A Great Way to ruin a perfect wall; My 400 Gallon Project

[Craig Lambert]

SERVO,

I believe this is my all time favorite thread. I'm sorry that I just discovered it! I wish I had been here from the beginning. I am printing the whole thing off as I plan to do an in-wall for out dining room in the future. Your project is going to be my "blueprint" Thanks....

 

[clekchau]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=8330556#post8330556 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by SERVO
Well after ages of minimal updates, I have some news to share!!

Here are pictures of the stand that Loserkidz hooked me up with!!
I am going to put a motorized linear light moving system on the bracket to move a 250W dual ended Aquamedic light. I didn't want to add more heat into the room and was excited to try one of these out! Anyway, I'll post more updates soon. I am leaving for San Francisco this weekend so I won't be able to get anything done until the weekend after next. Anyway, here are pictures of the stand.

to host this

loserkidz built that stand for you? interesting

 

[SERVO]

So the slow progress continues!!!

Here is what I'm totally stoked about

I plan on working to get it plummbed next weekend. I need to cut and mount the lineal lighting rack to the top of the elbow. brace for the lights.

I'm not sure how to do that with the tools available to me

I am also going to update my lighting. I originally intended on just using metal halides, but now I have purchased 5 24 inch T5 lights to use for supplimental coloration.

I have to redesign this

I need to make the whole system longer to span the complete length of the tank. I'm bummed that I'll have to repurchase more of the same so to speak.

I picked up all of the lighting and equipment via MACNA. The frag tank is a Trigger Systems Custom build.

 

[jnarowe]

I really like the lighting rack. Does it really have to span the whole tank? Don't you think you will get enough light as it is? I tend to prefer less light on the tank sides for a more "realistic" look, but with my lamps at 1000W it is just not possible. That is one if the things I don't like about my tank.

The frag tank is sweet!

 

[SERVO]

1000W's WoW:eek1: :eek1: :eek1:

Thats a lot of PAR/PUR.

I need lighing in the corner b/c of the stupid oversized internal overflow boxes cut out a significant amount of light and actually "shade" the corners giving me dead space.

No low light corals for me

 

[melev]

Looking forward to seeing your progress. The frag tank and stand look sharp!

 

[jnarowe]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=8392225#post8392225 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by SERVO
1000W's WoW:eek1: :eek1: :eek1:

Thats a lot of PAR/PUR.

I need lighing in the corner b/c of the stupid oversized internal overflow boxes cut out a significant amount of light and actually "shade" the corners giving me dead space.

No low light corals for me

:lol: Yeah, I had a guy at a frag swap yesterday telling me to put something low in my tank without having any idea of what kind of system I have. I have a fox coral under a ledge so it doesn't get too much light....SPS grow great though!

I have the center lamp in a dish and the two end lamps in Diamond/Lumenarcs on movers and it seems to be working well. I get some puzzled looks when people realize that my lamps are moving back and forth.

I find the couple "shaded" spots up high in the back corners are where the coraline algae grows the fastest and that is a PITA.

 

[SERVO]

Well I've got the tank plummed with a lot of help from my friend Todd. Stress A LOT of help. Long day plumbing. Actually, it is amazing what you can do with a saw! Hard plummed this one. It is amazing that there are only two lines; one in and one out. I plummed off of my manifold so I am still only using one pump to feed the system. Now I just need to re-plumb the closed loop to get a little more room and increase the out flow PCV diameter from the dart pump.

We also tapped the durso caps to place John Guest fittings in order to control the air thru the durso. This is alot easier to fine tune the darn things.

Now I need to get the lighting track sawed and mounted, but I'll need to find someone with a metal blade on their saw to cut the track.

Once that occurs, I'll mix up some water and run the thing:rollface: :rollface: Pictures to come.

 

[jnarowe]

yeah I use the manifold system too. I think I saw it first in an old thread by hahn under his old screen name. Did you mount the manifold above the tank water line?

Before I installed mine, I had Dale (tinygiants) over and he lectured me about water flow for quite some time. I buy into his idea that having the manifold above the tank will keep it from emptying out as long as there is an air inlet. I have an open line off the manifold feeding the fuge above the tank so that line is my air gap. It isn't submerged.

One time I accidentally left the fuge feed valve off and as I was doing a water change, I noticed something was amiss. The level of the water in the sunmps wasn't going down as fast as it should. It took me a while to then notice that the level of the water in the tank was dropping!! Yikes a momma! I was actually pumping the water out of my tank and I didn't have enough make-up water. So the lesson with the manifold is think about it carefully!

 

[SERVO]

Hmmmm,

Maybe I was using the definition differently from what this guy described.

My manifold is a chamber having several outlets through which the water is distributed from the sump out through the pump.

this;

I cut into one of the hoses and placed a Tee and ball valve.

I am really happy with the streamlined outcome. There are a lot of twists and turns, but I'm not to concerned about losing much pressure.

We'll see what happens once I fire it up and let it fill up.

I'm not going to do that until the whole thing is ready to roll.

I wanted to plumb it to have the ability to pull it off line and run it separately, but I got lazy and just went the easy way. (Like plumbing into a wet system is ever easy!) The wood block is a safety feature to prevent the acryllic from cracking if any bonehead ever stepped on the pipe

 

[jnarowe]

Yeah I was originally going to have my manifold below the tank too so I would have less distance traveled and less bends, theorizing that I could reduce the head pressure on the main pump. However, after talking it over with Dale, this is what I ended up with:

This is an older shot which has my intetrim filter while I built my skimmer. Now there is a multi-media reactor being fed from that line. At the right end of the manifold you can see a vertical 1.5" return line feeding the manifold. It has a see-through check valve I use to visually know how the flow is going.

You can also see the open line going up to the fuge and the 4 valves on the left are 1" returns feeding the tank. Of course, this clearly cannot be done for an in-room tank display. Since I have the tank room, I can do whacky stuff like this.

That second tank is sweet.

 

[SERVO]

Looks great, I see you have the keeper of the 7 seas to help you out as well!


THe second tank will be much sweeter once I fill it up with frags!

I've pretty much used about 95% frags to set up my main display and things have grown pretty slow. Now that I've got things set in, I'm starting to get some remarkable growth. Here is a FTS.

Here is a link to some great macros of some of the acros in the tank. My buddy, Brent came by and posted these.
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http://www.dfwmas.org/Forums/viewtopic.php?t=24808

 

[cward]

Very nice Ryan:thumbsup:

 

[jnarowe]

:lol: No one in my house touches my tank. They are afraid I'll kill them.

Love the finish work on the viewing side. Very smart looking. Have you thought about switching to Vortechs and getting rid of the lockline?

 

[Craig Lambert]

Looks fantastic!

 

[bkwudzjeep]

Does anybody else see the child in the picture? With it being so close to Halloween and all, I have to ask.....

Everything looks sweet!!!!! Great job on this project!!!

 

[JustOneMoreTank]

Yes I saw the kid sitting there on the right side of the picture as well. Kinda creepy in that blue light.

 

[jnarowe]

You know I looked at SERVO's picture about 20 times and couldn't see any kid...then I realized you are talking about my back room picture! Just to clarify, that is a shot of my tank room, not Ryan's. Sorry for the confusion?

 

[Cuby2k]

SERVO, I thought I saw a how-to thread somewhere on the building of the aluminum light rack that you have. It looks so much better than the white wire closet rack that I built and looks much sturdier as well. DO you recall where you got the idea for the consturction of that beauty?

 

[SERVO]

Actually, Marc Levenson Melevsreef.com gave me the idea. The construction is really easy if you have a table saw with a metal blade, a drill and a pop rivet gun. Make sure you put in two rivets in each corner and you will be really surprised at how sturdy these things are. I purchased the replacement angle iron to reconstruct the rack and I actually bought the next thicker angled iron. (not sure of the gauge that I bought off the top of my head). Anyway, given the overall sturdy construction, I'm going to go exchange it to the thinner stuff to save weight. I hope to get this done this weekend. I HOPE!!!!