New 200+ Gallon, Recap of old build and some lessons learned

[quahreef]

I’ve sold my old house and bought a new one. I thought I would give a summary of my old system that I’ll be taking apart and will be updating the thread with a the story for my new build that I’m working with my LFS on.

The Story
The tank was started about 4 years ago and was my first time running a Marine setup. Instead of going small and upgrading over time I decided to go with Med/Large and go for broke. I utilized a lot of advice from the LFS, Reef Frontiers and Reef Central. This thread is an attempt to give back to the community by talking about what went well for me and some lessons learned.

The Display
My old tank was built by CFI and was 60x25x24 Acrylic around 150 gallons. I had the existing cabinets modified to accommodate the tank and then penetrated the garage wall where all the filtration was. Overall been happy with this but you do get scratches on acrylic and with Acrylic yes you can in theory buff it out but I never did. I thought I was being pretty careful not allowing anyone but myself to clean it but scratches happen. It was never so bad that anyone but me really noticed but my next build will be glass. Which I know is harder but if you get a scratch is permanent but given I never sanded/buffed out will probably be about the same to me.

The Lighting
I started with 3 cheapo Chinese LED specials to start. One of the lights failed after about 6 months and decided to get an Eotech Gen 1 Radion. After running with this for another 6 months I decided to buy 2 additional Radion’s and at the time Gen 2 was the hotness and swap out the cheap ones. I’ve been running this since and have had no problems and even picked up a Reeflink. The reeflink is very much a nice to have. I hardly ever use it to modify things on the fly but its great for when I want to program a new schedule. In retrospect not sure it was worth the premium to have wireless control of the lights.



The Garage aka Fish Room
I decided to put all the life support in the garage for a couple of reasons. Number 1 wanted to isolate the noise from the main living area. Secondarily thought it would make WC etc. easier. Doing this is by far the best decision I made. By having this in the garage I didn’t have to worry about making a mess during water changes, gave me plenty of room to tinker and allowed me to make a mess in an acceptable portion of the house and gave me plenty of room to expand. I seriously doubt I would have kept with the hobby without that and I know my wife would not have allowed me to keep it. Also allowed me to make additions such as ozone, calcium reactor, both carbon and gfo reactors, AWC via Neptune DOS. I really have no idea how you would get all of this under a tank.

I built a two tier stand with some lumber and utilized a pair of 55 gallon tanks that I got from the $1 per gallon Petco sales. I also insulated the stand with some rigid insulation for the winter.

Here is the upper

Here I originally wanted to setup an Algae Turf scrubber on the left side and on the right side a refugium. In the end I took down the algae turf scrubber because it never worked the way I wanted and was causing quite a bit of salt creep. I ended up putting a power head in the right section to tumble cheato and dragons breath algae.

Here is the lower

Here is the lower sump which contains the filter sock, skimmer, pumps, ATO and kalkwasser reactor

Low Lights
Took me awhile to learn this lessons but Quarantine is a must. Bypassing this has caused ICK, more ICK, flatworm infestation, Monti eating montiporia. In addition my survival rate of corals/inverts and fish has gone from 10-20% to 80-90%. A side effect of always QT any additions it has slowed my roll which has allowed me to gradually increase bio load which I believe has greatly increased the stability of my system. I know that some people say it will stress the animals out but if you’re keeping them there for a min of 30 days that’s enough time to allow any stress to pass and if they are not nice and fat in the QT with little to no competition for food they won’t get there in the display. I know you always want to have your newest addition in the main tank but you are doing yourself and the animals that you are keeping a disservice by not doing this.

While I was enjoying the wonderful sun and breeze in Kauai my home suffered a power outage. I had a neighbor checking on the tank and they let me know that it was out but told them to not worry about it unless it wasn’t back on in the morning. Well in the morning the power was back on but 90% of my livestock was gone. Despite having a generator by not having instructions on how to get everything going without me it did me no good.

Key Lessons For me to carry forward:

1. NOTHING good goes fast, NOTHING.
2. Having filtration being remote is the best possible thing for me. Allowed me to experiment and identify equipment / strategies that worked for me
3. Loved having a Neptune APEX for automation
4. LED lighting all day all the time
5. Love AWC via DOS, since I’ve done this my stability has gone up and my time spent on maintaince has gone down.
6. A generator is a must. And having someone who can hook it up when your on vacation too.

 

[quahreef]

The new Build

The new Build

The new tank will be located in the family room with the filtration located remotely in a portion of the garage that I will carve out a fish room. The good news is there is plenty of room in the crawl space for me to make the runs. The tank will be 65x26x30 euro-braced ~220 gallons, setup as a two sided peninsula style with 1/2 glass and starfire on the front and right sides. The left side will hold an exterior overflow which I'll plumb with dual 1-1/2 drains setup Herbie style. It will be drilled for 6 returns through the top euro-braces but I'm currently only planning on using two of the return holes and see how the flow looks. The run to the garage will be around 15-20 feet with about a two foot drop to prevent air getting caught in the return siphon. In addition I think by having a dual pump return I can have the first one turn on about a minute before the second to help stabalize the drain before pushing the entire flow through it. The return head pressure is going to be about 90" so trying to decide between dual Mag 18 or 24's.

Here is the tank:

There is around ~45 jog in the wall, my plan is to use this space to house the overflow box and hide all of the plumbing which will be hidden in the left cabinet and my plan is to open up the drywall and drop a total of 3 1-1/2 inch pipes two for drains one for any cables, 2 1 inch pipes for the returns. The reason for running two returns is I want to run two display return pumps for fault tolerance.

Here is a picture of the wall

For the cabinet the area above the tank I will have about 16" of clearance with an internal shelf above that will be used for storage. I will be also venting the top of the cabinet above with a pair of 12x8 vents, my plan is to just use regular floor registers in a hole that will be cut in the cabinet. The primary reason for the vents are for heat issues. Given that I'll be running LED's not as much as a worry as with MH's but my current setup dosen't have this and in the summer you can hear the fans on the lights go into over drive. The tank itself will have a plexiglass cover to contain the humidity. This is how I have things setup today and I get enough oxygenation from the sump and helps make sure I don't damage the cabinets with the humidity. The con of this is that in a power outage siutation there is not enough gas exchange for the fish. I may convert to a mesh top but then have to worry about the humidity and may need to suppliment the passive air exchange with some fans. So not 100% locked on the mesh vs plexiglass cover

The tank will be sitting at bar level since it will be next to the kitchen bar and for visual reasons though it would be nice for them to be at the same level.

Here is the cabinet design

 

[quahreef]

I need some advice. The cabinets and tank are in and now working on building out the fish room and running the plumbing but ran into a problem. My plan was to run a herbie overflow with 1 1/2 pipes to a remote fish room I'm building in my garage.

The drains will come down ~8 ft vertical (6ft from the cabinet and another 2 from the foundation to a drop in the garage) and about 17ft horizontal run with a slight pitch. Good news looks like I will be able to get away with 4 45" bends which isn't too bad.

However because of where I was able to punch the pipes through the wall its two low for my sump.

So my option is to get a new custom one built which is only 14" tall. Or deal with a 45" bend to make it over the edge of the sump and another 45 to turn it back down. The lift is only about 4 inches. With the turn I'm concerned about not being able to generate a siphon with the backpressure.

Does anyone have experience with remote sumps and herbies that can give some advice?

My current plan is to get it running with the up turn and existing sump, figure out how much noise it makes and go from there.

 

[quahreef]

And yes I considered drilling it but its made of tempered glass so no joy.