Los' 360 reef CAD plans and setup
- Thread starter Los
- Start date
stunreefer
Reef Hugger
CONGRATS Los!!!
Going back for a second, I love what you've done with the pegging system... should eliminate the issues we've seen and give me something to do with my new tank build!
Keep up the great work Los! :thumbsup:
Going back for a second, I love what you've done with the pegging system... should eliminate the issues we've seen and give me something to do with my new tank build!
Keep up the great work Los! :thumbsup:
Los
New member
Thank you, Austin. I'm really happy with how the pegging system has worked out. If you haven't started yet, I highly recommend buying the plastic rods from USPlastic.com:
http://www.usplastic.com/catalog/va..._name=21315&product_id=18413&variant_id=44652
It's only 9 cents per foot and it works much better than the airline tubing. Using ruble with an inch of peg attached to it to occupy the holes until you are ready to replace it with a rock and peg with a coral attached to it works really well to keep the coraline from blocking the holes. As an added benefit, it allows for some really cool aquascaping effects. It was a fair amount of upfront work, but well worth it and moving corals around now is a cinch.
I'll try and get some pictures posted soon. I've already started stocking the tank and so far everything is doing well. Surprisingly, I don't have any algae yet, but I'm sure that will change...
BTW, I took some classes at Michigan in Ann Arbor. Great school and great place. You are lucky to live there, Austin.
http://www.usplastic.com/catalog/va..._name=21315&product_id=18413&variant_id=44652
It's only 9 cents per foot and it works much better than the airline tubing. Using ruble with an inch of peg attached to it to occupy the holes until you are ready to replace it with a rock and peg with a coral attached to it works really well to keep the coraline from blocking the holes. As an added benefit, it allows for some really cool aquascaping effects. It was a fair amount of upfront work, but well worth it and moving corals around now is a cinch.
I'll try and get some pictures posted soon. I've already started stocking the tank and so far everything is doing well. Surprisingly, I don't have any algae yet, but I'm sure that will change...
BTW, I took some classes at Michigan in Ann Arbor. Great school and great place. You are lucky to live there, Austin.
Los
New member
It's been a while since I've posted an update. Where to begin? I guess I'll start with the plumbing. After we put the sump in, it Nick started in on the plumbing.
Here's a close up of Nick. If you need a tank plumbed (or help with anything else), he's your guy.
Next time I'm water testing a tank, I'll be sure and put plugs in BEFORE it's partially full. We had it sealed underneath, but it was still dripping.
Cont'd...
Here's a close up of Nick. If you need a tank plumbed (or help with anything else), he's your guy.
Next time I'm water testing a tank, I'll be sure and put plugs in BEFORE it's partially full. We had it sealed underneath, but it was still dripping.
Cont'd...
Los
New member
We ended up not following the exact plans as set out in the CAD drawings I did earlier in the thread. For starters, I ended up putting the tank in a different wall, so I had to flip it 180 degrees, but I still wanted the sump placed in the original direction. That messed up all our plans.
The plumbing underneath is quite complex. There are three Reeflo Golds. These are very quiet; I have yet to hear any of them. Two of these feed two Oceans Motions, which have 2" in and 1.5" out. Nick suggested we paint the PVC using Krylon paint and that makes it a lot easier to understand which pipe does what:
The red pipes are the emergency backup pipes. There are no valves on them to accidentally shut off and in normal use they should never have water flowing through them. However, should the regular pipes get clogged or accidentally closed, then these will take over. The dark green pipes feed water from the tank to the sump, oceans motions, and pumps and the blue pipes feed water back to the tank.
The two 1.5" drains from the overflow are each split. One pipe feeds the sump and the Bubble King 300 Internal and another feeds the sump and the refugium. The final drain from the overflow is red and goes straight to the sump without any valves.
This is the side that has the refugium in it. The plumbing is a lot less complicated on this side.
Here is the side view:
And finally the back:
And here you can see the plumbing inside the tank:
I ended up getting rid of the two "trident" filters which were pulling water into the closed loops and replaced them with just a single pipe and filter on each side.
Cont'd
The plumbing underneath is quite complex. There are three Reeflo Golds. These are very quiet; I have yet to hear any of them. Two of these feed two Oceans Motions, which have 2" in and 1.5" out. Nick suggested we paint the PVC using Krylon paint and that makes it a lot easier to understand which pipe does what:
The red pipes are the emergency backup pipes. There are no valves on them to accidentally shut off and in normal use they should never have water flowing through them. However, should the regular pipes get clogged or accidentally closed, then these will take over. The dark green pipes feed water from the tank to the sump, oceans motions, and pumps and the blue pipes feed water back to the tank.
The two 1.5" drains from the overflow are each split. One pipe feeds the sump and the Bubble King 300 Internal and another feeds the sump and the refugium. The final drain from the overflow is red and goes straight to the sump without any valves.
This is the side that has the refugium in it. The plumbing is a lot less complicated on this side.
Here is the side view:
And finally the back:
And here you can see the plumbing inside the tank:
I ended up getting rid of the two "trident" filters which were pulling water into the closed loops and replaced them with just a single pipe and filter on each side.
Cont'd
Last edited:
Go BEARS!
Los
New member
For the lights, I bought four Sfiligoi XR6 400 watt MH + 4x26 watt T5s + 4 LED night lights. These are REALLY, REALLY nice lights.
One of them was for the frag tank and three were for the display. Fortunately, I tried one out first. If you buy these, there's something to watch out for. There is pink plastic inside that you need to pull off:
No problem, right? It was a piece of cake; I pulled off the plastic and was done (or so I thought). I then mounted the light (more on that later) and enjoyed finally having the tank lit. After a few days, I noticed there was some melted plastic inside on the reflector:
I did a quick search on Reef Central and google and found several other folks who bought their XR6s this Spring who had a similar problem. It turns out there is a very fine, thin layer of plastic on the diagonal pieces of the reflector that are just barely visible. This is different than the loose plastic that you should obviously pull off. They are on there tight and flush and you have to pick at them with a sharp knife to finally get underneath and pull them off. If you don't (and a lot of people didn't), then you end up with the melted plastic.
Fortunately, I only had tested out one light. After reading about what caused the melted plastic problem, I took the wrapping and loose plastic off of a second light to see if I had the plastic on there and upon very close examination I could see it. Here's a picture with the plastic still on the 4 corner pieces of the reflector:
It is so thin, you can hardly see it. And, it's still quite reflective even with the plastic on there, so it's easily missed.
I called up the West Coast rep and a new reflector is $150 and the corner pieces are a bit less. Lesson learned. I don't know if those pieces were left on there by the factory just in the Spring or if this is an ongoing issue. In any case, if you buy one of these, don't make the same mistake I did.
The lights come with a really cool system for hanging them. They are suspended by two 1/32" wires that come with some mechanical gismo which lets you easily adjust the length of the wire. I plagiarized some great ideas I saw here on RC and mounted these to some Johnson pocket door wheels which then slide in their tracks. This allows me to easily slide the lights back and forth for exact placement or to get them out of the way should I need greater access to a given area.
Here is the Johnson track door system
I ordered them from:
http://www.hardwareandtools.com/invt/6109649
The thread that I got the idea from is at:
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=990537&perpage=25&pagenumber=7
So far so good. Where I screwed up was in attaching the Sfiligoi mount to the wheel assembly. Warning: DO NOT COPY THIS IDEA, IT IS FLAWED.
I found plastic pipe brackets at the local hardware store. These were perfect. They gave me plenty of room to attach the light assembly with a bolt and they had holes that allowed them to be easily bolted to the wheels. Again, DO NOT DO THIS YOURSELF. I'M GOING TO DESCRIBE THE FAILURE LATER ON IN THE THREAD.
Everything was fine and I was really happy with the assembly. The lights moved back and forth easily and it looked good too.
Here is with the lights close together:
And this shows how they can easily be slid over to make room for aquascaping:
To be continued...
One of them was for the frag tank and three were for the display. Fortunately, I tried one out first. If you buy these, there's something to watch out for. There is pink plastic inside that you need to pull off:
No problem, right? It was a piece of cake; I pulled off the plastic and was done (or so I thought). I then mounted the light (more on that later) and enjoyed finally having the tank lit. After a few days, I noticed there was some melted plastic inside on the reflector:
I did a quick search on Reef Central and google and found several other folks who bought their XR6s this Spring who had a similar problem. It turns out there is a very fine, thin layer of plastic on the diagonal pieces of the reflector that are just barely visible. This is different than the loose plastic that you should obviously pull off. They are on there tight and flush and you have to pick at them with a sharp knife to finally get underneath and pull them off. If you don't (and a lot of people didn't), then you end up with the melted plastic.
Fortunately, I only had tested out one light. After reading about what caused the melted plastic problem, I took the wrapping and loose plastic off of a second light to see if I had the plastic on there and upon very close examination I could see it. Here's a picture with the plastic still on the 4 corner pieces of the reflector:
It is so thin, you can hardly see it. And, it's still quite reflective even with the plastic on there, so it's easily missed.
I called up the West Coast rep and a new reflector is $150 and the corner pieces are a bit less. Lesson learned. I don't know if those pieces were left on there by the factory just in the Spring or if this is an ongoing issue. In any case, if you buy one of these, don't make the same mistake I did.
The lights come with a really cool system for hanging them. They are suspended by two 1/32" wires that come with some mechanical gismo which lets you easily adjust the length of the wire. I plagiarized some great ideas I saw here on RC and mounted these to some Johnson pocket door wheels which then slide in their tracks. This allows me to easily slide the lights back and forth for exact placement or to get them out of the way should I need greater access to a given area.
Here is the Johnson track door system
I ordered them from:
http://www.hardwareandtools.com/invt/6109649
The thread that I got the idea from is at:
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=990537&perpage=25&pagenumber=7
So far so good. Where I screwed up was in attaching the Sfiligoi mount to the wheel assembly. Warning: DO NOT COPY THIS IDEA, IT IS FLAWED.
I found plastic pipe brackets at the local hardware store. These were perfect. They gave me plenty of room to attach the light assembly with a bolt and they had holes that allowed them to be easily bolted to the wheels. Again, DO NOT DO THIS YOURSELF. I'M GOING TO DESCRIBE THE FAILURE LATER ON IN THE THREAD.
Everything was fine and I was really happy with the assembly. The lights moved back and forth easily and it looked good too.
Here is with the lights close together:
And this shows how they can easily be slid over to make room for aquascaping:
To be continued...
Last edited:
Los
New member
I loved this light assembly and I was so proud of myself for figuring out how to marry the track idea with the Sfiligoi lights, until...
10 days ago I got a frantic call from my wife. One of the lights had fallen into the water and there was smoke everywhere. I hopped into my car and broke every law getting home. It turned out that one of the plastic brackets had failed and the bolt had pulled right through. The fixture was being held on one side, but a fifth of it was under water
. Curiously, the fuse didn't blow and the light was still getting power (and thus electrifying the water) when I got home. I promptly unplugged the light, pulled down the fixture, and then we went outside while the house aired out. When I took the other lights down a few hours later, I found that all the brackets were right on the verge of failing. Here are a couple of them, one failed and the other about to:
If you look on the top of the second picture, you can see the steel brackets I replaced them with. I found these at Home Depot. I have tested one of the steel brackets with one light for a week now and it works fine. This was clearly a job for steel and I had used plastic.
On the bright side, I didn't have very many colonies in this tank yet. Those that were in there receded down to nothing and I was sure they were goners. A bunch of stinky, melted, white creamy gunk had gotten into the water, probably because the side that fell into the water had the T5 ballasts built in. I don't think that's what caused the problem, though. I think the electricity is what freaked everything out. Unfortunately, I had just the day before put in a bunch of invertebrates I had gotten from Dr. Mac's Pacific East Aquaculture:
This included:
300 Small Blue Legged Hermit Crabs
200 Cerith Snails
150 Nessarius Snails
9 Turbo Snails
12 Emerald Crab
14 Peppermint Shrimp
7 Fighting Conch
Total: 692 animals
All the crabs and hermits were fine, but I did lose some of the snails. I took as many as I could find and threw them along with half my corals into my 90 gallon. Curiously, there was no difference in survival between what was thrown into the 90 after the disaster and what was kept in the 360. This makes me think the problem was with the electricity and once that was stopped, the damage stopped.
Back to the lights. This is what the setup looks like with the metal brackets:
And the other side:
And this is the test light, which has been fine for the past week:
And a close up:
Cont'd
10 days ago I got a frantic call from my wife. One of the lights had fallen into the water and there was smoke everywhere. I hopped into my car and broke every law getting home. It turned out that one of the plastic brackets had failed and the bolt had pulled right through. The fixture was being held on one side, but a fifth of it was under water
. Curiously, the fuse didn't blow and the light was still getting power (and thus electrifying the water) when I got home. I promptly unplugged the light, pulled down the fixture, and then we went outside while the house aired out. When I took the other lights down a few hours later, I found that all the brackets were right on the verge of failing. Here are a couple of them, one failed and the other about to:
If you look on the top of the second picture, you can see the steel brackets I replaced them with. I found these at Home Depot. I have tested one of the steel brackets with one light for a week now and it works fine. This was clearly a job for steel and I had used plastic.
On the bright side, I didn't have very many colonies in this tank yet. Those that were in there receded down to nothing and I was sure they were goners. A bunch of stinky, melted, white creamy gunk had gotten into the water, probably because the side that fell into the water had the T5 ballasts built in. I don't think that's what caused the problem, though. I think the electricity is what freaked everything out. Unfortunately, I had just the day before put in a bunch of invertebrates I had gotten from Dr. Mac's Pacific East Aquaculture:
This included:
300 Small Blue Legged Hermit Crabs
200 Cerith Snails
150 Nessarius Snails
9 Turbo Snails
12 Emerald Crab
14 Peppermint Shrimp
7 Fighting Conch
Total: 692 animals
All the crabs and hermits were fine, but I did lose some of the snails. I took as many as I could find and threw them along with half my corals into my 90 gallon. Curiously, there was no difference in survival between what was thrown into the 90 after the disaster and what was kept in the 360. This makes me think the problem was with the electricity and once that was stopped, the damage stopped.
Back to the lights. This is what the setup looks like with the metal brackets:
And the other side:
And this is the test light, which has been fine for the past week:
And a close up:
Cont'd
Los
New member
I now have two lights up and running and I have one Sfiligoi waiting on a new reflector and one waiting on new T5 ballasts. I could combine them into one working unit, but figure I can get by with 2 until I get the others fixed.
When I get all the lights up I'll show some more of the aquascaping. For now, here are a couple pics of the rocks:
And a side shot:
And the back:
BTW, the Bubble King pulls out all sorts of gunk. This is for Tbone's viewing pleasure
:
I'm really happy with that skimmer.
When I get all the lights up I'll show some more of the aquascaping. For now, here are a couple pics of the rocks:
And a side shot:
And the back:
BTW, the Bubble King pulls out all sorts of gunk. This is for Tbone's viewing pleasure
:
I'm really happy with that skimmer.
Los
New member
There is sand in the tank now and I have moved a couple of the pillars a bit, but I want to get the lights right before I post more pics.
I had an idea which I think is going to turn out really cool. I got a really good deal on a high end Canon Pan, Tilt, Zoom camera. It's a VB-C50ir. I have it mounted in a wall between the tank and my front door:
That's it above my shoulder. The box it is in isn't finished yet, but it will be soon. The camera has a full view of the back of the tank. The camera is web enabled with it's own mini-server built in. I can zoom in and look at any individual coral or part of the tank even when I'm traveling. What I especially like about the camera is the included software. I can set up 16 presets. For example, I can have one zoomed in with 24x optical zoom on an individual coral so that I can see the detail in the polyps. I can then have it at predetermined times take a picture of each of the presets and to save that to a computer on my network. I've had that running for a few months now and I plan on taking all the pictures from a given preset and doing time lapse photography with them. This will allow me to create a video of the corals growing.
I liked the camera enough that I bought another one on Ebay when another deal popped up. That will either be mounted on the other side of the tank or in the fish room.
Speaking of the fish room, it's almost finished. As soon as it is, I'll post some pics.
Cheers,
Los
I had an idea which I think is going to turn out really cool. I got a really good deal on a high end Canon Pan, Tilt, Zoom camera. It's a VB-C50ir. I have it mounted in a wall between the tank and my front door:
That's it above my shoulder. The box it is in isn't finished yet, but it will be soon. The camera has a full view of the back of the tank. The camera is web enabled with it's own mini-server built in. I can zoom in and look at any individual coral or part of the tank even when I'm traveling. What I especially like about the camera is the included software. I can set up 16 presets. For example, I can have one zoomed in with 24x optical zoom on an individual coral so that I can see the detail in the polyps. I can then have it at predetermined times take a picture of each of the presets and to save that to a computer on my network. I've had that running for a few months now and I plan on taking all the pictures from a given preset and doing time lapse photography with them. This will allow me to create a video of the corals growing.
I liked the camera enough that I bought another one on Ebay when another deal popped up. That will either be mounted on the other side of the tank or in the fish room.
Speaking of the fish room, it's almost finished. As soon as it is, I'll post some pics.
Cheers,
Los
Los
New member
Thanks, Bax. You are 100% right that it could have been worse. I didn't feel so bad, considering that fact. I was going to transfer all my sps that weekend and it could have just as easily happened after that. Or, worse, it could have happened while I had my hands in the water and saltwater dripping down my arms. As far as accidents go, I got off easily on this one.
Great updates!
I like the wonderfully organized piping!
Thank you!
savethereef
SCRK
Turned out really nice
Dudester
Premium Member
Beautiful job Los! Your plumbing is incredibly nice, and I really like how that one rock appears to be hanging off the main pillar, creating a great overhang. I'm glad you eliminated the tridents from the drains - totally unnecessary IMO with those screens you selected, and they sure take up a lot of real estate. The compliments could go on and on, and my only constructive comment would be that you may have some difficulty when servicing your 4-ways. I know that it's advantageous to keep them as close to the tank as possible (to reduce restriction of flow), but on the pics they look very close to the bottom of your tank and they may be difficult to disassemble. But again, that's just how it looks on the pics and I'm sure you've already given that (like everything) some thought.
Great stuff!
Great stuff!
