SmallFry's 75 Gallon (Reef Eventually) Build

[SmallFry]

This has been in the works for a long time, piggybacking on the log for my 27 gallon FOWLR. Now it's all plumbed and I've got some water in it albeit fresh to finish curing my diy rocks. I figure it's about time to give it its own journal, so here goes...

For the early parts of this build, see the late parts of my other journal.
http://www.canreef.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=49642

A long time ago I experimented with making some diy rocks for the new tank. I did it mostly because I wanted to have lots of shelf type rocks. I've been trying to cure it for a good while now, on and off as I was in two minds as to whether to use it. About a couple of months ago I decided to use it and started curing it in earnest. Progress has been slow, partly I think because the biggest Rubbermaid I had was not able to hold much water as well as the rock. To try and speed things up, I'm giving it some more volume of water, like the whole tank full of it.. And as a bonus I get an extended water test to iron out any kinks too.

Anyway - pictures!!

The whole thing..


The plumbing...


The sump...

It's pretty basic, no baffles, though I may add some later if I get problems with microbubbles from the skimmer (Euro Reef RS100) and I hope to get some sort of a refugium set up eventually. Another idea I had is to use some of the spare space in the external overflow for a couple of mangroves, but that's a way off yet.



And finally a close up of the aquascape...


I was surprised that they only come to 55lbs now, they weighed a ton when I started curing - there must've been a lot of salt in there. On the plus side they must be really porous!

Now if only the pH will come down! I have a back up plan if it doesn't, I'm going to get some of those Eco Reefer rocks - Skimmer King got some for his new build and they look really nice..

[Skimmerking]

i have mangroves that i can sell ya if you want them . the tank is looking great buddy.

[SmallFry]

Originally Posted by Skimmer King

i have mangroves that i can sell ya if you want them . the tank is looking great buddy.

Thanks, may take you up on that, if my pH ever gets anywhere south of 'drain cleaner'...

[SmallFry]

Finally! I went and did it! Just hit the button on an order for the LEDs and drivers for my new light.

It's going to be 24 XP-E royal blue (60 degree optics), 24 XP-G cool white (65 degree optics) and the PWM dimmable meanwell drivers which I'll be controlling with an arduino.

I'm going to build my own heat sink for them, which should be interesting...

[SmallFry]

Well, if you ever needed convincing that there are a million things that can seriously delay your build...

Things were all on track, I had my LEDs and all I needed to do was build the light, then this happened....









And as if that wasn't enough we bought this



which turned out to need a whole new subfloor and ended up like this...




Which has delayed things just a little.....
But finally I got around to building the light..





The LEDs have optics on them now too, but I don't have any photos of that, but they're quite bright. Speaking of the heatsinks, I built my own from a couple of different sizes of U channel bolted together. I drilled a lot of holes and filed them together with a rat-tail file to create slots for convective cooling. I did this to try and get the heatsinks to help cool themselves rather than having a big stagnant lump of hot air stuck on top that needs a fan to move it. It seems to work. I'm currently driving them at 700mA on the cool white and royal blues. The heatsinks are just warm with no fans running - the fixture is totally silent which sadly cannot be said for my return pump ..






On the plus side I now have the chance to get my 2 year old, but unused Euro-Reef RS100 going. Am impressed - there's no livestock, but it's still finding something to skim out. Not sure what though..

I've now got a couple of pounds of live rock in there to get things started and I'm dosing it with Stability to help get things established a little quicker.. I'm hoping to start moving some of the fish over from the 27 as soon as possible..

[SmallFry]

Its taken a while but I now have all the livestock I want in the tank - well nowhere close to all I want, but all I think I'm going to have. I may add some more snails etc to clean up the sand, but that's it..

So far the list is

Royal Gramma

Carpenters? Flasher wrasse
Ruby headed fairy wrasse
(yep, the Skimmer King got me hooked on wrasses)
Both are in hiding right now - I'm hoping that it's just because they're annoyed about having to share the tank with the new arrivals who zip around the tank quite a bit..

Coral Beauty
Kole Tang

Two Cleaner Shrimp
Rock Boring Urchin

Three Nassarius
Four Turbo Snails
One big spiky snail that I have yet to identify
Small but getting larger frag of Green Star Polyps

I'll try to get some decent photos up but I'm having difficulties getting things to focus properly with my camera. It's almost like the auto focus is off, but it's about ten years old so I guess I can't complain too much..

[SmallFry]

So a few things have happened since the last update..

Sadly the flasher wrasse did another of his disappearing acts again, but this time he didn't reappear. I'm now down to the four fish. The gramma is still the same size, but the others have grown quite a bit..

I bought a frag of Green Star Polyps to as a test piece for a while because it was cheap, and apparently pretty hard to kill.. It seemed to do OK. I did have a few issues with cyano and algae growth though which eventually spurred me into building my upflow algae scrubber.



I was skeptical at first, and all it's grown so far is brown slime and a few odd tufts of green fuzzy stuff, but the cyano seems to have gone and the tank is looking cleaner, so I guess it's doing something.

I have also invested in a 5 stage RO/DI system that does drinking water for the house which will probably be helping and the RO sure tastes better than city water. The improvements in terms of algae/cyano pre-date that so I think a lot of it is actually the scrubber. It is nice now not having to go to the local gas station and worry about what the TDS might be. The total volume of the system is now about 120gallons and it gets a 10% water change every couple of weeks. I don't dose anything beyond that at the moment because there's not enough in there to be using that much. In time I will probably need to start as I build up the corals/clams..

Buoyed up by this success I went to the LFS (OK, 2 1/2 hrs away) for some snails to complete the job. Came back with a Favia, and a Montipora digitata..



and



I've since moved the Montipora to the top of the rock work, and it's really growing - faster than I expected. The polyps don't come out too far when the lights are on, but they really come out at night. I figure if it's growing that much it must be happy..
The Favia doesn't seem to be doing that much, perhaps the darker parts are turning a paler shade of brown and the polyps don't seem to be expanding that much. I'm not really that sure of what to do with it since I've read a fair bit on the internet suggesting that it's a pretty low light coral, but my coral book says that it likes intense light but will 'tolerate' lower light. I wonder if I'm blasting it with too much light.. Doesn't seem to bothered about eating either, though this may be my technique..

Anyway, I went to the LFS again to get the snails which they were out of last time. I got them, but somehow ended up with a Fromia sea star, and a Crocea Clam. It's now sat pretty much where the Montipora was before I moved it, at the same level as the Favia (about 8-9" away horizontally) and seems fairly happy. Well, it doesn't look unhappy as far as I can see - clam body language isn't something I know a huge amount about. It's a little over 2".

From the front of the tank


And from above


Does anyone else have this problem with going to the LFS for something cheap and returning with something else that's totally different and exponentially more expensive?

I think things will stay pretty much like this for the next couple of months while I'm back at school, but my plan is to get some more frags in there at some point..

[SmallFry]

Things have been going pretty slowly but I did get some more frags - a few different kinds of montipora, which grew well up to the point that the montipora eating Nudibranchs appeared. You can guess the rest.

The tank has been montipora-less for about 6 months now so I think they should've died out and I might try adding some more montipora,as they seemed to like it in there.

I'm getting to spend more time on the tank now since we finished the Airstream (OK it'll never be totally finished but the workload has decreased) and even got to take it on holiday.


I noticed that my DIY rock was starting to crumble, then noticed my alk wouldn't stay up and it emerged that my calcium test was nuts. The end of the story is that the DIY rock got replaced with 50lbs of pukani from fijireefrock on Boxing ay. And very nice stuff it is too..


Now I just need more coral..