180g Complete Walkthrough- Updated

[skeets]

180g BareBottom Adventure
This is the story of my 180g from start to continual progression. I will continually update this thread as I add livestock, or any new equipment and such. Eventually I will get a website for my tank, but for now this is it.

I want to first off start by saying MANY thanks to Mike O’Brien (mojoreef) for truly making this tank happen. He influenced this tank through the works and really helped me get on track and get the resources together to get this tank up and running. I also want to thank Innovative Aquarium Products for supplying me with a great tank and great customer service, and also thanks to Cory at Premium Aquatics for helping me out.
My warmest thanks are to my girlfriend Meghan for helping me out so much on something she really did not want to. You put in so many long hours with me and I love you sooo much! She gave up her whole spring break to help me out… and if it had only ended there.

WHY?
So this whole thing started from a perfectly good 120gallon. This 120g was my starter tank into Saltwater, and then into sps. Here is a picture of my 120g when it had some sps in it. This was a few months before I decided to start on the 180g.



During the planning of the 180g I ran into some DSB issues whether it was my fault or just the nature of the beast I do not know(and definitely don’t care to discuss in this thread heeh). I ended up draining the tank, and removing the sand. In my 120g I had all the pests imaginable. I had flatworms and eradicated them through Flatworm Exit which worked great and was completely safe to my reef. I had aiptasia like you wouldn’t believe and bubble algae. For this reason I decided to get rid of all my liverock and start completely fresh with this new tank. Every SPS I had was broken off its rock and rinsed before put into the new 180g. The zoos and ricordias and rock were given to a local reefer who was fully aware of the aiptasia and bubble algae. Once the rock was out of my tank I put in eggcrate shelves to keep my sps up near the metal halides. The last pest I had was red bugs on a few of my sps and while my corals were still in the 120g I decided to use Dustin’s method of using dog heartworm pills to eradicate them. This worked great, and after one treatment they hadn’t returned after two weeks, but I did it again just to make sure.

Here is a picture of my 120g after I drained the tank, took out the sand, and put the water and corals back in


Here is a pic of the rock curing tub that sat in the house for nearly two months. Here in AZ it’s too hot out even in the spring to leave it out in the garage. It had very high flow, 120g of water and a large skimmer that helped along the curing process nicely. I didn’t actually get a foul smell in the house for more than the initial day I put the rock in.

[skeets]

INITIAL PLAN
Now that the boring stuff is out of the way onto the 180g! The tank always was planned to be 180g but went through a different phases of planning. The first initial phase I was going to go with a DSB again and run my tunze streams and two sea swirls in the front corners as my flow. The tank was also going to be a leemar glass tank. I happened to talk to Mike O’Brien about my plans and he said it looked great, except why the hell would I want to do that? We talked for several weeks, and I really bugged him calling like everyday and he finally talked me into going barebottom with a whole different philosophy on the tank. The tank was going to now utilize a motorized ball valve for dynamic flow, use a spray bar to keep detritus from collecting under the rock, have a big skimmer with lots of water movement to utilize lots of nutrient export, and be acrylic not a glass.

DESIGN
So now came the redesign phase. I needed to first figure out how the plumbing was going to work logistically, and figure out where I needed holes drilled, what dimensions to make the canopy and cabinet.

I use metal halide pendants and I wanted the canopy to have the appropriate cross beams to hang my pendants from. I do not like the look of Radiums by themselves, yet I wanted a little bit more of a crisp white than just a 10k bulb gave me. On my old tank I ran a 10k/20k/10k combo. On this tank I started by running 10k/20k/10k/20k with the bulbs staggered as to get them to blend as much as possible. Let me say that it worked OK. It didn’t work great, I thought once my canopy got enclosed the transition will be less noticeable and once my VHO’s are fully functional the actinics will help blend too.

Secondly on the cabinet I wanted the bottom to have a board to keep my sump and equipment off the floor, and thus I needed bracing to support the board on the bottom. Here are the drawings I gave my stand builder.




My stand is made out of 1.5’’ thick steel square tubing. The stand was powder coated, and it stands 40’’ tall. I REALLY like the height. It makes it much more pleasant as the tank is at eye level, and having it built out of a metal frame allows for easy access to equipment.
My canopy is made out of 1’’ tubing and was only painted as I don’t worry about it rusting, because it doesn’t have a load on it. The canopy is only 17’’ tall and will house 4x 4’’ icecap variable speed fans (2 on each end) once my wood work is done.

Next was designing the tank and hole placement for John at innovative aquarium. Now this was a chore deciding where the holes needed to go. It was a lot of planning, and I still ended up messing up by a smidgen(.5’’)! It wasn’t a big deal, I just had to modify one of my elbows and make it shorter. So BEWARE there is a mess-up in the plan showing all 12 holes across the front.

There are three main flow systems in the tank. The first is a spraybar that is on a closed loop and pumped via a sequence 4300. The second is my return via a mag18 from my sump. The third system was my dynamic flow system and has 2 banks of 6 outputs. A motorized ball valve switches between each output to create some nice flow. My dynamic flow is pumped by a sequence 5800.

Here is the outputs measured out on my floor for the dynamic flow


The mess-up is on the 7th hole from the left. It should have been at 38.25’’. Luckily this isn’t noticeable when you look in my tank, I can see it but that’s because I am looking for it. No one else has noticed it, even when I have pointed it out.


The initial design for the spraybar was to come up through the bottom and just have the piping lay on the bottom. As I was piecing it out this didn’t work and I needed to make it a stand, which worked WAY better. It really suspends my rock up nicely(more on that later). I ended up using 1’’ tubing once in the tank for the spraybar.



I couldn’t decide where the inlets to my closed loops should be, So I sent a picture to John at Innovative and told him to decide and surprise me. He picked the 4 holes closest to the edges of the tank(2 to the left and 2 to the right). Thanks John those were GREAT spots. My concern was I wanted them easy to access, I didn’t mind seeing them. I was able to cover up the top ones with a rock that will be easy to move and the other two lower ones are visible, but don’t look bad. Here are the choices he had:


FLOW CALCULATIONS
I have broken it down like this accounting for headloss:
1500gph return
3400gph spray rack
5200gph dynamic closed looop
2403gph tunzes(one on 100% other on 30% since they pulsate)

So I have 4,900gph static flow(27x turnover)
7,603gph dynamic flow(42x turnover)
For a total tank flow of 12,503(69x turnover)

[skeets]

TANK BUILD TIME
So the tank was ready to get built after a couple months of planning. John at Innovative Aquarium Products did a great job. He put together my tank, my sump, and two top off tanks for me. He also packed it up and shipped it all the way down to me in Arizona. I don’t have a picture of the packing, but it was superb. Looked like I had two coffins shipped to me! Here are the pictures John took of my tank in progress. He did an excellent job. Thanks John!

The tank was made out of ¾’’ acrylic, and the dimensions of the tank came out to be 72’’long x 24’’deep and 25.5’’ tall. The top bracing of the tank was made out of 1’’ thick acrylic. The perimeter bracing is about 2.5’’ wide and the center brace is 11’’

[skeets]

ADULT LEGO TIME
Everything had finally arrived to my house. The tank, stand, canopy, plumbing pieces, and most the equipment. It was the beginning of my spring break, and time to start pieces this thing together.

This first picture is of me and my little cousin before the work began. Yep that’s us both smiling, however I think we are smiling for different reasons. I am smiling because I think this tank is going to be awesome, and my little cousin is smiling because he thinks its funny how much I am going to work my butt off to get this thing running.


This is about when that smile dropped off my face. Cutting all those damn small pieces of 1.5’’ tubing to put together my plumbing parts! I never want to do that again… I need to get a bigger pipe cutter lol.
In the background you can see two white boards. One is for my tank to sit on, and the other was for the bottom of my cabinet. They were painted with primer and then some behr paint to seal the wood. They are 3/4’’ board.


I didn’t take as many pictures of the plumbing progress as I should have. I was so frustrated and putting in so much time that I was a grouch. Here is the beginning of putting together my dynamic flow system. This thing was really hard to do! The way it is designed(thanks Mike, lol) each bank has to be put together perfectly, and at the same time which is not an easy task because the pvc glue dries so fast. Here is the first picture of it dry fitted on.


This next picture is of me gluing it together followed by the end result. It is hard to tell from the pictures I took, but each bulkhead has a slip fitting onto it that this bank of outputs has to fit onto. So I had to put each Tee or Elbow together one at a time and glue it and then quickly shove it in place and let the glue dry. Then I needed to take it off and move to the next piece until I had the entire bank of 5tees and 3 elbows done. Once this piece was done I had to glue all the slip fittings and inside of the tees and elbows REALLY fast, and get that bank of 6 outputs shoved on and banged into place. This was a pain in the butt. Did I do it right? Is it going to leak? You will see later!



I didn’t end up documenting anymore of the plumbing. It was a long grueling process getting everything to work and fit. Flex PVC isn’t the easiest thing to work with, but it sure made this job a lot easier. It took me about 2 days to finish all my plumbing up.
The next step was to move it outside and get it hooked back up. Here is the end result in the driveway.

[skeets]

FRESHWATER LEAK TEST
Since it was dark I called it a night and waited until the morning to do my freshwater leak test. Better outside than in the house right? I covered the tank up and went to bed. The next morning first thing I did was start to fill the tank up. That look on my face is a somber realization that I could be doing this entire plumbing gig over again if this thing leaks. I was so uptight that morning it wasn’t even funny!


The sump filling up


Woohoo, return turned on and some water movement. After I checked the tank for leaks and the plumbing for leaks I turned on my sequence4300 and sequence 5800.


This is my custom MR-3 skimmer from myreefcreations. It now has dual injectors and works great. Produces lots of nice gunk. It is powered by a genx8500 pump.


So were there any leaks? Well I let the tank run for the entire day and I did have two leaks, however they weren’t a big deal. I had leaks at the nipples entering my pumps, so I just put new Teflon tape on them and tightened them down more and goodbye leaks. I was very happy that day that I didn’t have any hard plumbed leaks. All that hard work had paid off! So the next step was to get this thing drained and apart again so it could be moved into the house. Here it is taken apart that night

[skeets]

TIME FOR THE TANK TO GO INSIDE
So it was finally time to get the crew to move the tank into the house. This was really awkward because we needed to come in through the front door up several stairs and a few tight turns, into the house and down more stairs. What we ended up doing was taking two of the large folding tables and slowly transferring the tank from one to the other by sliding it on towels, worked out great.
Here is the moving crew… the guy on the left is my dad, next is me, my uncle, a crew member on our race car, and then his dad. Thanks guys!


Of course the floor isn’t close to being level, but I knew this before hand and planned it out. Here is one high tech item supporting this tank! SHIMS! But no wood shims for me because I slop water all over and that means they will swell up. No that’s right, I need my shims custom made by Tom Yancer Racecars, who is our chassis builder. The floor got measured and he milled these shims down to match the gap between the tile and the tank perfectly. Thanks Tom!


I also had to have the house re-wired for this tank… again! There is one 40amp wire running to this room for my metal halides. This is a normal wire on our regular breaker box. This is the aluminum strip on the wall. Then there is a 30amp wire that leads to the two black power strips. These strips go to a generator panel so if we loose power I can start up the generator and power everything I need to my tank(minus the halides). We are soon upgrading to a larger generator that will kick on automatically if the power goes out, right now I have my aquacontroller setup to call me and tell me if the power goes out. I am not finished with the electrical part, I am going to have all my items that are not hooked up by x-10s on a switch panel next to the tank so I can turn on and off stuff without having to unplug things and get behind the tank. That will happen soon.


Just so everyone knows this tank totally ruined the living room. Goodbye to our 70’’ big screen TV and surrroundsound! The room was also a total mess for months, and still isn’t quite back to normal. Here is a picture of the trio of tanks in the living room. My 150g stock tank that was used to cure my liverock, my old 120g and the new 180. Wow that 180 isn’t much bigger… for all that work you should of gone 2 feet longer and a foot deeper… what a dummy!

[skeets]

FILL IT UP!
So with everything in place time to get this thing filled up. I had to fill this up slowly, I make my own RO/DI water. I had problems during this stage though. I got the tank about halfway full and ran into some issues and the water stood stagnant for a couple days. I then finished filling it up and let it run for a while. It was about a 2 week process. I poured my saltwater in, and let it run. UH OH MICROBUBBLES!


I resolved this issue by taking my drain lines and putting two elbows on them, making a U shape so that the water came out and was directed to the top of the surface. This worked wonders!

The next problem was the water was milky and I had some bacterial slime! Was it due to airbubbles? Was it due to my salt? I checked my water parameters and everything checked out fine. It didn’t settle well with me, and I ended up draining the tank and starting over. This time I didn’t waste time and got the tank filled up ASAP and made sure the water was 0ppm on the tds meter in the tank. Time to pour in the salt AGAIN!




I got my salt in, and hooray its milky again. So this time I decided to take the advice of Mike and others here on the board and just put my rock in. The rock did cause the water to clear up after a couple days. Evidently there are particles in the salt that don’t dissolve, and with all the flow in the tank and nowhere for the particles to settle, it floated around. After a few days of the rock being put in it settled and has been good ever since.

Before I got the rock put in however, I ran into another holdup! My water temp was 84.7 without any lights on!!!!!!! After a couple days of testing I found out my sequence pumps gave off a total of 11degrees of heat between the two of them. WOWOWOW! I talked to sequence they said that would be normal on my little water volume. I decided to bite the bullet and buy a 1/3hp artica chiller. I like this thing… it is quiet…when its off! But seriously I think it is quieter than other products out there probably. It does a great job at holding my reef down at 80 where I want it. It is controlled by a 3digit medusa controller so that I can keep the temp flux down to .5degrees. The artica is nice because it is safe to do this with, it will cause premature wear on other chillers. The chiller is fed via a mag 12 that sits in he middle of my sump, and the outlet is in my last compartment where my return pump is. I keep my temp probes in the first compartment and the chiller doesn’t affect it or make any false readings. I like the medusa because it doesn’t get crappy VHO interference like the aquacontroller does. You think for 500 bucks they could get knock the price up 2 more dollars for a shielded temp probe cable.

[skeets]

ROCK TIME
Before I put my rock in I wanted to paint my spraybar with the purple pvc primer so it would blend in better. Now I will tell you about the spraybar design. This isn’t much of a spraybar now I guess; its more of a mini rack. My rock sits on this and is not touching the tank anywhere in the middle of my tank. My rock only touches in the front to hide the pvc rack. I have about 98% of the rack hidden by my rock. This rack/spraybar has worked great and I recommend it to everyone with a barebottom!

Here are the pics of the spraybar. I drilled ¼’’ holes at 45degree angles to the bottom to create constant flow and keep any detritus in the water column and pushed out from under the rockwork. The last pic is of the rack painted with the pvc primer. Looks better in the tank than white.




Putting the rock in I expected to be a pain since it was barebottom. I figured the rock wouldn’t sit on the bottom well, and it would be hard to stack. Well because of the rack I had made and the large pieces of rock I had it was quite easy! I had really big pieces of rock though to work with, and I couldn’t imagine having to stack a bunch of small pieces. I got lucky; I think and it worked out good. The pictures don’t show the good rock qualities, it is hard to show depth when it is just rock. I have some really nice overhangs and such. Here is a pic with the lights off.


This rock is premo stuff. I had about 160lbs of show kaelini I used.

I am able to see the entire bottom of my tank, even under the rockwork because of how I got the rock placed in there. So I can see if my spray rack is working… and well it works GREAT! No detritus is building up in there, it gets pushed out to the front in one corner for easy vacuum access. Here is some views of how I can see the entire bottom. It is hard to tell but on the first pic I can literally see down the entire length of the tank. It was just too hard to get the camera to take a pic of it.
(NOTE: I have to bend down and really look… all this piping etc isn’t noticeable just looking at the tank normal)




Here are two side shots of the tank with two 400w radiums on it. The 250w 10ks were still on my 120g keeping my sps alive. I have since moved them over though. Man that rock looks white and ugly.

[skeets]

LIVESTOCK TIME
So finally now that everything is stable and running good its time to test out this water by ordering 200 bucks worth of a cleanup crew. I made 3 orders. The first order was for worms, pods, small reproducing snails, etc from inland aquatics. The other two orders were from dr foster and smith. One order from etropicals the other from liveaquria. Get this… by ordering from the two different places I got 20 more snails and saved 35 bucks even though they are owned by the same company. Shipping was free on both orders. Here is what I ended up getting


Astrea Snails


Cerith(liveaquaria) and Turbo Snails


Cerith(etropicals) and Trochus snails. It is interesting to note that the etropical and liveaquaria snails are different. I wanted a lil diversity. The black ones are from liveaquaria and the white ones are from etropicals(even though their sites show different pictures)


Peppermint Shrimp. I ordered 4 and got 5!


Emerald Crabs. I love to watch crabs


Margarita snails. I forgot to take a pic of them in their bag so here they are once released. See the crab?


Cleaner shrimp. I ordered 3 of these guys, I love them. And after all this hard work I think I deserve a little pampering right? My shrimp thought so too!

[IMG]
http://www.internetsyndicate.com/per...q/cleaning.jpg[/IMG]

[skeets]

OLD LIVESTOCK
So after adding all the new livestock and seeing how they did, which was terrific, it was time to tear down the 120g and move everything over. Now that was a project! Meghan and I started at 2pm and went to bed at 330am when we finally got my livestock moved over. As I had mentioned before I was careful not to bring any aiptasia over to the new tank. I also didn’t transfer over any snails or anything that could possibly have it as a hitchhiker. Lets hope it doesn’t live on sps tissue!
No pictures of the move but it was a long grueling day. Thanks again to my baby for helping me on this one!

So did everything do good on the transfer? To be honest… no! My corals have had a hard time adjusting to the light. Most corals have acclimated and are fine now. My piece that got hit the worst was my samoensis colony. In my 120g it was in a spot that the bottom wasn’t receiving much light. I ended up placing this on the bottom of the tank thinking it would be fine because it was much higher in the other tank. Well was I wrong! The light reflects off the acrylic and the white board that the tank rests on so it got a lot of light. Here is a before picture in my old tank.


Here is a picture of it now. It is not getting worse, and it is definitely getting better. As long as no algae or anything grows on the branches I wont break them off. The white stuff on the bottom of the colony is epoxy to cover up any chance of aiptasias being under there since it hadn’t encrusted all the way. (As of 8 months later the colony is doing awsome)

[skeets]

STARTING EQUIPMENT
So now ill go over some of the equipment and setup.
My flow consists of:
Sequence 4300 for the sprayrack,
5800 for the dynamic flow with a 1.5’’ Hayward ball valve.
I am using a mag18 as my return.
My skimmer is a myreefcreations skimmer with special dimensions, measuring out to 30’’. It has dual becket injectors and works well. It is powered by a genx8500 pump that sits in the first compartment of my sump.

My sequence 4300 and 5800 are sitting on a carpeted board to reduce any noise vibrations. Works good, my 4300 is a little loud because of the backpressure it has from the plumbing design, which was inevitable. You can see on my pumps that I used a double union ball valve. These babies are sweet! However a 1.5’’ one will set you back 25 bucks a piece lol. They are so easy to turn as compared to the cheap white ones, and they are compact with the ball valve and unions being in one piece.


Here is a pic of everything fitting nicely in the stand. I did a LOT of planning on this… I made sure that it would be easy to get the skimmer in and it would clear once I had a stand made to suspend it up out of the water some. I also made sure that all the equipment I wanted would fit under there.


Here is a picture of one of the holes going to my sprayrack. I have to holes drilled in the bottom of the tank. I needed to cut a big enough hole in my wood to allow me to get my hands in there to tighten down the bulkhead. I used all sch 80 bulkheads on my tank. You can also see how the wood was painted and sealed.


Here is my CA reactor and topoff setup. My CA reactor is a myreefcreations cr2. It has worked pretty good, and I am running a 5lb co2 bottle which is being upgraded to a 10lb bottle next time I need to fill it up. I run ARM media in my reactor. The reactor has a external mag2 and also is pumped by a mag 3.5 that sits in the sump.
My topoff tank is a 12g tank, and currently I am evaporated like 2 to 3 gallons a day without any fans. I am using a tunze top-off system that has worked great.


The tunze system is kinda like a float valve. It uses an optical eye however to know when it needs to fill the tank. This is sitting in the last compartment of my sump. The float switch you see is a emergency item incase water gets left on and floods. It really is useless up there, if that much freshwater got in there it would be a mess. I could put it on another rail and lower it if I was truly worried about it.

[skeets]

Here is my 1/3hp artica chiller. Like I said before this thing is quite… when its off(its off in the pic). It is noisy, but I think its probably quieter than any other thing out there. It also looks nice too. I am unsure of where its permanent home will be so that’s why I have the extra tubing currently. It is pumped by a mag12


Here are my luxury items for this tank. My aquacontroller and my 3digit medusa controller. My medusa controls my chiller and turns it on at 80.5 and off at 80degrees. I like to keep a tighter degree range than the 2degree that comes with the chiller.
My aquacontroller controls my lighting and allows me to check PH and temperature swings etc. The temp is off from my medusa because there is no point in changing it. The aquacontroller gets horrible interference from the VHOs when they are on, and truly sucks as a temperature controller, so I just use it as a reference to see temp swings over the day. I do have it setup however if the tank gets 81 degrees to shut off my MH just incase.


This is what my lighting looks like (I changed my lighting setup from what is here. See below on changed equipment). I have two 250w DE AB 10k bulbs powered by a dual PFO 250w HQI ballast. I am also running two 400w 20k Radiums powered by a dual PFO 400w HQI ballast. My lighting goes 10k/20k/10k/20k. It does an alright job of blending. I also have 2x 160w VHO actinic bulbs that are powered by a icecap 660. I had to send the ballast back to get a dimmer modification made to become compatible with my solar dimmer 750 that I bought. Eventually that will work.


Here is my drain lines from the tank into the sump. I wanted to keep down on the evap in the cabinet so I had the first compartment in my sump made into a box, with water flowing under the first baffle that extends to the top of the sump. I also had a lid made, and drilled 3 holes in it. Two holes were for my drainlines and the other hole was for my skimmer pump hose and electrical cord. This is turning out to work great, it keeps down on 99% of the saltspray and evap etc that I had in my old tank.


Here are some pictures of the detritus that has accumulated in my sump. I have been blowing off my rockwork daily to try to get all the detritus out. So far the detritus is collecting in my sump in the first compartment(where my skimmer pump is… grrrr), and my middle compartment where I have some extra liverock placed. This liverock helps cut down on any skimmer bubbles that might try and make it to my return pump



I am not running a refugium for critters or macroalgae. I do however have a separate 10g bug tank with large populations of different pods and worms. It is actually a really cool tank, I love watching all these little guys running around. Also it is cool to see the worms crawl out of the sand and stuff when I feed. It has a aquaclear mini filter on it, a ebojagger heater, and a LOA 65w light.

[skeets]

UPDATED FROM HERE

CHANGED EQUIPMENT
The following are things that I changed over the 8 months the tank has been setup.

LIGHTING
I could never get the 4 bulb 10k/20k/10k/20k combo to look right, it never blended properly. I am now running 3x 250w DE 10K AB bulbs, and 2x 400w Radiums all run by PFO HQI ballasts. I did not like how 4 bulbs looked over the tank, and now with 5 bulbs it blends excellent. I run my bulbs in the following order-10k/20k/10k/20k/10k. The metal canopy has the same dimensions as before where my lights are placed, with one bulb added in the middle. I am running 2x 6’ vho actinics.



GENERATOR
The automatic backup generated has been installed. It is awesome, whenever the power goes out the generator automatically kicks on and switches everything over. It has been used several times already, with about 30mins being the longest use. It runs on natural gas.

PHOSPHATE REACTOR
I have had my Deltec FR509 reactor and 5L of rowaphos now for about 3 months. I ordered a good merck test-kit to test my phosphates. I have yet to install the rowaphos reactor, primarily because I am lazy. However my phosphates are reading 0 on the merck kit. This means my system is working real well, and I have been doing very good at keeping my nutrients in check. I have very little algae growth. I suspect if I hooked up the rowaphos reactor my algae will probably completely disappear.
It was in my intention to start this system from day one with RP, but that did not happen.

[skeets]

MAINTINENCE SCHEDULE
Detritus Cleanup
I get detritus accumulating in one spot in my display tank(a back corner, and very easy to get too… only large chunks accumulate here), and the finer stuff accumulated in my sump. I siphon out the detritus in my display about every 2 or 3 weeks, because we are talking a pile about the size of a quarter. Most of the detritus in my sump had been in my drain compartment which WAS sealed off and a real pain to get into because I had to shut the returns down, disassemble the drains, pull the cover off, and then I could clean it. So a lot of detritus would accumulate in there and it was hard to get to.
I took care of that problem! I cut about a 5’’ hole in the top of my drain compartment lid. This will allow me to get my hand in there weekly to siphon.
I tried just siphoning for a couple months, however I wanted to remove the detritus easier. I now am running 25micron filter bags on my drain lines. I change these every other day, and then I was them in the washing machine. After about 10-15 washes I throw them out and get a new pair. They are less than $2 bucks from www.filterbag.com so this is a really cheap way to keep my water very clean. It also kills all microbubbles.


I am covering the hole with a piece of acrylic. The point of this compartment is to keep down on evap in the sump area.


Skimmer
My skimmer does pull out a lot of gunk. This picture is from 4days. However I have noticed once the skimmer gets to this level of gunk, it slows down and wont seem to produce a whole lot more. I can never get the skimmer to pour a lot of gunk down into that tub and into my waste collector. I have never really figured out how to get this thing dialed in. It wont consistently skim wet like I want it.


Salt
I have used about 240gallons of oceanic salt for water changes, so I am in the process of changing over. I have not had any negative effects, and its too hard to say if ive had positive or not. Everything is normal.

Parameters
I am keeping my alk around 9dkh and my calcium around 420. This has lead to some great growth in the tank. Because of my setup and aggressiveness at nutrient export, I have undetectable phosphate(with a merck kit), ammonia, nitrate, nitrite. The tank is extremely healthy.

CABINETS
Here is what the initial design of the cabinets were.



Since my tank sits so far away from the wall, there was a lot of extra design that had to go into making the cabinets work. I needed there to be a hidden door so I could access the back of the tank easily. Here is a pic of the 26’’ gap behind the tank.


It is also important that the cabinets do not take up excessive “working� space and do not hinder the accessibility to the tank for maintenance and such.

[skeets]

FINISHING TOUCHES!!
Finally for what everyone has been waiting for. Complete pics with CABINETS!
I still need to decorate the shelves, and there is some crown molding going around the top to finish it off.

Here is my entire setup at 8months.




The cabinet maker matched the metal tubing of my stand and canopy to give me maximum access room. There are even small doors on the sides for access.


The canopy has doors on the side, and installed in the doors are 2x 4’’ icecap variable speed fans. This works great, and I am able to open the doors up with no fan problems, since the fans are mounted right to the door.



The left cabinet has a TV and all our entertainment electronics in it. I have the shelves to make this left side match the right side. When I move, there will not be a TV in this cabinet.

The right cabinet houses aquarium supplies, electronics, and chiller. The chiller is the reason why all the cabinets have speaker cloth on them, so that they would match the chiller side which needed the speaker cloth to allow the chiller to get good airflow. I was afraid that the chiller may not get enough airflow, or it would be too hard for the air to escape out, but the chiller works just as good as when it was out in the open. It is much quieter in the cabinet too.


In the left part of the right cabinet I have all my electronics mounted on a rack for easy access. I have a sheet of paper that lets me know what switch is what.


As I stated before, I needed to be able to access the back of the tank easily, and I needed a hidden door. Here is what we came up with for this. Everyone who sees the tank asks, “how do you get back there if you need to?� Guess that means the “hidden� part of the door works.


The cabinets are awesome. Lots of detail went into this to make it a full wall unit, and look as if it extends all the way back to the wall. Everything is cherry wood.
My cabinet maker is Marvin Pace, owner of Cabinet and Trim Masters here in Arizona. He did an excellent job, and put lots of work into every detail. This was a complete custom job, and was a team effort on design between Marvin and I.
If you would like to reach him, his contact info is:
Cabinet & Trim Masters,LLC
19019 N. 45th Circle
Glendale, AZ 85308
623-587-9068

[skeets]

LIVESTOCK
Fish
I plan to have probably about 7 fish total in this tank once I can decide what else I want. I want to get very peaceful fish on the more rare/exotic side.
Currently the fish I have are:
Pyro- Flamehawk(with me for 2 years)
Grouch- Royal Gramma(with me for 2 years)
Tommy- Tomini Tang
Belle- Female Bellus Angel

Inverts
I still have 2 cleaner shrimp that I only see once lights are out, and I have my 5 peppermint shrimp still which all live in a huge cave one of my rocks has. I see their antennae out during the day, and them during the night.

I have a Sumatran Speckled Sunburst Linkia that has been with me since the beginning of July. I named her Speckles, and she has been doing GREAT. One very interesting thing is that she has dropped one of her arms, which I see on a regular basis cruising around the tank. The leg has doubled in size and Speckles and completely re-grown her leg.
I have 2 brittle stars that have been with me both now for two years.

At least once a month my trochus and margarita snails spawn. My whole tank turns milky white for hours. I have had several new snails thanks to the spawning events. It is awesome that I am actually having these guys reproduce on a consistent basis in my tank.

I found a baby urchin of some kind that came in as a hitchhiker from my rock. He hangs out in the same place during the day, and cruises around at night. I have no idea what he is, but as of now he does no harm. We will see as he gets bigger.

Coral
This tank is a predominant SPS tank, housing both acroporas and montiporas. I also have numerous different zoanthinds on the bottom of my tank, along with a couple very nice yuma ricordias. I am keeping the zoanthids on separate rocks on the bottom of my tank to prevent them reaching my main structure. I don’t want anything on my main structure except SPS.

[skeets]

LIVESTOCK PICS
Here are pictures of a few things in my tank. Hope you guys enjoy the eye candy.

[skeets]

[skeets]

[skeets]

[skeets]

[skeets]

[skeets]

[skeets]

[skeets]