Asylumdown's 275 Tank build

[asylumdown]

Figured out that if I take pictures when the lights are at 12K, it's not quite so horrible.

Spent 300 bucks on frags/mini colonies at RCC yesterday, and I'm realizing just how long/amount of money it will take to get this tank looking full! I had two tester pieces in for the last couple of weeks to see what would happen under my lights/with my water and I was pleasantly surprised. Even with the algae issues, one semi-browned out frag has turned a beautiful cream/lilac, and the other frag's colours just popped.

First, FTS front and back:






This was my first tester frag, it was only a little blue when I got it, now it's practically turquoise


My second tester coral is the one in the middle. The mother colony has browned out at the store pretty significantly, and when i got it, only the tips still had any purple, the rest were brown. It practically glows now!


Edgar thinking he's going to be fed


These frags are pretty browned out right now, but I'm hoping something magical will happen under my lights.



These two colonies are so encrusted on their bases I didn't think it was right to break them off. Presently banished to the sand bed until I am sure no aiptasia have hitchhiked in on them. The one in front was in the process of browning out, but I can see from the tips that it has a lot of potential.


And just to totally put the question of whether radions are strong enough completely to bed...
From this:


To this:

After running the lights at 100%. Whoops. It's on the sand bed, 25 inches down, a full 32 inches under the lights.

[gregzz4]

Nice corals
Keep the updates comin'

[lastlight]

You've come a long way! Fish and coral now and they're looking really good too. Not that I qt corals or fish... but pretty brave to place new coral on the sandbed in the display to wait and watch for aiptasia =)

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by lastlight

You've come a long way! Fish and coral now and they're looking really good too. Not that I qt corals or fish... but pretty brave to place new coral on the sandbed in the display to wait and watch for aiptasia =)

I've become pretty aggressive in my response to aiptasia, the first on I see won't be ignored or treated chemically, but will be removed (rock and all) and blow torched to a cinder. Those two corals are the only ones whose base rock went in, and only because I couldn't easily remove them.

I also added a cleaner wrasse today, that luckily readily accepts prepared food. I know they're no solution to ich and disease, but it's been my experience that they help a lot when it comes to general tank health. My bristle tooth tang and harlequin tusk are almost fighting over him.

I also picked up a 40 gallon breeder today and started seeding some bio balls in a bag in the sump (for a canister filter) so I can run a quarantine tank on demand now. I won't e adding anymore fish until they've been through a two week fattening up period going forward.



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[asylumdown]

Just to put the word out there, I'm looking for frags! Frags frags frags! If you're selling/tossing/moving or what have you, I'm definitely interested. My tank looks like a desert!


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[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.