55 gallon FW to reef conversion

[ratherbediving]

I am setting up a 55 gallon setup (previously freshwater). I loved keeping African cichlids, but have been wanting a saltwater tank, especially a reef tank, for a quite awhile. Even after reading an embarrasing amount of RC and several books the last 14 months, I still have a lot of questions.
I am starting to get anxious about getting the tank up and running, and have a feeling that I am going to start making a lot of mistakes in the process in my impatience. So I thought I'd start this thread detailing my 55 gallon conversion to a reef tank--
I currenlty have the following stuff:


3 MJ 900s and a 'Natural wave' powerstrip
Custom sump
ASM G2 protein skimmer
200 watt Visitherm heater
Powerstrip w/ integrated timer (for lights)
A number of reefkeeping books :)
Quiet One 3000 pump on order for the pump return
Kent Marine kalkwasser gravity doser and Kalkwasser
Refractometer
40 lbs aragonite sand from LFS
4 bulb T5 retrofit


I am going to be placing on online order for some goods that the LFS doesn't carry right now. I know I need:
Some test kits--
I am thinking Salifert nitrate, calcium and phosphate kits are good ones to spend the money on. Ammonia, nitrite, and alkalinity I think I can use cheaper kits. (will see what LFS has). My LFS has recommended Red Sea test kits for everything, but I am hesitant based on what I've read here.

Ph monitor-- am looking at either the Pinpoint PH monitor or the Milwaukee instruments monitor/ controller. I am hoping to use an AC adapter, although I have read these can screw up the readings. Not too reassuring, but I hate batteries. :rolleyes:

Additional water movement-- I am thinking about getting one more powerhead also; either the Rio Seio 820 or 620. I am still not sure which one to get, but am so far opting for the 820. The price is not much more, and I certainly don't want any more power heads in the tank if the 620 turned out to be not enough flow (have way too many as it is).... on the other hand, the 620 uses 8.5 watts vs. the 820 uses 18.... The reason I want to one now is that Customaquatic has the 820 on sale for $42.... seems almost too good to pass up.

Heater-- the one I have has been going strong for over two years... however, I am paranoid about heaters that stay on... should I get a new one? I am thinking about ordering the heater at the bottom of this page (250 watt) (http://http://www.customaquatic.com/customaquatic/subsubcategorypage.asp?subcatindexid=he-aq-ti) from Custom aquatic.

At any rate, I have a lot more questions.... but I have rambled on long enough! If you have any advice, please let me know.

Thanks! :)

---Mike

[Nuhtty]

Go with the Seio 820

[ratherbediving]

Nuhtty

That is probably a good recommendation, and I was leaning towards that. I am not planning on getting a chiller and so am watching pretty carefully the wattage of everything I am putting in the tank. But an extra 10 watts shouldn't hurt anything.

As far as test kits goes-- I am thinking about getting (eventually) some zoanthids, button polyps and mushrooms to start off with, then maybe getting some LPS. I will be dosing kalkwasser to keep the Ca up; will there be any other supplements I need?

[phil519]

regarding additives/supplements - I found this article to be very useful:

Water Parameters (http://reefkeeping.com/issues/2004-05/rhf/index.htm)

As far as heaters- I'd suggest considering purchasing 2 (lesser powered) heaters so that if one fails - the change in temp won't be that catastrophic - but equally important if one goes the other direction (as in tries to fry your fish) it won't be that powerful.

HTH

[ratherbediving]

phil519

Thanks for the excellent link! It was a good read; I have that bookmarked and will definitely refer to that again. Based on what it was saying, I think I should investigate supplementing magnesium, and I wouldn't add supplements without having a means of measuring for that ion.... so I need some kind of test kit for that.

Having two heaters is a good idea; however, I think they would be hard to calibrate. Meaning, I would think it might be easy to have one heater that was on 75% (working too hard) and the other only on 25%.... (just examples.) Although it has been a LONG time since I read about this-- I thought the issue with heaters was that there was a small piece of metal in the heater which moved in or out-- when the temperature reached a certain point, the metal would move a different direction turning the heater off. Since this piece of metal was constantly being moved back and forth, eventually sometimes the metal piece wouldn't switch off-- causing the overheating problem. I may be wrong about this--- but I would think using a heater with an IC (integrated circuit) to determine when the heater goes on or off would circumvent this problem. I'll do some more research on this, and if what I said is bogus, I may purchase two heaters as you suggest. Meanwhile, I should be able to get by with my current heater for awhile.

[ratherbediving]

Alright, I had a lot of dumb experiences in plumbing the last few weeks. A sensible person wouldn't actually share them. However, I figure I might as well share all the things I did wrong, in hopes that maybe someone might benefit from them.

Keep in mind I did some of these things at night, and may have not been as awake as I should have been :)

I set up my tank outside, put in the sump, and filled it up with the hose. I wanted to try out all the plumbing before I glued everything together.

I have a 55 gallon acrylic tank; it has pretty large bracing around the top. Coupled with a tank only 12.5 inches front to back, this was a tank that was not easy to aquascape. Haven't bought your tank yet? Get a 75!!

Anyway I decided to have the LFS drill a hole about 8" from the top. A hole closer to the top would have been ideal in some ways; however, I wanted to have options to change around the plumbing if I needed to later on. This turned out to be a good move on my part... you'll see why later.

The drain was 1.5". Whether I should have gone smaller remains to be seen....

Anyway, here is the drain:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v233/mroys/aquarium/Drain.jpg

This was the design of the sump I submitted to a local sump maker. He ended up doing a good job on the sump; hopefully this will clear up the plumbing a bit.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v233/mroys/aquarium/sump.jpg

In the diagram, the left side is the skimmer compartment, the middle the return, and the right is the fuge. In the picture below, because I am photographing from the back, the order is reversed. :)

I apologize for the bad pictures; hopefully you can kinda figure out what is going on...

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v233/mroys/aquarium/backofsump1.jpg

..continued....

[ratherbediving]

So I started up the plumbing outside. The first thing I noticed is that the Quiet One 3000 pump pumped out a LOT of water. I originally had plans to have 1" tubing from the return area of the sump, and just have it go over the top and into the tank. No nozzles, or redirection that would reduce the pump flow.

When I did this, the water went all the way to the top of the drain. While this really isn't an issue (I didn't realize this at that time of night) I felt that this was a lot more flow than I really needed. So, I decided that I would tee off the return line with a 1/2 inch line. I figured I could reduce the flow off the 1/2" line using a ball valve later on if I needed to.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v233/mroys/aquarium/old_back2.jpg

The problem with this was-- this reduced the amount of flow WAY too much. I figured that even with the ball valve, this was not efficient. If I was going to reduce flow this much, I might as well get something more out of it! So I decided to create some nozzles, sort of a a bizzare, smallish manifold. The end result was this:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v233/mroys/aquarium/top.jpg

The picture is pretty bad; I need to explain this. I had the 1 inch line go over the top of the tank-- then there were two 1/2" pipes that terminated in a homemade "nozzle" which I made by boiling some water, putting a small section of pipe in, then bending it into a nozzle shape using some pliers. Works pretty well, if it isn't the prettiest thing in the world. I added two more nozzles after reduceing the 1" pipe to 1/2". Each piece of pipe inside the tank is not glued, and can rotate as I need it to.

I drilled two anti-siphon holes, and made sure that when the return pump was off, then the water went all the way to the top of the sump... but did not overflow.

I was pretty happy with this arrangement (and it was LATE) so I decided I was done with the test, cleaned everything up and put everything inside.

I wasn't really done though; and so the first mistake was not waiting until the weekend to do this. If I had more time, and been more thorough, I might have avoided some of the mistakes I made later on.

More on that in a bit...

[ratherbediving]

After I moved the tank inside, and started filling with water, I decided that a 1.5 " ball valve would be a good idea. Unfortunately, I was using flex PVC, and it went in pretty easily. I didn't put enough PVC cement in, and there was a small leak. Because I didn't have a lot of room, this meant I needed to replace the ball valve, union, T and reducer-- a $20 plumbing mistake. It is a lot better if you don't have to have the plumbing peices (like unions, ball valves etc) close together; that way you can avoid ditching all of the peices if you have a problem and need to replace one.

After I put the plumbing together (this time with some rigid PVC connecting the ball valve), the system was very loud; much louder than it seemed when it was outside. I don't know if that is because saltwater has different properties than fresh, or if I just noticed it a lot more because it was indoors; sound reflecting off the walls and such. I also had a lot of air going into the sump; and this was cauing air bubbles to get trapped in the protein skimmer pump. A filter sock over the drain line helped quiet things down a bit and reduce the bubbles.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v233/mroys/aquarium/sump1.jpg

When I desiged the sump, I really didn't make the sump compartment big enough. The skimmer barely fits, and it is tough getting the drain line with the filter sock to snake its way in. Unfortunately, I had made an even bigger error in the design of the sump, and when testing the setup outside. Without the protein skimmer in the sump, the sump could hold the water from the display when the return pump was turned off. However, when the sump was in place, and the protein skimmer was running.... this was no longer the case :( .

I found this out when I shorted out one of my ballasts, and tripped the GFCI. I unplugged the lights, reset the GFCI, but the return pump did not start up. Luckily I was right near the tank when it happened so I was able to turn off the flow of water to the sump using the ball valve after I noticed it was going to overflow. We have a plastic runner under the the stand which helped a lot, but still some SW did make it over to the carpet. :(

The Quiet One pump unfortunately does not seem very reliable. Often, when I turn on the power to the pump, it does not start up; I have to turn it off and on a few times an move it around to get it to fire up. Even if it worked flawlessly, I knew this design could lead to a SW flood, which would be a huge problem.

This meant that I needed to redo the drain line from the tank. Instead of using an elbow with a plastic strainer, I ended up just using a straight pipe to the surface. This would mean less water would drain to the sump when the return pump power went out, but the noise was unbearable. I drilled holes in the top of the pipe, and zip-tied two small peices of plastic gutter gaurd to help quiet things down. However, the system is still quite loud; I am going to have to find a way to quiet things down.

Right now I have 42 lbs of Figi live rock, and 80 pounds of aragonite sand. I think I will be ordering some rock from Gulf view (Floridaliverock.com) in the next couple of weeks.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v233/mroys/aquarium/tank3.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v233/mroys/aquarium/rightside.jpg