Nothing much with the tank. Just getting the fish room ready. Its being divided into a couple of rooms so I can hide the mixing barrels, holding tank, and all the supplies. The electrician is coming this week and hopefully within a month or two, I can find a drywaller who can make the time to drywall and finish it. But around here, houses are going up like mad and getting a drywaller is next to impossible unless your a builder.
Does anyone on this site run large tanks like this with Metal Halides? Looked into LED's, but spending 10,000 just wasn't in the cards. I found 3 coralvue 400 watt dimmable ballasts with 6 month old bulbs, the large reflectors for 225 bucks. They are the newer style. Plus I already had one setup like them and he threw in another 400 watt ballast for free.
Picked up 120 pounds of the fake handmade purple Fiji live rock to get started and am "cooking" another 100 pounds of standard live rock now. Planning on 2 or 300 more pounds of fake rock.
Not running a large main pump. Don't think its necessary, but will be using MP 60's. Maybe I'll try a couple of those new maxspec gyre pumps too.
Not running a large skimmer either. Just a bubbleking 250 supermarin that I used on my 600. Bioload will be small with a lot of open space.
There will be a standard sump under the tank for the skimmer, reactors, all that messy stuff... A "pond" for the deep sand bed, caulerpa, and mangroves will be in the open area of the fish room. This will be on basically a lone system with its own small pump from the sump. Will most likely use a maxspec gyre pump for this. Some fish and inverts will also probably be in there too. Maybe some lower light corals too. The size layed out on the floor is 4' x 6' and planning on it being shallow...maybe 16".
Brother in law is a heating and cooling guy and will be working with me on managing the evaporation.
Thats about it for now. Its moving along, just really slowly.
