600 Gallon Surger Reef Build

[mdreef1]

Sump Shot

Sump Shot

Here's a shot of the sump level. I'm afraid I didn't have a lens with a wide enough angle to capture the whole thing, so you'll have to use your imagination to piece it together a bit.

This is the lowest level. The sumps are resting directly on the concrete slab. The nearest sump is only for temporary use during water changes. The blue barrel inside is RO/DI storage, but there is a valve in the bottom that can be opened to the larger sump making the whole of it in to RO/DI water storage. For water changes, this valve is closed (cutting off the blue barrel from the sump) and salt is added to the sump. In practice, the blue barrel is always fresh water, and the sump flip-flops between fresh and salt depending on where it is in the water change cycle. After mixing salt, there is a valve to connect the two black sumps together. The near sump is then part of the display tank system. After a few weeks, the near sump is valved off (isolated), drained, and the process starts over.

Mounted above this sump you can see the RO/DI system. It's a 5 stage unit with an extra sediment prefilter. This is a Spectra Pure MaxCap UHE with integrated booster pump for the RO membrane because the house pressure is around 40 PSI and too low to get much through the membrane. The booster raises pressure to 80 PSI.

The far sump in this picture is the main system sump, and it's where all the aux equipment hangs out.

If you look closely you can see the floor drain, and above it is a 3" PVC drain system. There is 3" PVC running around the perimeter of the room with 2" access ports evenly spaced throughout. The idea being that anywhere around the room, a drain is never far away. The floor drain goes outside to a special gravel pit deep underground. It was my concern that too much salt water in to the house septic system might cause problems over time. So, any waste water from this room is dealt with separately.

In the far back corner is one of the Hammerhead pumps; the output pipe is painted blue. This heads up to the surger level at the top of the room.

 

[reeftanknewbie]

Admittedly, I'm no master aestheticist (is that a word?), and I tend to prioritize function first. Here's a couple of things about that center section:

1. It's only about 1 inch think concrete, hollow, and open from the back. It's basically an enormous cave for fishes to hide in.
2. Inside it is the distribution manifold for the closed loop system, and there are a few eductors that poke through the concrete to direct water flow where it's needed.
3. The right side of the tank is VIOLENT. The tank needed a wave break to provide a calm space on the left of the tank.

Long story short, the center can't be removed, but I suppose if it gets mistaken for a pile or rocks instead of slab of concrete, then that's at least partly positive. I'd love to hear some idea about how to make it better.

I am not the guy who can give you suggestions on aesthetics as I can barely pick out nice colors for paint. Just ask my wife....lol
Never thought about the need for a wave break but maybe the rocks can be closer to the sand bed to open the space of for fish to swim and corals to grow into.
This is truly a brilliant design!

 

[mdreef1]

I am not the guy who can give you suggestions on aesthetics as I can barely pick out nice colors for paint. Just ask my wife....lol
Never thought about the need for a wave break but maybe the rocks can be closer to the sand bed to open the space of for fish to swim and corals to grow into.
This is truly a brilliant design!

Thanks for the idea. I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to layout the corals, or how they'll grow, but I'm kinda stuck with that center section unless I want to break apart the concrete - it's all one solid piece now. Time will tell if it was ill advised.

 

[mdreef1]

More fish room shots

More fish room shots

This is the other side of the lowest level. In this shot, the sumps (from the last pic) are just behind and to the left of where I'm standing. There's a wash basin for cleanups and work area for whatever comes up.

I went to an auction, and walked about with those white cabinets for $10 a piece. I got the counter top there as well.. I bit darker than I would like, but the price was right.

On the other side of this wall is my wife's office, and luckily there's barely any sound that passes through. The wall itself is 6" wood studs, 5/8" fire rated drywall and packed with fiberglass insulation. There's also an EPDM gasket that runs along the floor and up the wall just in case I get a lot of water on the floor, it shouldn't penetrate in to the house before the floor drain has a chance to take care of it.

Almost hidden on the left of this pic is the entrance to the house which is two steps up from the fish room floor.

 

[mdreef1]

Spinning around a bit more to the left from that last shot, you can see the left side and back of the tank. The walls have now been wallpapered with 98% reflective Mylar. The idea is to make best use of the sunlight that comes in to the room.

The hammerhead pump in this pic powers the closed loop. It's mounted to a board that is sandwiched between low density Styrofoam. The pump is mounted to the board, and the board is mounted to the deck. I did that to reduce the amount of vibration that transmits from the pump to the deck as the deck acts like one hell of a sound board. Even with that precaution, this pump is main thing you hear inside the house.

If you look really close in to the back of the tank, you can see the inside of the concrete center section and the PVC pipes and locline running through it.

 

[mdreef1]

Alright.. boring stuff out of the way, and on to the cool parts. This pic shows the very top left of the room, and the 10 chamber surger. You can't really see the blue supply line that's coming up from the hammerhead below, but this is the highest lift point in the system. It's all downhill from here. I kind of wish there wasn't a skylight directly above the surger as it really fuels the algae growth, but it is what is it.

Below and to the right of the surger is the beginning of the 'fuge. You can sort of make out a set of bubble baffles the water passes through before it gets to the main area of the fuge - down and up and down again.

 

[mdreef1]

Spinning a bit to the right, you get a full shot of the fuge. It's 3 feet wide and 8 feet long. The water comes out of the surger on the left, travels across the fuge to the right, and then drops 16 inches down a chute in to the tank.

The surgers give a lot of randomness to the flow, but the travel across the fuge saps a lot of the energy. The drop down the chute puts some energy back in to the flow. The sump pump is doing a lot of work to get the water up there, and the idea was to not waste that work. The only place that does waste energy is in the drain lines that head back to the sump. That flow does feed the heater and chiller, but for the most part just gets wasted. I wish I could think of more things to drive off that flow. It's greater than 4' of drop that goes to no particularly good use.

 

[dave.m]

Could you please explain what appear to be diagonal baffles on the left side of the lower part of the refugium? -what are they for/how do they work sort of thing. Thx

Dave.M

 

[Lavoisier]

Spinning a bit to the right, you get a full shot of the fuge. It's 3 feet wide and 8 feet long. The water comes out of the surger on the left, travels across the fuge to the right, and then drops 16 inches down a chute in to the tank.

The surgers give a lot of randomness to the flow, but the travel across the fuge saps a lot of the energy. The drop down the chute puts some energy back in to the flow. The sump pump is doing a lot of work to get the water up there, and the idea was to not waste that work. The only place that does waste energy is in the drain lines that head back to the sump. That flow does feed the heater and chiller, but for the most part just gets wasted. I wish I could think of more things to drive off that flow. It's greater than 4' of drop that goes to no particularly good use.

Unique and simply amazing build. I'm subscribed and fascinate! However, if this tank is to be long term you must protect the wood! An exterior latex will work but I suspect a 2 part epoxy paint might be the wiser choice. I can't wait to see more. Thanks for sharing your dream.

 

[mdreef1]

Could you please explain what appear to be diagonal baffles on the left side of the lower part of the refugium? -what are they for/how do they work sort of thing. Thx

Dave.M

Sharp eye. They are supports for egg crate dividers. The idea was to partition the sump so I could have some containment of the various types of algae. They are angled toward the skylights and the flow of water. It's setup for 6 algae compartments with a large square area (3' x 3') on the right for frag grow out.

 

[mdreef1]

Unique and simply amazing build. I'm subscribed and fascinate! However, if this tank is to be long term you must protect the wood! An exterior latex will work but I suspect a 2 part epoxy paint might be the wiser choice. I can't wait to see more. Thanks for sharing your dream.

Yeah, I wish that had occurred to me earlier. It's a bit harder to do now that everything is in place. The wood is pressure treated which also raises concerns of bad chemical seepage.

 

[dave.m]

The idea was to partition the sump so I could have some containment of the various types of algae.

Okay, gotcha. Just for fun you might want to try adding a piece of that plastic mesh that is used for needlepoint on top of one of your egg crate pieces to see if it would function well as an algal turf scrubber.

re. Painting the woodwork - +1 Yes, get in there and paint everything with a sealing paint, at least two coats. Do it now before things get any more complicated in there.

Dave.M

 

[mdreef1]

Okay, gotcha. Just for fun you might want to try adding a piece of that plastic mesh that is used for needlepoint on top of one of your egg crate pieces to see if it would function well as an algal turf scrubber.

re. Painting the woodwork - +1 Yes, get in there and paint everything with a sealing paint, at least two coats. Do it now before things get any more complicated in there.

Dave.M

It been on my mind to try to convert one half of the fuge to a turf scrubber. At one time I had thought to have a setup like you describe, and have a dark section underneath for sponges and the like.

 

[mdreef1]

Surger photos in more detail

Surger photos in more detail

Here's a couple of the surger being put together in the garage.

This beasty is made up of 82 PVC joints above, 40 below, and 23 bulkheads


There are 10 chambers and each of the chambers is a different size to keep randomness in the cycles. The total volume is about 100 gallons. It's divided in to 10 chambers because the cycle time of a single 100 gallon surger is over a minute, and I felt that was just too long between surges to do what I wanted. So I went with 10 chambers with 10x 2-inch gravity surge siphons (or CSD's if you prefer). Each chamber is individually valved so I can have control over the cycles, and to shut off sections for maintenance. There is also a bypass valve that bypasses the whole surger system and diverts flow directly to the fuge.

I did a bunch of experimenting with the gravity surgers to tune them and get them reliable. I tried different diameter pipes at the front, top, back, different types of fittings, different flow rates. The trick to getting them to fire every time was to drill a tiny hole at the top dead center of each surger. This hole lets the air escape the tube to trigger the siphon, but is small enough not to break the siphon before it hits the bottom.

In the end, I've found that the hammerhead (mighty as it might be) can only drive 6 chambers reliably. I think a second hammerhead would get all 10 running, but now that I've had a bit of experience, I think that would be too much flow.

In my dreams I pictured a wall of water flowing through the fuge and breaking against the far wall before heading over the chute and blasting the tank. In reality, the surge is a barely perceptible swell in the fuge followed by increased flow over the chute. It's amazing how long it takes water to move around. There's never a time when flow over the chute is completely stopped, but there are times when all surgers are on the fill cycle and it becomes so quiet that I think something must be wrong. Then they all fire at the same time and the roar that it creates is just plain scary. It's a rare thing, that seems to only happen a few times a week, but when it happens at night, it wakes me up! Most of the time it's just a gradual increase and decrease in flow. More graceful and less fantastic than I envisioned.

As relaxed as the flow seems, there's been one catastrophe and one somewhat expected 'event'. After months of running flawlessly, there started to be this terrible groaning, creaking noise that I just couldn't quite locate until one day the outside front corner of the largest surger finally gave way and dumped it's contents on the floor. Luckily, it was the easiest chamber to access and repair. It was just a matter of turning off that chamber and the one next to it, and gluing the acrylic back together, followed by double the walls, and adding lots of bracing to the corners. No biggie really.

The catastrophe happened when the right-side acrylic wall of the fuge (furthest from the surger) blew off. It came apart at both ends and dumped 250 gallons of water plus all subsequent surges on to the floor. I was at work when it happened, and got a call from my wife that said the tank didn't sound quite right. What she heard was the hammerhead running dry after the sump had been pumped empty.

On the bright side, the EPDM gasket and floor drain did their jobs, and no water penetrated in to the house. I also rescued most of the critters in old tanks and Rubbermaid containers.

On the not so bright side, I was walking barefoot in the sump during the rescue, and the number of bristle worms in the sand is just plain amazing. I didn't even notice at the time, but when the adrenaline died down I noticed how itchy and hairy the bottoms of my feet had become. They swelled up so badly I couldn't wear dress shoes for a week, and I had non-stop burning and itching for days.. ugh!

Also on the super not so bright side, I ran out to get 4 heaters to keep the emergency tanks warm. I bought Aqueon brand heaters from the LFS, and ALL 4 OF THOSE DAMN THINGS failed on within a few days and cooked the emergency tanks. :headwalls: After the first one did it, I should have thrown out the others, but I didn't, and in the end I lost all the fuge critters.

 

[Aquatron]

Really cool stuff When bad things happen with my build it seems......that when I learn the most. Nice touch painting your plumbing.

 

[reeftanknewbie]

Wow what a cool build. Sorry about the setbacks but as you know that's how this hobby works.

 

[hatcher2014]

awesome build hope there is new pics to come soon with all of the livestock that is thriving in its new house

 

[Dmorty217]

Could you make a video and post it of the surge system in action? I really like what you did with it and would like to see how it functions in real time

 

[sde1500]

Yea, would really love to see how the tank has come along since last update.

 

[mdreef1]

Update

Update

Great timing! I'm planning to retire the old AC3 Pro tomorrow, and replace it with an Apex. I've had my head deep in the tank the last few weeks (figuratively) thinking up ways to improve it, and it's been on my mind to update this thread as well.

For a quick update, I'll say this: things have been going quite well, but some things haven't worked out as well as I would have liked. The tank has been through several full solar cycles, and I've learned a few things. I had been hoping to keep mostly SPS, and while they seem to get enough light and flourish in the summer months, in the winter loose color and most types die off. The cycle repeated two years in a row, and for this last winter I only had LPS and softies which worked out much better. Instead of fighting it, I've decided to alter my goals and go with the flow in regards to what life I'll be keeping.