Joe's 180 In wall SPS Tank

[RTMA]

Sure G, I'll see if I can isolate him, but may be a while as he is hiding behind the other on the same rock. I'll shoot you a pm.

Just got my new Hanna Alkalinity and Calcium checkers, the Alkalinity one is awesome and just realized that my alk is dropping pretty low everyday (around 6) so it's time to recalibrate the dosers. I think when its all said and done I'll be dosing close to 300 ml of Alk per day...better start baking that baking soda Low alk is what I probably should have expected when dosing Calcium and alk for the same time each day. And this all while still dosing top off Kalk, but as it gets warmer less evaporation and less Kalk into the system, which is probably a main reason alk is low.

Tomorrow I hope to be building a new staircase for the room, but we'll see how it goes. Tough building a tank and finishing a room at the same time. Also have to do some more lighting...fun stuff.

 

[scolley]

Joe - have you thought about working on the tank and the room so that they "finish" at the same time? For instance, you might finish some process on your tank - say initial population - where you are going to let things settle for a few weeks, before moving to the next step - whatever that is.

Anyway, that few week gap might be a time where you shift efforts from tank to room finishing.

Or is it that you want to finish the room before populating the tank?'Considering dust, paint fumes and such...

 

[RTMA]

Its been a while and a lot has been done.

Didn't take any pics while I was putting it together, but here is the final outcome.

4' side

3' Side

Livestock

Borbonious Anthias
Firefish Goby
Female Bellus Angel
Hybrid Mimic Tang (or what could just be a changing Half Black Mimic)

Coral Beauty

I love watching the Coral Beauty and the Mimic tang follow each other as they graze. Kinda reminded me of watching Atlantic Blue tangs graze while snorkeling in Aruba.

Doni's Reef Picasso (Ocelleris)
SA Black Ice Clownfish (Occelleris / Perc mix)
Leopard Wrasse

Wish List:
Pair or Trio of Ventralis Anthias

I did lose my ORA Hycinth Birdsnest after and my Purple Plasma colony just before, but other than that it went pretty well.

 

[Collinrb]

that's beautiful. I can't even make a 20 long look that clean

 

[RTMA]

Well Collin it's all pretty new, hopefully the sand stays that clean!

The pictures fail to show the depth. I have to thank Steve for the aquascape help. Hopefully it will fill out even more over time.

Here are some Fish room shots.

It's all powered on its own 20 amp circuit. I may run another to split them.
I do still need to upgrade the Reefkeeper to version 2, but been lazy at sending back my SID. I also plan to get a new SL2, as I do sometime get interference on the PH port, which gives me some wacky readings. Still need to do some better cable management.

Things have been settling in, as I can tell as my Alk consumption went from 60 to about 120 ml of Alk per day. Good thing baking soda is cheap. Oceanic salt has plenty of Calcium so I'm just adding alk and Calcium is around 450 still.

Added the GFO reactor and PO3 has gone from .04 to .02 in two days and probably close to 0 today. I'll have to be careful and feed a bit more, but i did add three new fish. I'll test that tonight.

Water is made by a new BRS RO system with the two 75GPH water saving membrane kit.
I used my old Water General 150gph system as my DI canisters now. Water in is about 109 TDS and after the membrane I see about 7-9 TDS going into my DI. This should last me a good while.

Sump shot of skimmer (waiting for a new bubble blaster 2000 for the SRO), Avast K1 Kalk Stirrer and MR1 Reactor. I have found that mixing both the ROX carbon and GFO in the same canister help keep the GFO from clumping and solidifying. All powered by a Reeflo Snapper 18. So nice to get remove the bevy of Maxijet's I used on the past systems. Built a custom mount for the snapper using some very nice Sorbathine feet (thanks Scolley for the tip!). Found them on Amazon here

The pump is somewhat noisy so I'll replace that later on with hopefully something a bit less noisy.

I feed the external skimmer from my drain and used a modified version of the Bean overflow. So far it has worked out well (besides the need for a new skimmer pump). [On an aside - Jeremy from CoralVue has been awesome with replacing the skimmer pump. It happened on Friday night around 9 pm and by 11 pm Jeremy had responded and by Saturday I knew I'd have a new pump shipped to replace the old version 1 one. Great customer service! If anyone is thinking about a new skimmer, I would highly recommend a Reef Octopus.]

I still need to setup the dosers, maybe I'll do that tonight.

 

[RTMA]

I also want to thank everyone who was kind enough to buy frags from me to help fund this project. I appreciate it.

 

[thefuz]

Holy cow - so awesome! Can't wait to see it in person. Great job!!

 

[RTMA]

Thanks Mike.

Po3 - 0.0 on my Hanna Meter
Alk - Still low (@ 6 dkh at 11:30 pm) - upped to 125 ml per day, and that's with about 1.5 gallons of Kalk.

Decreased temperature to about 78. Hopefully this will save a little bit of heater expense. Would like to get it to stay around 77 eventually. We'll see.

 

[Arusso713]

Man the tank looks great.