Asylumdown's 275 Tank build

[mseepman]

Well all I can say is that's a wonderful looking desert you have there. Love the look of the corals as they've come back under the LED's.

I'm sure you will find things starting to fill out quickly with good water and good light.

As for frags, you're amazingly lucky to have both RC and CoralMaster in Calgary to choose from. I'm sure they will continue to have stuff you'll want.

[asylumdown]

Been a while since I updated this. Lots of changes, some of which have been posts in the main section, so I'll try and be brief.

#1, My ATO system was a danger to itself and others. I knew it, but was waiting on the right equipment to fix it. Needless to say, the disaster happened before I got the chance to remedy the situation. Had a salinity disaster while I was out of town for a long weekend, and toasted almost all of my corals. Thank the universe this was still a new tank. I only took pics of a couple carcasses:




This whipped my butt in to gear (even if I couldn't really afford it) to finish my ATO system the way it was designed to exist. My R/O system now feeds a 50 gallon reservoir in the basement (instead of being the direct ATO system), and there are two pumps in that 55 gallon drum that 1. run the ATO and 2. Send up water for water changes when the time comes.

Remote R/O system:

upgraded Tunze osmolator powered outlet:

How the whole thing runs through the floor:

Backflow preventer under the cabinet:


After the salinity issues, I had a serious outbreak of ich. Like, deadly. I lost about half my fish, and stopped the carnage by catching every single one of the buggers and converting part of my custom sump to a QT system. I had some issues with the cycle this created in the QT system, but as of a week or so ago, all toxic compounds were registering undetectable. My remaining fish are:

Copper band butterfly
Purple Tang
Powder Blue tang (a new addition to the QT system after the cycle was complete, my initial Powder Blue was lost in the ich outbreak)
Harlequin Tuskfish
mated pair of Bengali Cardinals
4 square spot anthias (1 male 3 females)
Longtail tripod fish
Leopard wrasse

My QT procedure has been to lower their salinity to 1.009 for 30 days after the last visible spot (10 days remaining), then I'll dose them with Seachem paraguard for 3 weeks. Then 2 weeks of observation to make sure the ich is gone. This will have left my Display fallow for 10 weeks. Seachem assures me that no part of Paraguard will remain 'active' after the treatment is complete, so I don't need to worry about the rocks and sand in my sump that will have been treated. I added a spare canister filter to the QT system, and both the nano LED light systems and light timer I had laying around, as my sump is normally unlit.

Here's some photos of the QT portion of my sump from today (the QT area is on the left, the return chambers to the main tank is on the right):

Close up:

CBB hanging out near the pump that does double duty draining the Water Change Chamber (which also happens to be the main QT chamber ATM), and the return pump that drives the QT system:



In that time I've had ongoing serious issues with my overflows, as Herbie style overflows are really fickle when you've got your overflow plumbing all connecting to the same outlet in to the sump. I've got a forum thread about this in the main area so I won't elaborate here, but I'll just say that Herbie style overflows aren't always appropriate for every setup. Research them carefully for how they'll behave on your own specific plumbing set up before taking the plunge. I spent today converting my main overflow system to Dursos, which worked beautifully on my last 90 gallon tank. In a normal system they're a little noisier than a Herbie, but since my tank's plumbing is contained within the walls of my office, I don't notice it. Presently, I'm still using my double herbied gate valves (I think I described them a few pages back?) to control the water and bubble levels in the return chamber. This prevents splash-back into the QT chamber. It's not perfectly optimal, but when the QT process is over, I'll have a fickle free sump that still allows me to do mostly automated water changes.

I used plugs with threaded 3/4" holes in the top to cap my dursos, and drilled them just right to prevent full siphon while minimizing bubbles. Right now, since I'm doing this weird, not optimal, hybridized herbie'd durso, I don't have the threaded cap in, which means I'm still sucking some air down the drain pipe, but it's a controlled amount of bubbles, and I've got really fine control over the water level in my return chamber for the time being. It's also not that much louder than my last overflow system:



I also took this opportunity to add more lochline to my return line, and switched to flattened outputs, as the rounded outputs I had were creating this nasty jet of water that blasted one area of my rock:


And finally, I've started replacing some of my lost corals while everyone is in QT. Getting all the fish out meant removing 100% of the rock, so I got the chance to re-scape. I took that opportunity to remove some of the base rock that made my tank look too packed, and I tried to follow a more balanced "2/3 to 1/3" aesthetic ratio that you normally follow for photography while balancing the two sides. I like this much better:

[mseepman]

So glad to see this back on track. Really like this tank and given some of the common "building a house around the tank" issues we've faced, I need this tank to succeed!

[gregzz4]

Crappy to hear about your losses and the MI issue

Glad to see it hasn't got you down

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by mseepman

So glad to see this back on track. Really like this tank and given some of the common "building a house around the tank" issues we've faced, I need this tank to succeed!

#1 mistake: Not having a fish room with a proper QT system in it. My Fiance was so concerned about resale we didn't put a dedicated room in, but we also didn't leave any logical space for a separate QT system anywhere in the house. I tried taking over the laundry room for a while, but that was met with serious resistance. The only thing that has saved me has been the extra time spent designing my sump. After what I've gone through in the past month, I wouldn't run a system without a full prophylactic treatment regimen for every single new arrival again. People say you can't avoid ich, I've done the research, and I'm fairly confident that you can, you just need to be prepared for it.

Also, you think you've planned for everything, but the devil is in the details. 99% of the work happens in an hour or two, that last 1% can take 2 entire freaking days. Each time something happens, I make the adjustments that will make this tank what I originally intended it to be, but man, getting there has been a labour of love. Planning a house around a tank is hard for all the reasons that you know it will be (contractors, timing, design, etc.), but it's made equally hard because it's almost always a completely unique circumstance, and there's no 'out of the box' solutions. Everything I did on this system was specific to this system and this set up. Some things are working beautifully, others I would change if I had the chance, but what I have to keep reminding my fiance (who hates how much time the tank has consumed) is that this is a brand new system. Almost nothing is perfect in it's first iteration, and each change impacts some other part of the system. I keep thinking I'm 'Done' with the set-up, but I keep finding ways to make it less fickle, and less likely to behave in unexpected and unintended ways.

My best advice is to be prepared for the best laid plans to not turn out the way you intend on a first pass, but if you've put enough forethought in to the 'bones' of the system, nothing is irrecoverable.

[asylumdown]

Also, I should add that while they aren't cheap, buying a sh*t-ton of ecotech product was the best investment I made. So far their service has been above and beyond what I would have expected from any company, and they've been 100% on the ball with helping me make things work properly. You'll notice a dark spot on the far right in the FTS above. The power supply on one of my lights started going nuts a few weeks ago and Ecotech went the distance to get it repaired. I've got a new power supply en-route to me now.

And that concludes my shameless plug.

[asylumdown]

Man it's been a while since I updated.

Tank has gone through some changes. Had a monster ich problem, tried fixing it with cut corners, which, you guessed it, not only failed, but made my display tank look like garbage. I tried using my modified sump as a QT for a hypo treatment. The hypo protocol didn't work for me (likely do to the fact that I couldn't prevent backsplash from the DT and my salinity fluctuated too much), but for all that time, the DT had no protein skimming, no water changes, no GFO, no bio-pellets, no nutrient export of any kind. And I kept feeding the display. Fast forward 6 weeks and the display tank looked like this:

Front:

Back:


Basically it looked like garbage. After the fish got ich again in the hypo treatment, I moved them to a separate QT tank and started a copper treatment, and returned my sump to it's normal operation. This had hte nasty side effect of forcing me to reset my fallow clock to 0 days after already having a fishless display for nearly 6 weeks. Needless to say I'm itching for my fish to be back in a proper home. They're banished until November 30th.

Since then I've been aggressively correcting all the problems that co-opting my sump for 6 weeks caused. I started GFO again, tuned my bio-pellet reactor, started doing water changes a couple of times a week (my salt budget has exploded), and got a small army of Mexican turbo snails. I also cut back on the amount that I feed the display. However, none of that was really all that effective. It was obviously working, as I didn't even have to clean the glass anymore, but that nasty hair algae is tough as nails. It's almost like once you have it that badly, you have it. You can slow it down but it's so pervasive that it sucks up the nutrients faster than any of your nutrient reduction systems can remove them. For 3 weeks I was manually removing at least 2 pounds a week and it was still growing back, albeit slower than it had been. So I ordered Algaefix Marine from an Asian seller on Ebay who didn't mind shipping to Canada (it's technically banned here, and most US retailers won't ship it) and started dosing as per instructions. I'm 4 doses in, and this is the tank now:

Front:

Back:


I've also gone on a bit of a coral shopping spree, have rescaped the rocks a tiny bit and moved stuff around to make room for all the new things. I've also upgraded my Radions to the TIR lenses and picked up an Apex controller unit, which has made my life oh-so-much easier. Not having to unplug things when I need to clean equipment alone was worth the cost, but the feed cycles are also invaluable. I haven't set it up online yet as the ethernet cable in my cabinet is dead (another thing for the warranty people!), but the control panel is pretty straightforward.

So far the only disasters have been to do with my RO system. I was using a switched timer to bring the water up from the RO reservoir in the basement because I couldn't find any three pronged switched outlets. Basically it had a 'timer' mode and an 'on' mode. I deactivated all the timer points so that it was effectively an off switch. I went out of town for 10 days, and the night before I was refilling all my dosing chambers and must have knocked the timer on the switch with the bucket, which told the timer to switch on at 4 pm the next day. When I was 2000km away. Thank any deity you can thank that my roommate just happened to be home when the pump kicked on called me freaking out. She was literally walking out the door when it happened, and had she left 5 minutes earlier 55 gallons of fresh water would have emptied on to my office floor. Needless to say I ordered proper switches that day.

Anyway, that's kind of it. I'm looking for someone who wants to sell a frag of red planet, Oregon tort, cali tort, or any other 'premium' level frags in Calgary, so if someone reading this has some they want to sell, let me know!

[lastlight]

Well that Algaefix sure seems to have worked... wow! Hope the turn-around continues. Your SPS looks happy from what I can see.