HDReef

Glad to hear that you were able to get it off. After taking the trim off of my tank I was as the same point that you are. I will never do that again. It sucks!

I have a 75g tank as my basement sump. You can see pics of it Here, the basement sump stuff starts at post #8. I love it so far. I also have a head pressure calculator that I made in excel so if you decide to go this route and need help selecting a pump just let me know.

It looks like a stomatella snail. Google them and see if that's it. If so they are fine.

Post #22 in my build thread Here shows how you can build your own. If you have any questions just send me a PM. Darrell

Also during our wait, we had some algae... These photos show the algae that we collected while the tank was cycling. We also had a problem with the heaters not being large enough for the tank so we got some new ones. During this time, we continuously checked the tank for ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate. The nitrite dropped to 0 after about 1 month, but the ammonia stayed for quite a bit longer...FINALLY, after a few months of testing the tank, on 3-15-11 we got a test back that showed 0 ammonia. A week later, we got our clean up crew: 12 dwarf blue legged hermit crabs, 12 nassarius snails, and 25 cerith snails. We are now ready for fish and corals and plan to keep updating the build thread with our new aquatic pets. Thanks for all your comments! Holly and Darrell

While we were waiting for the tank to cycle, we decided to work on making light hanger posts for our T5 lights. The reason we wanted to do this was that it was getting to be a pain to have to remove the light to do anything inside the DT... First we cut some metal conduit pipe to the length we thought would work best for our hangers. We then attached 90 degree bends with couplings. Here are the two completed uprights. We then began working on the base. We took a 2x4 and attached metal conduit clips to ensure the poles stayed in place. We then spray painted everything black to match the light. Once dried, we added the hangers to the tank, securing them in place in the back with c-clamps. These pictures show the finished hangers. We also decided to purchase an APEX controller to further improve our automation of the tank and allow us to receive notifications in the event that something goes wrong while we are not home. Please ignore the numbers as this was taken before the pH or temp probes were added.

After a long hiatus, we are able to update you all on our 75g tank. Much has gone on since January and we are excited to have pictures for you now. We had added salt and once the salinity was where we wanted, we were ready to add our first pieces of live rock. We first added two powerheads in the DT. We then added heaters to bring the water up to temp before adding the live rock. We also added Tyvek to our basement ceiling above the sump as our basement is not finished at this time and this would prevent things (fiberglass, dust, etc) falling in the tank. We then added live rock. The first picture is a piece of live rock in our display, and the second picture is a few smaller pieces in our sump, as well as some cheto. We added this on 1-8-11. Thanks to gwweber for the live rock and cheto to get the tank started! To start our cycle, we added a couple of large pinches of flake food to the tank. We added the skimmer and the refugium light at the same time we added the live rock. We plugged all of this new equipment into our homemade portable GFCI outlets. You can find our DIY thread here.

Hello! After we were frustrated at our portable GFCI outlet, we decided to make our own. The problem with store bought GFCI outlets like this one is that they trip during our frequent power outage blips and they only have one plug while taking up the space of two plugs. Our DIY portable GFCI does not trip during power outages, only takes one wall outlet but gives you two GFCI outlets, and as an added bonus it has an extension cord. Below is how we made it. We ended up making several of them, since we liked them so much. First, you will need the following supplies, all found at Home Depot for about $15.00 (which is cheaper than the store bought GFCI): A GFCI outlet, a single gang outlet box, a face plate cover, and then either a replacement power cord like this one or if you want a specific length cord as you see in our picture you can buy 12/2 NM-B wire at any hardware store and a plug. You will also need wire strippers and a couple screwdrivers. Next, you will need to strip the first inch or two of the outer cover to expose the inner wires. There will be three of them; a black (hot), a white (neutral), and a copper (ground). On your GFCI outlet, you will see two places to attach your hot and neutral wires and one place for your ground. The copper (ground) goes to the green screw, the black wire (hot) goes to the brass screw, and the white (neutral) goes to the silver screw. You need to use the hot and neutral locations marked "line" as seen in this picture. DO NOT USE THE ONES MARKED "LOAD." After determining the "line" vs. "load" locations attach your wires to the outlet. Just again: black (hot) to brass screw, white (neutral) to silver screw, and copper (ground) to green screw. Once that is done, you can run your wire through your outlet box and attach your outlet. Next, run your wire through your plug and follow the same procedure as the GFCI outlet: black to brass, white to silver, and copper to green. Then you can close up your plug. You're almost done. At this point, you should test your outlet. In this hobby, having a GFCI tester to ensure everything is wired correctly not only on things you wired, but also things wired at your house, is invaluable. GFCI outlet testers are fairly inexpensive. Lastly, assuming everything is wired correctly, install your cover plate. Here is your finished outlet. Repeat, as needed, for additional outlets. We hope this was helpful and will inspire you to try it yourself. Holly and Darrell

Finally finished our cycle and got our cleanup crew!!! Hopefully we will get a chance to update this sometime this week. Lots of stuff to update Holly & Darrell

That was me. Take a look at my second post in this thread Here. You need to run a knife along the entire edge inside and out to start and then put some rubbing alcohol into the trim piece and let it sit for a little bit. If you have any questions just shoot me a PM. Darrell

Welcome to WAMAS!! Darrell

Thanks so much for taking the time to speak to us! We really appreciate that you came from Duluth to talk about your breeding experiences. It was very interesting to hear about breeding - as new hobbyists we weren't even thinking about it breeding, but with the info you gave us, it does not seem to be an impossibility in the future. Thanks again and have a safe trip back! Holly and Darrell

As I said in my first post it was never about the price. Unfortunately I am not comfortable giving my credit card number over the phone and BRK's policy is not to hold things unless you pay for them. I took a trip down to 5 LFS's in the area a couple weeks ago and BRK by far had some of the best looking tanks. I never once thought that I would never buy from them again over this experience. The only reason I posted originally is that I felt hurt that I (without my name being used) was accused of not supporting LFSs which I do. So I felt like the other side of the story should be given also. I am sorry that my phone call caused BRK to be so upset that they felt they needed to create a post about it, that was not my intention and as I said in my first post I am sorry that it bothered them so much. If when I was on the phone with them they had told me I could order it offline from their store(I didn't even know they had an online store) I would have gladly still bought it from them, but sadly this is not the case. I feel this topic has gotten a little off track as to the orignal post from BRK so I thought it may be time to reel it on in. If anyone feels they need to PM me personally to discuss what I may have or have not done wrong please feel free and I welcome the conversation. So again I am sorry to BRK that I upset them over this one item.

At the risk of being attacked. I will fully admit that it was me that called. The reason I asked for the item to be held is that I live about an hour and a half away from BRK and didn't want to make the drive all the way down there Sunday just to find out the item was sold already. When I was told that I would have to give my card over the phone. I most definetly said that I was not comfrotable with that. It is far more likely to get your credit card information stolen by giving the full number to someone over the phone then it is using a secure website from a reputable online dealer. And yes I did state that I was a WAMAS member. I said this because I figured as a premium sponser BRK would know that the membership here is trustworthy and will pick up something they are asking to be held. As for not supporting a LFS. I was trying to support a premium sponser and a fish store an hour an a half away. So I think saying that I didn't support a LFS is a little wrong since that is exaclty what I was trying to do. I always buy from LFS's when they have what I need and have more than once highly overpaid for items because of it and have no problem with it because it is supporting my LFS. In this case the only person local to me to carry the APEX system (that's what I asked to be held) is BRK so I went to them first for the item. I didn't ask the price just called to make sure they had one and asked for it to be held. Again just trying to support my LFS. I really hope this doesn't turn into some huge argument here. I just figured I would put it out there that it was me. I apologize if I offended you but I don't feel like what I did was wrong. This also doesn't mean I wouldn't get anything from you in the future but just not this item. Darrell

For the first 'failure scenario,' the water level in the sump will not overflow. We have tested this already by shutting off the pump and letting the water drain down. The display tank, with the pump off, drains down to the water levels shown below: Here is our return lines in the display tank. The water stops siphoning into the sump once the water drains below them, as shown here. Please note the water movement you may see is from the powerheads, not the return lines. With this picture the water in the overflow only drains until the hole is met. So with the water at these levels in the display tank, the sump will still have 3 inches of room before it would overflow. As for the drain getting clogged, we have thought about that and it would most definitely cause an overflow. However, we came up with no perfect solution to prevent this. Our only thing we plan to do is make a form fitted covering for over the top of the overflow in the display tank to try and prevent a clog. (i.e. snails, large debris, etc.) Thanks for the comments; keep 'em coming! If you do have any suggestions for the second scenario, please let us know! Holly

I have heard this before and was told that it depended on the ballasts in your light fixture. So I will keep an eye on this and if there is a problem I will switch the lights to non GFI outlets. Thanks. Darrell

Thanks so much for the compliments! To answer your questions: Currently the pump stand is not attached to the sump stand. The stand that the pump is sitting on now is temporary. I will be building a new pump stand in the near future. I was not planning on attaching it to the sump stand, but now that you bring that up, I will. Thanks. For the GFIs, everything will be going into GFI outlets. I am about to add another fuse to our fuse box. This fuse will be for the aquarium only and will go to a bank of outlets by the sump, all will be GFI. The pump being plugged in there is just temporary. Everything on the display tank will also be plugged into GFI outlets. Good catch on the outlets. Darrell

After the piping was complete it was time to fill the tanks! This was one of our basement walls before. And this is after. We mounted a 5 stage RO/DI unit with booster pump to the wall for making water. After the water was made, we began adding it to the display tank. When the tank was halfway full, as shown in the picture, we re-leveled the tank. Next we added the remaining base rock to the refugium in the sump and filled the tank. Next came the leak tests. This is the sump running. Luckily there were no leaks!! This is our display tank with water running and the lights on. And here we are finally! As of this posting this is our progress thus far. The tank has been running with water for four days just to be extra sure there are no leaks. At this point, we are ready to add the salt, heaters, protein skimmer, and powerheads. So our next step is finding a few quality pieces of live rock to start seeding the tank. We are also going to add some cheto to the refugium. If you have any, please see my topic in the For Sale/WTB section Here. Stay tuned for more updates and pictures as the tank progresses.

At this point with the sump and tank ready, it was time to do the piping. First, I began to piece together the smaller portions of the piping. I put together the smaller pieces of PVC and their elbows. Once I had them ready, I plumbed them through the floor first to lay out the position of the pipework. This is the piping under the display tank. The short barbed piece of pipe is the drain and the return is the longer PVC piping. We added a gate valve to the return to be able to adjust the amount of flow going into the tank. After this piping was done, we added flexible tubing and pipe clamps to the barbs to complete the upstairs piping. Next, we plumbed the pump. We included unions and ball valves to be able to shut off the water and remove the pump in case of cleaning or maintenance. There is also a strainer on the pump intake to prevent anything from entering the pump. We then worked on the larger pieces of pipe that connected the display tank to the sump. This is along our basement ceiling.

Thanks for the welcomes! Regarding the rubbing alcohol: we were almost to the point of buying a new tank too. The rubbing alcohol really seemed to help loosen the silicon a lot.

The first step we took on the sump was leak-testing it after the resealing was dry. Luckily there were no leaks so we were able to begin the remaining work on the sump. We purchased a glass hole drill stabilizer and bit off eBay to add a hole to the side of the sump tank for a bulkhead for the return pump. We used plumber's putty around the area we were drilling to hold in water to keep the bit cool. This is me drilling the hole. This was the first time I ever drilled glass. It was pretty nerve-wracking because we spent so much time on the resealing (due to the top trim - see above ) and were afraid of cracking the tank. Hole was a success! There was also some de-struction that had to take place to make room for the sump downstairs. Here are the plans for the stand for the sump tank. And so we began...here is the base to the stand. The leg and the upper frame are now complete. Almost done - all that remains are the top braces. This is the tank on its stand, downstairs in its final position. You may notice the baffles have been added to the sump as well; we did not take pictures of those being installed. At this point, with the display tank and sump ready for water, it was time to complete the piping.

Now came the rock work in the display tank. We purchased thin, clear knitting screen from a craft store and attached it to the bottom of the tank with silicon. This was to have a base for the rocks to sit on to prevent having a stress point from the rocks against the glass. And we needed to purchase one more piece of equipment...The pictures should look better from here on out. Now we were ready for the rocks. We laid out the rock structure before we set them in the tank to make designing easier. This was our final draft after trying many configurations. We then placed the rock in the display tank and added our sand. We rinsed the sand before putting it in the tank. The rock was placed in first so that no sand-sifters could dig underneath the rock and unbalance the structure. After that we placed painter's plastic over the rock structure and sand to prevent displacement of the sand when adding water to the tank. Time to level the tank. This was the last thing we worked on in our display tank until after we began the sump.

So the next thing we decided to work on was getting the display tank ready. We decided to paint the background on the display tank rather than using a stick-on background to prevent salt creep in between the background and the glass. Here we have taped off the tank. We chose blue from Home Depot and here it is painted. Due to the setup of our house and the placement of the tank, the corner overflow would have been very visible. So we had my work custom make a small stainless steel corner piece to cover it. I spray painted it black to be discrete. We also added sticky velcro to easily remove it when we need to see in the overflow. This is the corner piece mounted on the tank. Since we are not using a canopy and we plan to get a firefish (which are known jumpers) we made fitted clear-net screen covers for the top of the tank. We used screen window framing. These are the frames just before we added the clear quarter inch screen we got from BRS. This is the tank with the background painted, the corner cover piece attached and the light fixture on.

While we were resealing the tank, we ordered some other equipment we would need. Here is our light fixture. It is a 6-bulb T5 and moon LED light fixture from IceCap. We also order 120lb of base rock from BRS. It is 100lb of Reef Saver Rock and 20lb of Pukani Rock. This will be split between the display tank and the refugium in the sump. We then got a Blueline HD55 return pump from our lfs. This is the light fixture on the tank.

We leak-tested the 75g tank for the sump outside when we first received it. And although we found no leaks, the inside seals looked really rough. So step one was to reseal the 75g tank for the sump. We started by getting our tools ready. (Rubbing alcohol added later) The first thing we did was to take off the rim of the tank. This is not as easy as everyone makes it out to be. This by far was the longest and hardest process of the tank being transformed into the sump. If you ever have to do this, might I suggest rubbing alcohol to loosen the silicon. After struggling with it for well over 3 hours with little progress, we decided to try the rubbing alcohol. With the tank upside down, we poured it (not a lot) into the rim and let it sit for 15 minutes max. We were then able to pry it off the tank. Here we are working the rim off, making sure not to break it so we could install it later. Here is the rim finally off the tank! We then removed the silicon seals inside the tank with razor blades, being careful not to stick the razor blade in between the seals of the glass. We then taped off the edges where we wanted to keep the silicon. We made the silicon seals a little large in the sump to ensure the tank is strong for when we are adding and removing equipment in the sump. Since this is not the display tank, we felt the larger seals were fine. This is one of the completed seals. After completing the seals, we reattached the top trim and let it sit to set. (Sometimes you have to improvise - in this case cases of soda make good weights. lol)