I'll see about taking more pics of the room as more stuff starts happening in there.
600 Gallon Surger Reef Build
- Thread starter mdreef1
- Start date
I'll see about taking more pics of the room as more stuff starts happening in there.
Welcome aboard! Where I can, I'm trying to keep things simple. Complicated things tend to break a lot, but you're right.. it is starting to get a little crazy.
Speaking of crazy, here's the next component - the refugium:
The footprint is 8x3, and it's 16" high. On the right you can see a set of removable bubble baffles - this is where the water will enter from the surger. The slanted supports in the middle will eventually have eggcrate mounted on them. This is where the macro algae will grow. The idea behind the slanted surface is to increase the density of the algae while still having enough exposure to the light. Each of the 6 eggcrate plates will be easily removeable for havesting/cleaning as needed. The left side is wide open for a day when I'll need frag grow out space. Likely that's years away yet.
In the background you can see some of the sand stacked up. Spread around the garage there's 450lbs of sugar fine 0.5mm, 240lbs of 2mm, 300lbs of 3.5mm. There's also all my build plans scattered across the floor, and a can of gas.. for what reason I'm not sure.
There are 10 2" bulkheads in the bottom of the surger which connects with 10 2" bulkheads on the side of the fuge. Once in the fuge, the surges are pushed down, up, then down again (over the baffles) before entering the main part of the fuge. This pushes some bubbles out of the water, and spreads the water out to a 3 foot wide flow.
Two problems with CSD type surges are the amount of bubble that get caught up in the flow, and the flow is tight and concentrated as it comes out of a round pipe. The flow in that case is similar to a powerhead, and I want a flow that is as wide as the tank.
Additionally, the swushing of the water through the fuge should be good for keeping the macro algae clean of detritus, and should serve to flush 'pods and such in to the display.
reefnut2012
New member
Incredible. Subscribed. Thanks for sharing
rpjaws74
New member
I have a 500 glln but its only 36in deep! I wish I had gone with a 48in deep instead after seeing yours.. I bet the aquascaping is gonna look phenomenal! Thats a lott of realestate. Also very interested in your surge gonna see how you make it work. keep up the good work and pictures please!!!
dustin.chirico
New member
Rather unique and very interesting. I'm in!
prop-frags
SPS Slave
Beautiful tank, and an ambitious, well-thought out plan so far. Subscribed!
Remember to keep in mind maintenance considerations for everything, e.g., those led water blocks. You'll occasionally have to open them up for draining, cleaning, repairs, etc. The easier you make accessing everything, the more likely you'll be to keep up with maintenance.
Remember to keep in mind maintenance considerations for everything, e.g., those led water blocks. You'll occasionally have to open them up for draining, cleaning, repairs, etc. The easier you make accessing everything, the more likely you'll be to keep up with maintenance.
prop-frags
SPS Slave
Beautiful tank, and an ambitious, well-thought out plan so far. Subscribed!
Remember to keep in mind maintenance considerations for everything, e.g., those led water blocks. You'll occasionally have to open them up for draining, cleaning, repairs, etc. The easier you make accessing everything, the more likely you'll be to keep up with maintenance.
Remember to keep in mind maintenance considerations for everything, e.g., those led water blocks. You'll occasionally have to open them up for draining, cleaning, repairs, etc. The easier you make accessing everything, the more likely you'll be to keep up with maintenance.
Well.. the grass is always greener.. In some ways I already miss my nano cube.
Thanks! Welcome aboard!
I'm a bit worried about the aquascaping. I've never done anything this large, and the rest of my tanks have been the pack-as-much-rock-as-possible-while-leaving-space-around-the-glass type designs. I've been reading up on others' scaping in the build threads here on RC. I love the pillars of Sanjay Joshi's 500G, and ChingChai's scape is amazing - well beyond anything I'll be able to string together.
Aesthetics aside, I have some techinical points that I'm going to try to adhere to.
1. All structures will rest on the glass and not the sand - I love burrowing critters e.g. engineer gobies
2. As little sand will be covered as possible. I want ample sand space for LPS like Eupyllia in addition to the rocky SPS perches.
3. I'm going to put a wave break in the center of the tank to break the surges. The right side will be the fore reef, and the left side will be the back reef. The tank should be big enough to pull that off.
Using ideas I've seen on GARF's site and around the web, I've started experimenting with concrete. Seeing as how I'm going to need around 700 lbs of rock (give or take); it'll break the bank to go all live rock. An 82lb bag of concrete is $22
Here's my best effort to date:
It took a lot of iterations to get this, but this is the mix I plan to use. Finding the right concrete was an adventure all it's own, but locally the right stuff is called Portland White (used as the skim coat on swimming pools). It's low alkalinity and doesn't appear to be fired with an funky stuff (like Sulphur).
I used 1:1 concrete to sugar fine aragonite, and wet it with a 1:1 water to acrylic based plasticizer to make a very runny goop. I then mixed in water softener salt - mostly the large crystals with a bit of pellets to change it up a bit. It worked out that it was just enough concrete to coat each piece of salt.
I let if cure for a day wrapped in plastic, and the soaked it in water for a week. The water soak dissolves the salt, and leaves behind a very porous and light structure.
As you can see in the picture, the resulting concrete skin is very thin. The result is a fairly brittle rock, but it does give me the look I'm after.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think I can come close to how good nature does it, and I still expect to use a fair amount of base rock, but I plan to make some of the underlying structure with concrete for ease of construction.
It should provide me with years of non-stop challenges and frustrations.
.. but I wouldn't have it any other way!I know.. it's seems like a klugey mess. Not to mention these things will be above the tank, and made of copper...
Right now I'm just looking at what's possible. Having seen Dr. Mac's tanks (which are amazing), it's clear that sunlight alone doesn't make the green fluorescent proteins glow like what we have all come to expect. I need some form of actinic light, and the smaller and more powerful the better. I tried T5's and they are way too weak. I'd have to cover the tank with T5's and block out the sun to be able to see them. Some LED arrays are bright enough, but still cover more of the tank's top than I'd like. So I continue to search.
Here's a couple more shots of the fish room.
It didn't take long for algae to cover everything. That's clean fresh water.. where does this stuff come from? Ah well. The important point is NO LEAKS!! Fully weighed down, the stand is almost perfectly level at less the 1/8" over 8 feet. I plan to cut doors in to the stand at a later date so I can use it for storage. The tiny gray box on the wall on the right side is a timer which controls the upper outlets in the room.
You can see the two 300G rubbermaid sumps in this picture.
The room is 12x17. The floor is painted with a gray/blue two part epoxy paint. I plan to spill a lot of salty water on this floor, and this seems like the best way to go to keep it clean. The walls are painted in high-gloss pure white.
All that wood is for building a walkway around the tank stand. The top of the tank is 7' feet up, and a bear to access - even with a ladder. When the drywallers were working in this room, they threw a piece of scrap wood over the tank, and stood on that to hang the drywall. :angryfire: I didn't find out until after they were done.. no harm, no foul I guess. I guess that means I don't need to have any qualms about laying on the tank to reach things at the bottom.
It didn't take long for algae to cover everything. That's clean fresh water.. where does this stuff come from? Ah well. The important point is NO LEAKS!! Fully weighed down, the stand is almost perfectly level at less the 1/8" over 8 feet. I plan to cut doors in to the stand at a later date so I can use it for storage. The tiny gray box on the wall on the right side is a timer which controls the upper outlets in the room.
You can see the two 300G rubbermaid sumps in this picture.
The room is 12x17. The floor is painted with a gray/blue two part epoxy paint. I plan to spill a lot of salty water on this floor, and this seems like the best way to go to keep it clean. The walls are painted in high-gloss pure white.
All that wood is for building a walkway around the tank stand. The top of the tank is 7' feet up, and a bear to access - even with a ladder. When the drywallers were working in this room, they threw a piece of scrap wood over the tank, and stood on that to hang the drywall. :angryfire: I didn't find out until after they were done.. no harm, no foul I guess. I guess that means I don't need to have any qualms about laying on the tank to reach things at the bottom.
rpjaws74
New member
Here's a couple more shots of the fish room.
It didn't take long for algae to cover everything. That's clean fresh water.. where does this stuff come from? Ah well. The important point is NO LEAKS!! Fully weighed down, the stand is almost perfectly level at less the 1/8" over 8 feet. I plan to cut doors in to the stand at a later date so I can use it for storage. The tiny gray box on the wall on the right side is a timer which controls the upper outlets in the room.
You can see the two 300G rubbermaid sumps in this picture.
The room is 12x17. The floor is painted with a gray/blue two part epoxy paint. I plan to spill a lot of salty water on this floor, and this seems like the best way to go to keep it clean. The walls are painted in high-gloss pure white.
All that wood is for building a walkway around the tank stand. The top of the tank is 7' feet up, and a bear to access - even with a ladder. When the drywallers were working in this room, they threw a piece of scrap wood over the tank, and stood on that to hang the drywall. :angryfire: I didn't find out until after they were done.. no harm, no foul I guess. I guess that means I don't need to have any qualms about laying on the tank to reach things at the bottom.
your fish room is what I like to call my living room lol!!! But man those workers would of gotten an earfull atleast. Just to make sure they dont do it again:uzi:
Assuming the concrete I'm using doesn't give off anything too nasty, then yes it will. I'll cure it for a while in fresh water to wash off any surface impurities.
Funny thing, but cement is almost completely CaCO3 (aragonite and calcite mostly). In some countries they use live rock, heat it up killing all the critters we hold dear, and sinter it to make cement for building. Though I don't know for sure, I'm imagining much of our cement to come from ancient buried inland reefs. In some wierd twisted way, I'd like to think what I'm making is close enough in composition to real live rock that most life won't care.
I'll never duplicate the fine grained pores of real live rock. So, the bacteria won't be as dense, and the concrete rock will probably not help with denitrification. I plan to use a deep sand bed and a large algae refugium to help with that, and I could always pack the sump full of dry base rock.
In any case, I've never noticed coraline algae to be picky about what it grows over. With a little luck, the extra alkalinity of cement will encourage it's growth.
