Ryan's 300 Gallon Starfire Journal

Side Shot

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Some Tester Coral Shots. They actually still have good color (compared to what they had in the other tank), and good polyp extention!

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And here is the manifold i built that is fed off teh Dart Return...

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Well the City Inspector just left....

He signed me off! Everything is good! Im really happy considering i did nearly all the work my self!

I tested the water levels again today. After a few days of zero Ammonium, i tested it today and it was like 2.5! I really didn't know why so i cleaned the syringe w/ fresh water really good and re-tested and it was at zero! I also forgot to shake the reagent so that might have had an effect on it. I'll continue to test prior to saturday.

I also tested the nitrite and it was zero as well.

Yesterday, i got teh QT setup and running so in a month or so, i can start adding some fish!

Here is a shot...

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roktsintst said:
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Click to expand...

You can use black (DuPont) Krylon to paint your dursos so they don't stand out so much. Be sure to put masking tape on the bottom 3/4" if you paint them. (Remove after painting, of course)You don't want paint on the part that slips into the bulkhead.

After a while, the back of your tank will cover with coralline, and you won't even notice the overflow...

Are are you using all four standpipes?

LL
 
looks great! but i would still think about covering the back with something. maybe even a black backround so it's not permanent.
 
fishkid6692 said:
looks great! but i would still think about covering the back with something. maybe even a black backround so it's not permanent.
Click to expand...

Thanks Matt. Like i said, im still undecided about how im gonna handle that. Now that i've moved everything over, i REALLY love to look at the tank from the back of the room. it may just be a worthy sacrifice. Also, I followed Brians thread (previous tank owner and March 2008 TOTM) and he never had a background that i saw. The 2 years of following his thread i never noticed it until i owned the tank. Wait until i post pictures of the tank full of coral! And i put some smaller rocks in front of the stand pipes to help hide them, but before too long they will be covered w/ "stuff" to help hide them as well!
 
The UpDate!

The UpDate!

This is gonna take a while...

So, Saturday came and I got home from work at 7:30 am. My wife was ready to help after my brother backed out on helping with the move. I got the new tank ready, (checked levels, got the ladder out, towels down, and the door above the tank removed).

Then we went over to my brothers. It isn't too far, about 10 minutes.
We got a few last pictures of the other setup. It was a little sad breaking it down. I just put sooo much time and sweat into it, it was a little sad to see it go.

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So then i got the truck ready with tanks and buckets.

I filled 3 totes 1/2 full of water and began taking all the corals out of the big tank first. I wasn't gonna worry about the frag tank until the big tank was moved and settled. Oh, and before i did that i shut everything down for the last time! I also took the last of teh rock out and put it in a trash can that i filled w/ water. I had a 55gallon acrylic tank i filled in the back of the truck that i used for the big pieces and the fish.

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Once i had all of the livestock out of the big tank, we left all of the equipment at my brothers and drove over to my house to just get the fish and corals into the new tank!
 
So once we got to the house, we took the totes into the house. Then my wife and I, just started grabbing the big corals out of the 55 in the truck. I just put them on the sand until i could get all the corals in the tank as quickly as possible. I also needed to get the last of the rock placed before i could start placing corals!

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Then once those frags were placed with the remainder of the rock and the fish, we ate some lunch and headed back to my brothers to get the equipment and frag tank! Now that was quite an ordeal! I never expected that to take soo long. breaking down all the equipment too a very long time. Then we pumped some water into some totes and the rest of the 75 gallon frag tank into two trash cans to reuse the water at the new house. I took all the frags that were on the racks and put them into the totes. But i left the few fish and all the challices/ LPS on the bottom w/ ~4" of water for the move to the new house....



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Oh, here is the table i built! I am pretty restricted on movement inside the room so i had to make the most of it!

Here is my table!

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The special thing about it, is that there are hinges on all 4 legs. So all i do is lift it and there is a clasp on the side is hook to the wall and the table stays up against the wall and doesn't take up any room!

I love it!
 
Anyway, back to the move!

Things were going very well. I was a little worried about my orange shoulder. When i was moving him from the 210 into the truck, i slipped jumping into teh truck bed w/ him in the net and i fell on the truck bed! He did some flopping around until i could pick him up, but now his is just fine!

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So that was most of the move! My wife took over 100 pictures so that is just a quick recap on the days events. These pictures are also from saturday, and i have got a lot more done so i'll try to take some new pictures of the clean and organized fish room and the finalized display.

I am sooo happy w/ the way the display came out! It looks incredible!

Now, on a more somber note. The only bad thing about whole move is.....

I had got everything at least placed in the display, and i had the frag tank up w/ water and powerheads in it, but not connected to the main system. We had to go to a Firemens Retirement Dinner and i couldnt' get it done. I just figured i would connect the two systems after dinner.

Well during the dinner my son's mom called me and told me that he fell and she was going to take him to the Emergency Room 30 minutes away. So my wife and I got in the truck (which still had the 55 gallon tank full of salt water in the back!) and drove to the hospital. Well he ended up breaking his arm and so we didn't get home until 1am. At that time I really didn't fell like doing a bunch of plumbing!

So i left the tank. The next day i was going to a SF Giants game with my dad and brother so i couldn't work on the tank. But i woke up to a HUGE problem. Im not sure what happened, all the levels lined up, but i lost a bunch of corals. Almost all my sps were dead white or severely bleached and all of my challices (Quite a large expensive collection) were sucked up showing a good amount of skeleton, and some were just plain dead! I lost a very nice hard to find Jabawaki and a 3" Fruity pebbles colony.

On the bright side, the display looked great and all my fish are doing Awesome! And most of my Challices pulled through, but i did lose some really nice ones. I had also just pulled all my nice sps out of the frag tank to mount in the display, so i was lucky there again!
 
Oh yeah, I was also very worried about the tank temperature. I did some re-programming of my AC3 and i mounted a 12" fan to blow across the tank. I didn't even plumb the chiller and by spliting my lighting schedule with the 400's ive been able to keep the tank @77! I think i can even go lower but i dont want ot push the issue too much. The weather has been very mild lately as well, but it is nice to know that even with all that equipment, it is possible to keep the temp down.

I think my "new" solution for cooling, is to install an 8" external Fantech vent fan that pulls 400 cfm and to mount the 18" 11000 CFM fan to the wall and use evaporative cooling. I think im also gonna get another 1/4 hp chiller and run two of them at separate temps so the second one only kicks on if the temp gets really warm and that way, it is also redundent!
 
Sorry to hear about the losses Ryan.

Can you clarify if you only lost the sps in the frag tank only or the sps in the display?
 
I only lost frags out of the frag tank. They were all backup frags for the most part. i did lose 2 nice colonies on the pink Lemonade though...
 
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