my water changes. My intention is to make 15 gal of RODI and the night before I do a change, I will add my salt, a powerhead and a heater, and then on change day I can wheel it out and do the change pretty easily. This seemed like the perfect container for a small space.
And, well, that's about it! Just keeping an eye on things and some day down the road I'm looking to add a BTA and a Crocea clam, and maybe another fish.
