archway reef build

[easttexas]

well, now that I'm more than half way dome with my build, I figured it was time to start a build thread for it.

I am upgrading from my old 75 gallon reef that I was allowed to get when we moved into our new house 8 years ago. It was an upgrade from the very old oceanic RR 58 gallon that I have had and used on and off for like 20 years.

I started out in Salt water in 1992 when I got out of the Army. I started with a 29g tank and an undergravel filter and managed to keep lots of soft corals and even 2 anemone's in that tank in an apartment. When my wife and I got our first house, I ended up with a 6 foot 100 gallon behind the couch, a 42 hex connected to it and a 75 gallon stand alone. At this time I discovered GARF's website and got fairly successful at reef keeping and had a very good local fish store that help a lot. Another move and bigger house later, I had much bigger tanks, however; both were bought used, and both had problems. I had a 6' 220 and an 8' 300 burst seams in the living room while I was at work, and the wife had to save the fish, so I was told no more large glass tanks.

Now on to today. I convinced the wife that an acrylic tank would be much safer than a large glass tank and have been in the planning stages for almost a year on this build.

I definitely didn't take enough pictures along the way, but I'll post a picture of where I am today, and them chronicle the in following post how I got here.

 

[easttexas]

well, It all started with a lot of planning. I found RC a few years ago, and really started reading. Pet smart is the only pet/fish store around, so my 75 gallon tank kinda became a FOWLR tank, and I had many fish in it that had been with me for many years, but I noticed that it got to were I could not keep my parameters in check, and after much research, I felt that my GARF inspired Deep sand bed had become a nutrient sink, and it was out of control. I also had about 50% of my rock was home made, and it was crumbling (was over 15 years old). I repossessed my old RR 58 I gave to my brother (which I found in his back yard rotting!) spend a week rebuilding it, made a new temporary stand and got a Rubbermaid sump that fist inside. I removed all my home made rock, and the DSB, cleaned my live rock with a nylon brush on a bucket of SW and moved everything over.

Temporary set up with scratched up tank

 

[easttexas]

I have been accumulating for a while now so that I don't shock the wife with 10K of stuff all at once. So far I have ordered/received:

3 Jeboa WP40 with 12-24V power supplies
reef octopus DCS200 DC skimmer
2 Jeboa DC12000 pumps
return and closed loop
1 Jeboa DC6000 pump
currently in temp tank and future reactor and fuge pump
3 Reef Radiance Lumentek 240's
32" 80 LED controllable full spectrum fixtures
2 for the 180 and the other for the existing 75
2 Reef Radiance Fuge Par 38's
lots of filter socks
120# Bahama Pink sand
got the plexi for the sump and tank
build the sump and tank
materials for the stand and hood (OMG, it was over a grand!)
3 BRS reactors (running in the temp tank already, the GFO and Pellets have my nitrates and phosphates down to immeasurable amounts already

I have about 75# of live rock left to reuse, and will turn the 75 into a softy/frag tank linked to the main sump.

Things I still need to get:

Apex
150 # dry rock
I'm thinking Marco rock, or BRS reef saver, I don't want the hassle of dealing with the Pukani
lots of plumbing parts

more to come tomorrow:

 

[ntrlsur]

What size take are you going to be going with? The huge upfront cost is what keeps me from having the conversation with the wife. Maybe I can take a page from your book and build up the equipment over time with the tank being the last purchase..

 

[easttexas]

The tank I build is almost a standard 180. I had to shorten it to 71 1/2" to fit the archway opening. it ended up being 24 1/4 x 24 1/4 x 71 1/2 external. I'll have pictures of it under construction later. I started water testing it yesterday and all is good so far

 

[easttexas]

well, got some time during lunch for some more of this build.

I started my planning with lots of RC researching and drawing up designs

I knew where I wanted the tank to go and knew I wanted as close to a peninsula style as I could get, so I took a picture of the area I wanted the tank to go and started drawing over the top of it in an old program I've had for a long time, publisher 97'! sure wish I could upgrade this program, but **** its expensive!

The one I liked best, but didn't win

and the one my wife approved because we could do it without removing any of the existing trim (which didn't worry me at all) The room the tank is actually in is sunken down 7". We started by removing the carpet from that room, and replacing it with a vinyl plank wood floor that you can't tell is not real, it looks exactly like our real wood in other rooms. I planned all along to have a fish tank in this sunken room, so the tanks location (old tank) had a dedicated power and there are 2 floor drains already installed (I did the blue prints for our dream house, and did most of the construction)

the one that won

 

[easttexas]

and to get way ahead of the story, this is how it worked out. I built the stand in my shop to fit the opening then had to trim it out in place to work around the existing structure. the whole thing will be stand alone, but look like a built in that matches our kitchen cabinets (room across from the tank)

and from the family room

you can see the old 75 cleaned up and on its old stand. the stand is the same one I built for the 100 gallon tank behind the couch like 15 or 16 years ago, and will be reused again. that is also the wall that has the dedicated circuit and water supply and drain.

 

[easttexas]

I love this picture, it shows how clear plexiglass G is, the door your looking at in the picture is thru over 24 inches of plexi and 2 joints. just a teaser shot of the tank construction

 

[easttexas]

Oh, and thanks Ntrlsur for checking in, its hard to keep motivated with build threads if no one is paying any attention to it. I did a lot of build documentation on Jeep Forum, but this is the first over here

 

[justa210]

What part of east texas are you in? I'm in Shreveport, la

 

[easttexas]

What part of east texas are you in? I'm in Shreveport, la

Thanx Justa; I'm in the middle of BFE, Lufkin TX, it takes me about 3 hours to get to Shreveport.

It takes me about 3 hours to get anywhere worth going actually but I like living in a little town.

 

[justa210]

Very familiar with lufkin.

 

[easttexas]

on with the build:

I did a lot of planning and drawing, and this is what I came up with as the starting point.

the tanks lay out, sump and overflow box. full size they even show how the plexi is to lay out and be bonded. I seem to be developing a little OCD as I age, I used to just attack this kind of stuff and make it up as I went, now I seem to plan out every last cut ahead of time. For the Sump, I found a lot of good info in Melv's Reef site, and studied a bunch of his designs, and then made one up that was what I think is ideal. I spent a lot of time on the computer maximizing the sump size out of one single sheet. this is the biggest I could make it. I wanted several features in the sump that I have learned I like over the years. I like filter socks, yes they are a pain, but they keep the sump clean and the water clear. I use the mesh ones full time and the felt ones for just a day once a week. The systems I built in the past have always had the drain pipe running into the filter sock, and it is a PITA the change them, so this time I have built a sock chamber into the end of the sump and changes will be easy now. I made the skimmer chamber just a little bigger than the skimmer (thank BRS for having the dimensions listed as I built the sump before the skimmer arrived.) the RO DCS200 has a huge foot print by the way. I have become a fan of Cheato in the last few years, but the only design I have tried that actually grew it well was the 20 long sump I had under the 75 where I built a tumbler into it. I have no tumbler in the temp sump and the cheato is almost gone and been taken over by the caulerpa that didn't grow worth a darn in the old system. so this sump had a new tumbler I'm going to try build in.


The external overflow box has no teeth to make it quite and will use the Bean Animal design (found here on RC) I have been using the Herbie method before I ever heard of it for years, but that was out of necessity when your using a premade overflow box.

as you can see in this picture, I planed out every last cut

 

[easttexas]

Building the sump pictures:

as you can see I used lots of shims and the pins from Wal-Mart's produce department

made a templet to route out the top and used double sided tape to hold it down

finished in the shop still

 

[easttexas]

Test fitting the skimmer in the sump, and some of the pumps and plumbing. I ended up making a 3" tall skimmer stand out of the scrap from routing out the top opening so that the skimmer should ride in about 7" of water. I didn't have the right size hole saw to cut out the filter sock holes so they aren't in yet. The hardest part of this sump build was getting good joints in the intake box for the filter socks, there are a few bubbles in the seams on it, but not on the outside so they don't really matter, just ran a bead of WO16 to make sure it didn't leak out, but it would have just leaked into the return chamber anyways. Careful planning had to be made in order to figure out the order in which to assemble the sump so that every joint is bonded while flat.

I will have 3 of these DC pumps in the pump chamber when its said and done. They are supposedly not rated for external use, so I am going to put the closed loop one in with the other 2 and just plumb it like you normally would for a closed loop, just with the pump in the water to cool it, leak proof...whatever

 

[dave.m]

Nice skills. Have you worked in acrylic before?

Dave.M

 

[easttexas]

Starting to build the tank. I looked and looked online for a tank supplier that was "reasonable" The cheapest I found was a guy on ebay for $1450 plus freight. I found prices all over the map, glass cages, aquariums direct ect all around $1700, and some over 2K. I had to drive down to Houston, but got 2 @ 4x8 sheets of 1/2" Plexiglas G and a pint of WO4 for just over $500 (plus 50 dollars in diesel and 3/4 of a day) I bought a couple new router bits, as mine were quite old and well used, blew up my old router so had to get a new one of them, and used sacrificial scrap wood as a fence and some feather boards (after messing up one of the sump dividers when the router "ate" into it) so all told I've got about $650 into the Tank. I will say that it is very time consuming. It only took me one Saturday afternoon to machine and route all the pieces. I found that my wood scraper worked beautifully to clean up any edges that weren't just perfect. and I was amazed at how the shims could make that tiny adjustment for a perfect seam. The "Pins method" I learned on RC really made this job come out much better than I had hoped. In my past acrylic projects I just used straight capillary action and always had bubble, even thought they never leaked and held for years.

I had to make the overflow first, then bond to one side, cut in the overflow, and then bond the sides to the front

it took 6 packages of shims to do the top and bottom.

I was lucky that it was about 50 degrees in the shop and that gave me a little extra time to work with the WO4. The top I had my wife come behind me 30 second after I applied the WO4 and pull the pins, but she was clueless about how to work the shims, and they started setting before I could get to them. so the top had a few bubbles, but still pretty good. I found that while setting up the joints and adjusting the shims as I set the pins in so that they had just a little pressure on them got them real close to where they needed to be before applying the WO. for the bottom, I did it solo, and just worked one side at a time and it came out perfect. not a bubble one, just like the sides. looks almost Factory made.

joints

 

[easttexas]

Nice skills. Have you worked in acrylic before?

Dave.M

I've built a couple sumps, a 6' long dump surge device (used one day, was unreal how loud it was!) and a couple small tanks. I was shocked at how much acrylic went up. The last 1/4" sheet I bought was like 60 bucks, now its $120. None of my old projects came out this good thought, learning about the pins method on RC and Melv's Reef really helped

Thanks

 

[easttexas]

I preplanned every cut for the tank as well. not much scrap. I plan on using some of the scrap for a quarantine tank to set next to the 75

I've build several houses, so I already new how to distribute the loads in the stand, but still used the methods outlines in the DIY forum about stands when I build it. I looked thru every post I could for ideas. I used to make lots of cabinets, and had all the tools needed already. I decided to trim out the stand to be a blend of our kitchen cabinets and our entertainment center in the family room (tank is viewable from the kitchen......and the foyer, living room, family room......kind of an open floor plan)

design phase:

 

[easttexas]

I did buy a new toy for the stand and canopy build. I have always used Biscuits in the past, but decided to give a pocket hold tool a try - I loved it. I hid all the pocket holes behind trim pieces, or on the back sides of things. I really liked the fact that you could still handle things before the glue had set. every joint in this thing is glued and most are screwed. I highly recommend one, just use lots of clamps as the pocket screws will try to shift the work as you screw them in.

I had to trim out the stand in place to work around the existing structures and trim. The wife wouldn't let me pull any of the old trim off, the tank had to be stand alone, but it had to look like a built in to ME!

family room side (sunken room)

Kitchen and entry way side