Our 40g Island waterfall

So while I'm taking my sweet time with the stand (it is slowly coming but is coming lol) we took a little video tonight of the tank:)

Tank is now in its permanent position where we get to see it more so that equates to better care , we just added 3 peppermint shrimp to deal with the last of the aiptasia and we've recently added a bunch of zoa frags

Enjoy a little video we took tonight :)


https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UfAwfGDIz_4
 
SaltyDoug said:
Love this tank, however after losing a fish to carpet surfing I couldnt bring myself to have an uncovered tank again.
Click to expand...

Thanks :) yeah it's a hard tank to cover up but for the most part my fish arnt known jumpers and most ice had for years so they don't scare easily anymore lol

Thanks glad you like it :)
 
I just picked up an 80 gallon blue edge shallow tank, and this kind of thing would be perfect for it.

Ive been obsessing over it since last night....

I wonder if perhaps I just did a single island sticking out if I could construct a screen and leave a hole for the rockwork. If I could cover it 90ish% of the way. Then when people come over or im working on the tank I could remove the screen and enjoy its beauty :spin1:

Obviously it wouldnt be 100% protection but would give me some peace of mind.
 
I actually have a screen mesh cover for when I had some wrasses not the prettiest when it's on but does the job so I'd say you can do it for sure :)
 
figured its time for a good update.

tank is coming along great as of lately , we were having a huge issue with aiptasia and i finally broke down and added 3 peppermint shrimp maybe a week or two ago and they are def doing their thing so thats a huge bonus as alot of its now gone.

a friend brought me yesterday a bangai cardinal and a barnacle blenny , the bangai is getting along with my full grown pjs which i was worried about but they dont seem to care about each other lol the little blenny has taken a liking to the many holes and caves in this pukani rock we chose

we have gotten to take a look at my harlequin serpent star as he rarely comes out he decided to come say hi one day out in the open so i took advantage of the situation and got a pic of him on a dinner plate hes really quite cool and so far has been a great addition to the whole system

we started working on the sump a bit today as we are planning to put something down in the fuge area were still in the air on what yet but i added a bit of sand and rearranged the rock to look better down there and shopvacced out the crud while it was empty , cleaned glass etc etc.

tank is now safe to say zoanthid dominated lol theres a healthy mix of cloves , mushrooms and a few choice leather and gorgonians but other than that its all polyps lol

we are adding more gems as we go


a friend of mine from work is coming to help me next saturday cut the remaining marble for the stand so i can get that finished up and applied to the tank its really the last thing making this setup look sweet from a distance


one plan down the road ill be doing soon is swapping out this t5 for a halide pendant supplemented with leds , while i prefer t5s in a living room situation and this type of design i feel halides would be both appealing to the eye and camera while still giving me the results im after:) leds to tweak the spectrum a bit.......thats all down the road for now its running smooth still



yay tank is almost 2 years old and were having as much fun with as we did on day 1 :)



heres some pics












 
so you can see in the last pics the fuge area is simply not going to work lol


while we have no solid stock plans yet (not doing corals) i added some sand and rearranged the rock to look nicer:)









will figure out the rest down there later for now its just tidied up a bit .....

also added my mangroves to the system , they are in a plastic cup now since pods and finally have been large enough to add to the tank so they can be seen and stay above water, they are hidden behind the structure and had just enough room for it to fit back there wihtout being noticeable or a pita to work with .....turned out great i thought:) more of those coming down the road .

 
heres some top down shots of the exposed rock waterfall , excuse the colors its under a heavy mix of t5s atm lol

the epoxy pools and channels have blended in well over time and the exposed rock its self has taken on its own form of life , water is absorbed and coraline algae and other algeas grow without being submerged in water simply being wet is good enough , i thought that was cool

im actually enjoying the exposed rock , its pools and water falls and the corals around the waterline more than the whole tank down lower lol













you can see the cup the mangroves are in in this shot







 
some ugly sump shots :)

nothing fancy happening down there overall , sump runs just as designed we added the green matala filter pads to the drain baffle to stop any animals who get down my drain from going further into the sump without harm so right now they couldnt make it into the filter sock , and then added a piece to my skimmers baffle to stop any small snails or debris from the fuge getting into the skimmer section and further down that line

once in a while i take it out rinse under the tap and replace its an incredible product that has also silenced any water noise in my sump what so ever combined with the herbie style overflow its brilliant:)





 
its full custom built from concept ( obviously) and designed by me and ruth we maxed out every last inch of space available so its a bit of a jig saw puzzle lol
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Update

Update

Ok so I figured I'm about ready for an update and certainly been a while and a lot has happened

Alright where to start ......well I guess we will start from where we left off , we had put a lot of tlc into the tank and our hard work was paying off corals were growing spreading like crazy and the tank was very pleasing to the eye things were running perfectly and was low maintenance it was almost to good to be true in over a decade of reefing this is prob my favorite tank we nailed the design and look we wanted and it actually ran flawlessly

Back in April I had to leave my province to go to the middle of nowhere for roughly 6 weeks work , I had lots of concerns but none really for the tank my concerns were my wife was pretty much 8mths pregnant , she however had no issue taking care of the tank and I had no doubt she could I'd simply put the tank in cruise control and she can do the light stuff like feed send pics lol

5 weeks in to my job and things and went great just as planned at this time the wife is pretty much ready to pop and I'm 5 days away from my flight home , I'm excited to see everyone , the tank and dog and just all around come home :)

The next morning I get a call from the wife saying there's no power at the house , without going into to much detail as we live in a old old house it would be 4 days before they could get the power back up so with things going no where fast with them I had to tell the wife to spend the weekend at her friends as she can't stay there with no power and being pregnant , I'm also stuck in the middle of nowhere with poor communication as I broke my cell first week up here and using my roommates/co worker .....well that friggen Murphy guy eh .....anywho I was a bit worried but the old stubborn reefer in me being typically cocky figured it's not cold out so I'm sure things will fare fine , few losses at worst in some coral maybe loss of shrimps to the extreme ....

The next evening they went by the house to check on things and all of our fish were dead (had some of these guys 6yrs+ ) and all our shrimps were dead , and the whole tank in general wiped out , whatever corals did survive were gone by the following day

Worried about all the crazy nasty palys I told the wife to leave it be and get away from it I'll take care of it when I'm back just in case there's something bad in the air


Power was up shortly afterwards but the damage was done , not a single living thing made it all worms, stars everything was toast within the span of a day or two. I came home and cleaned out a horrible mess basically a 5g bucket of coral slop and old plugs , dead gorg skeletons fish bones etc etc the only thing still showing any hope what so ever is the mangrove while it looks haggard I've seen it like that before (frozen in a winter move oops) and make a miraculous comeback:)

But all that happened were not out , huge blow as we start completely from scratch again but we're in it for the long haul so here we go , some pics of the carnage , a long time reefer still never learns the old lessons and like I say you get cocky and think that's likely to not happen to me lol












 
Oh, that SUCKS! I'm so sorry....sometimes life just gets in the way and stuff happens. Good luck with the rebuild on congrats on the imminently arriving new baby!
 
I am so sorry to read about this. This was one of my favorite tank build threads. Your tank was amazing. I hope you will be able to achieve recreating a similar tank soon. I guess the bright side would be that you'll be able to enjoy the build all over again. That isn't much consolation for the lost critters. :(

Good luck!

Oh, and yes, congrats on your new family member :)
 
Thanks guys , we're def going to restart and was a huge blow but often one door closes so another can open so we figure we will jump right back in :)

While the tank was drained we threw some ideas around about what to do with our tank next , truth be told the tank ran so well we decided to not change much on it and I got it cleaned and back to resembling a box of water again , here's some pics of the empty now cleaned out tank








The tank sat like this for the next month , pretty sad reminder every day of what happened but we're on a path with a new plan to get it filled , I also change up some minor things but we will get to all that soon:)
 
Ok so we had the chance to redesign but actually liked pretty much every aspect except the look of the huge t5 fixture , we decided to go back to metal halide and purchased a pair of hamilton 175w mogul pendants , they came with two ancient bulbs one 10k and one 20k ....odd mixture so i purchased two new 20k bulbs , i also bought a friends setup who was shutting down this was a all or none deal so i ended up with a mixture of random softies and fish some of which need to be rehomed here shortly lol i also started up on zoanthid collection again and am adding some sps this time around so we got a few acros to try out. We bought a large magnificent anemone whos doing great and the clowns love it so after a days maintenance today as i was back home for two days and ship out tomorrow the tanks looking semi great again, the mangrove finally shed its last leaf so im about to order 300 pods to raise then transfer some of these to the display and keep the rest in an attached system tied in:)

Things are settling now but will add some pics tonight of where we are with all this :)
 
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