600 gallon plywood Down Grade!
- Thread starter Cougarman
- Start date
Gogandantess
New member
Beautiful Fowleri! Definitely my fav.
Thanks. This is the best one I've seen for sale. REal friendly right from the start. Eats like a pig.
RyanSweatt2004
New member
nice setup but a bit small and crowded for a lot of those fish, just my opinion
Sure. Its a 300 gallon display with a 300 gallon softie tank, 120 gallon chaeto refugium, 130 gallon deep sand bed, 100 gallon sump and 110 gallon frag tank all plumbed in-line. I run a four foot dual beckett MRC recirculating skimmer with ozone, custome made calcium reactor, 3 tower Lifeguard UV sterilizer, 3 tower Lifeguard filter system for carbon and rowaphos etc. My return pump is a Reeflo hammerhead which supplies returns to all 4 tanks and the protien skimmer. There are 2 tunze wave boxes in the display and several inexpensive koralia 4 power heads through out the system. There are several hundred pounds of Live rock throughout the system.
The display is lit by three 400 watt 20000k XM metal halides with Lumenbright reflectors. The frag tank has two 250 watt Pheonix HQI bulbs and unknown reflectors. The 300 gallon softie and refugium are lit by fluorescent bulbs.
The display tank is a commercially produce marineland 300 gallon starfire glass. I was concerned about tank turnover, so I modified the returns into drains so that there would be a total of four one inch drains. I'd prefer more tank turnover with the heavily stocked situation I have, but I'm stuck with what I've got.
The tank stand was purchase with the tank and I built a canopy to cover the lighting.
Live stock includes a whole bunch of tangs and unicorns(much to the dismay of the tang police) which I have had living happily together for several years. A porcupine puffer, Moorish idol, cross hatch triggers, black trigger, garden eel, cortez stingray and some clams.
The display has mostly sps inwhich the acros have seen better days. Fortunately they look like they're starting to recover from the transition.
I'll be the 1st to admit its an ugly setup, but I prefer to build things my self if I can. Unfortunately I'm no artist. But its more enjoyable this way.
My phosphates are <1, nitrates are usually 5 - 10 ppm. I also drip Kalk.
Ich generally isn't much of a problem in the system but if I add a new fish there's usually a small out break. It usually doesn't cause any fatalities and fades away after a couple weeks without any treatment. That being said when I broke down the 600 gallon plywood tank I lost a few to ich while they were in the holding tanks.
In the near future I plan to build an enormous tank which I will code name "the colossus" to house all my large fish. Just need the new house to put it in. I will be sure to start a build thread for that.
I think that's everything.
RoganTerrance
Young Reefer
wow nice tank
Ya that was all the leftover sand from the 600 gallon plywood tank. The 130 gallon is not as full now (maybe 16 inches), I used some of the sand in the 110 gallon pseudo-frag tank.
I'd say realistically I do a 60 gallon water change every other week. Sometimes its more often depending on how the tank looks, or what the water parameters are.
The water flow starts from the 100 gallon rubbermaid tub to the main pump. From there it goes through the lifeguard tower filters (rowaphos, carbon, sometimes empty) then through the lifeguard uv sterilizers and feeds the 300 gallon display, 300 gallon softie, 110 gallon pseudofrag, 130 gallon sandbed, and protein skimmer. All 4 tanks including the protein skimmer drain into the 120 gallon refugium which is a dense mass of chaeto, some live rock and every critter you could imagine. The refugium then drains back into the 100 gallon sump and the cycle continues. The calcium reactor is gravity fed from the diplay tank, and drips into the sump. I also use a 5 gallon kent aquadose to manually drip kalk into the sump. I just bought a kalk reactor, which I have yet to set up, to automate the kalk additions. The skimmer is ozone fed which really helps with the water clarity and skimmer production.
I don't notice a huge build up of detritus in the refugium. It seems to get trapped in the dense matte of chaeto, and perhaps consumed by the critters. I have a huge population of mini serpent stars and mini white seastars, pods and snails reproducing in the fuge. With 4 tanks and a skimmer draining into the refugium there is a lot of flow and I think the particulate matter that escapes the refugium ends up in the sump and then is removed by the skimmer or eaten by the various organisms in the the other tanks.
