Haffs09 370gal Tank Build...Finally!

Stocking

Stocking

I plan to have a whole bunch of tangs in the tank. Currently, I have scattered throughout various tanks:

Yellow tang 5"
Hippo tang 5"
Desjardini tang 5"
Powder Blue 4"
Achilles 4"
Purple tang 2.5"

I hope to acquire the following within the next week or so:

Blonde Naso tang
Tomini tang
Lavender/Brown tang
Fowler's tang

After feeling comfortable that all of them are healthy and eating well, I'll add all of them at once. Hopefully, they'll establish their hiearchy without any fatalities. My plan is to feed these guys a lot and keep them in a tank with lots of flow.

Other misc. fish I plan to add:

Foxface
Flame hawkfish
Pair of clownfish

I'll let things settle out over the summer and then think about adding some angelfish:

Emperor
Majestic
4 or 5 flame angels
 
Haffs09 said:
Thanks for the comments. Not a mermaid shot, but here's what my wife would probably call the first angelfish in the tank :lolspin:

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/49249553@N04/5501780875/" title="IMG_5085 by Haffs09, on Flickr"><img src="http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5177/5501780875_2b17833626.jpg" width="500" height="375" alt="IMG_5085" /></a>
Click to expand...


oh we all know how angelic that species is. :crazy1:
 
Mr. Winters said:
just a suggestion for your fish list:
http://www.liveaquaria.com/product/prod_display.cfm?c=15+25+1853&pcatid=1853

these yellow pyramids looks sooooooo cool in a small group. as soon as i get my tank im gunna get a small school of these.
Click to expand...

Great suggestion! When I dove in Kauai in Sept. '09 I saw a huge school of those mixed in with pennant butterflyfish. It truly was a sight to be seen! I'd love to keep 5 of them, but if I do get all the tangs and angelfish that I want, I may be maxed out. Several years down the road, those tangs will be pretty beefy!
 
First fish in the display tank!

First fish in the display tank!

Yesterday, I moved into the display tank got its first inhabitant, a 2.5" purple tang. I've had him for the past 3 weeks and it was eating everything I put in front of it. I had to move him because I got a shipment of fish on Tuesday, and needed to free up some tank space. Right now, I have over 800 gallons of saltwater amongst my main system display and a bunch of other tanks. It feels like a regular LFS in my basement! Here's the break down:

90gal:
Hippo tang
Yellow tang
Foxface

All have been with me for a long time, 5-10 years.

30L:
3-4" Achilles tang. I've had it since 2/28 and it is doing wonderful. It's eating lots of red and green nori and flake food. It's fattening up quite nicely!

40L:
1 yellow tang and 6 flame angels. I got them this past Tuesday. All the flames are 1.5-2" long. There have been a few tussles between a couple of them, but as far as I can tell, no one has asserted himself as the dominant male. All are eating mysis shrimp, flake food and/or nori.

40B #1:
2.5" Tomini tang, 3" Yellow tang and 3-4" lavendar tang. They arrived this past Tuesday and are starting to eat nori, mysis and flake. The lavendar is definitely a mover!

40B #2
3" yellow tang and a black onyx clownfish. The yellow arrived on Tuesday and is still getting use to its temporary home.

20H
3" yellow tang and 3" blonde naso, both received this past Tuesday. I started both of these guys on a erythromycin treatment today. The yellow hasn't eaten anything I've put in front of it. It is paper thin, and has some fine, faint red streaks around its snout and around its gills. I'm not sure if it will make it, but hopefully the treatment will help. The naso appears to some fungus on one side of its mouth. It is picking at and slowly taking a liking to red nori with garlic. Hopefully, the treatment will help him/her too.

14gal AIO:
This contains one of my favorites, a flame hawkfish. He/she is a pig and will eat as much mysis shrimp as I put in the tank. I got him this past Tuesday. He also shares the tank with a YWG and pistol shrimp.

75:
5-6" desjardini tang and a 4" powder blue. The desjardini has been with me for a couple of years, and I got the powder blue this past Thanksgiving. Both are pigs.

Hopefully, I'll be able to add all the tangs in 4 weeks. Since I have limited or no biological filtration on few of the observation tanks (40Bs, 40L and 20H), I'm changing a lot of water every couple of days. I look forward to that ending when I can move them into the DT!

I don't have any pics right now of my progress, but hopefully I'll get some as I build my rock structures for the DT.

Cheers!
 
I just came across this thread. What great planning and design -- and I thought I was detailed. :spin3:
One comment (and maybe I was seeing something that wasn't so), it appears as if you used solid PVC to connect the suction from the tank to your Reeflo pump. If so that will cause problems down the road from the vibration caused by the pump. If you did use solid PVC I would recommend changing to Spaflex that you used on the pump discharge.
Great job.
 
Thanks for the comments!

EnglishRebel - What type of problems did you encounter? Did you have a bulkhead crack or even worse a pane of glass?

The next 4 weeks are going to be the toughest so far for this project. Resisting the urge to move all my tangs over will be extremely tough! I won't cave in though, as I want to ensure they're all doing well without visible signs of disease. I'm in the process of trying to fish out my foxface from the 90gal. Maybe that will satiate my desire for another fish in the DT!

I should also mention that I had the unplanned test of what happens when I develop a significant leak in my supply plumbing last Tuesday morning. When I woke up I noticed my supply pump sounded a bit louder than normal. I walked downstairs to the DT level of my house and didn't hear the sound of the overflow. I looked closer and oh boy, water wasn't being supplied to the DT! I ran downstairs to find my pump running dry and I lost 30-40 gallons of saltwater to the floor! Fortunately most of it drained to my crock, but after I soaked up everything else, the investigation began. Water had sprayed in areas that shouldn't normally be wet. I didn't find anything obvious, so I filled up the sump with 40 gallons of NSW from one of my tanks. I plugged in the return pump and had Old Faithful spraying against my basement wall! The pump was quickly unplugged and I was disgusted to find the venturi assembly to my LifeReef VS3-36 had cracked. Again, I overtightened a screwed connection which resulted in equipment failure! When I first hooked it up, there was a slow leak coming from that connection. Rather than take it apart, re-goop it and put it back together, I just tightened it up. I thought just a bit, but obviously it turned out to be too much. While SCH40 PVC is more than adequate for our systems, I now understand why some folks go SCH80. In my case, I'll call it the dummy factor. From now on, any screwed connection I have will get a lot of pipe sealant and then only tightened a 1/4 turn past hand tight.
 
Haffs09 said:
Thanks for the comments!

EnglishRebel - What type of problems did you encounter? Did you have a bulkhead crack or even worse a pane of glass?
Click to expand...

No I didn't have a bulkhead crack as I have Spaflex on the suction and discharge sides of every pump. The pump will vibrate and over time you could crack a bulkhead or cause the joints to come loose. It's just good practice to use flexible pipe when connecting things that could possibly vibrate or move.
 
EnglishRebel said:
No I didn't have a bulkhead crack as I have Spaflex on the suction and discharge sides of every pump. The pump will vibrate and over time you could crack a bulkhead or cause the joints to come loose. It's just good practice to use flexible pipe when connecting things that could possibly vibrate or move.
Click to expand...

That makes a lot of sense. How long of a suction run of piping do you have prior to your pumps and what diameter is it? If I redo my 2" line, I'll only have ~6" of flexible pvc (hack up the existing) or if I tore it completely apart and redid it, I'll have 10" of flexible pipe.

I just purchased a Reeflo Marlin from a fellow RC member. Maybe I'll experiment with that, as I will connect it up to unused 1 1/2" bulkhead. Currently, it's hard piped, but I think I'll need to offset it a bit since the Marlin may not fit right next to the Hammerhead. Spaflex will be the way to go if that is indeed the case. Thanks for the insight! Keep it coming...
 
Haffs09 said:
That makes a lot of sense. How long of a suction run of piping do you have prior to your pumps and what diameter is it? If I redo my 2" line, I'll only have ~6" of flexible pvc (hack up the existing) or if I tore it completely apart and redid it, I'll have 10" of flexible pipe.
Click to expand...

Ideally you need at least four to six diameters of straight pipe (Spaflex) before the suction of the pump, but as you are pulling straight from the sump then you should be okay. What you don't need is any elbows in the pipe leading up to the suction. The diameter should be at least the same as the inlet on the pump, so if it's a 1" inlet then 1" diameter Spaflex is fine. The whole idea is not to put any restrictions on the inlet such as small pipe, elbows, or worst of all a valve which is why you should always throttle a pump by restricting the discharge.
Alan
 
Total devastation!

Total devastation!

Well, in my 12+ years in this hobby, I have never been so down and out. This past week was a tough one for me. I lost 2 QT tanks and all their inhabitants.

In the first, I had 6 flame angels and a small yellow tang. All were doing extremely well for 2 weeks. They were eating well, and there was only minor aggression between the flames. All of the flames were < 2", and I started to see the larger one keep track of the others. That was probably my male. Thursday evening, I came home to find one on its side and everything in the tank was respirating rapidly. I checked the water, and ammonia was measureable, just on the yellowish/green side of the chart. I did a 50% water change and moved the lone flame into a hospital tank. I fed a little flake and they ate it. Friday, the flame in the hopital tank was dead and again all the fish in the QT tank were respirating rapidly with one of them in rough shape. I check the water and everything was good, but I did another 50% water change. Again I moved the one into the hospital tank. They didn't look any better after the water change, so I decided to give all fish a 3-5 minute bath with some malachite green mixed in...pretty heavy duty stuff, but that's what I had available late Friday night and was losing hope fast. Over the next 36 hours, everything bit the dust. Through the course of this, I could not see any visible parasite, marks or anything external to the fish. The flames did appear redder than normal under the gill plates. Unfortunately, I'll never know.

So while battling the above, I look and see another QT tank has broken out completely in ich. I had three small tangs in there, a tomini, yellow and lavendar. The tomini and yellow were eating well and the lavendar was still trying to adjust to tank life. The lavendar succombed the next day, followed by the tomini and yellow. All this happened within 48hrs. During this time, I was slowly decreasing the specific gravity from 1.024 to 1.009. I never made it past 1.015.

To top it all off, when I was draining a couple of gallons from the ich tank so I could add some RODI water, the hose fell out of the bucket and sprayed up, directly onto a controller for a MP40W!

When it comes down to it, I was trying to do too much at once. Once one tank started to go haywire, I lost sight of the others, and then like a snowball rolling down a hill, my issues just got bigger and bigger.

What would I do differently? Only have one or two QT tanks versus 4 and cut way back on the fish. I knew I was accepting that risk upfront, and regret it. I hate killing anything, especially fish! Hopefully someone will learn from my misfortune, stupidity or whatever you want to call it.
 
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