Hi All,
Ok ive been busy and done a bit of hard decision making. Spoke to my electrician who told me not to have the tanks inside my equipment cupboard too close to power (makes sense) plus I still need room to put all my controllers, monitors, ballasts etc so as such I basically went as big as I could without effecting me slotting my skimmer in as I needed to add an extra support beam to the front.
I decided to get rid of the sink all together as I can use the laundry for cleaning and only need the water and drain for RO, unfortunately I cant really drop the taps any further due to studs in the way etc. As such im quite limited in height.
Ive got 18mm marine ply to be a base ontop of the frames which limits me to 22" of space for the hospital tank but needs to include room to obviously put a fish in with a net.
And 20" for the frag tank but needs to include room for the T5 reflector an a bit of clearance. NOT IDEAL!
But I can only work with what ive got so heres the frame:
<a href="http://s212.photobucket.com/albums/cc108/r0cksteady_scarlett/?action=view¤t=EquipmentCupboard-Update.jpg" target="_blank"><img src="http://i212.photobucket.com/albums/cc108/r0cksteady_scarlett/EquipmentCupboard-Update.jpg" border="0" alt="Photobucket"></a>
This essentially means that if I allow 6" clearance above each tank (not a lot I know) the hospital tank could be 16" high and the frag tank 14" high.
Im picking up the hospital tank and the frag tanks tomorrow as well as my 7ft x 2ft x 2ft sump.
Im still finishing final treatment for the whitespot (approx 2 weeks to go). I then need to spend a week raising the salinity back to normal which skewers plans slightly.
I reckon the first two weeks of May are going to be insane weeks of work and my mates are going to be hating the multiple phone calls to move heavy items back and forward.
Either way I would say all is going well. The whitespot has completely gone from the fish and no more have died. Dropping the salinity in my old established tank did cause a significant die off causing everything to spike but thankfully I was very observant with testing the water each day and with a bit of 'prime' and a few water changes the fish weren't noticeably effected and now the bacteria\dsb has kicked back in to take everything back to 0 including nitrate.
My bday is coming up soon and I asked the family to buy me a few marine books selected from amazon. Two of these are meant to be the bees knees in cultivating live foods as ive decided to try my luck with getting the tank to be able to feed itself (in a general sense) where possible though just early days at the moment and not currently a priority.
So my two goals after everything is running and stable is to somehow do automatic water changes on a daily basis hooked directly up to my 3300L storage tank and cultivate live foods for the purposes of eventually keeping some harder corals in a more specialised tank.
On another note:
Im really liking the idea of having two hobby tanks in addition way down the track:
1. To successfully have a small cube focused on filter feeders eg. xmas tree worms, dendro's, goni's etc.
2. To breed pinnate batfish
Big calls I know but something to enjoy reading up on and researching whilst im waiting for all this hardware to arrive etc etc. Im fairly confident on the filter feeders to a certain extent ie. wet skimming, nutrient rich, live cultivated foods etc BUT breeding batfish I havent actually found any evidence of anyone having done it before. Theres no published book I can find either focused on even keeping batfish.
Thought considering ive still got about 2 weeks for everything to be finished id at least take some pics of my 6ft DT. Even though its fishless at the moment with all the fish currently been treated for whitespot the corals seems to be going well and ive been picking up the odd addition along the way that takes my fancy.
Some of the corals are still settling in and are yet to pic up their full colour but you will get the jist. Hope you enjoy.