Scott & Marcia's 175g bowfront

[FishWife]

Well, no sooner did we have our 80g bowfront up and running, when we got an offer we couldn't refuse to upgrade. Friends wanted our tank, and we had wallspace for a bigger one, and the chance to redo our system so it was more stable and would be satisfying for longer. Long story short, here is our 175g build.

 

First pics: getting the tank from the previous owners.

 

First glimpses of the tank breaking down.

 

 

 

We got 300 #s of live rock from the owner; some of it was encrusted with sponge and mushroom corals.

 

We had planned to put the live rock in our master bathroom tub while switching out the old bowfront (we figured a month) and hoped to put our fish in our QT for a week only. Well, the old owner had fish that he had tried to sell and... couldn't and... we were taking the tank... so, long story short, we set up a holding tank for 15 new fish in our bathroom.

 

 

with the live rock in the tub as promised, working like a sump... and Dan's skimmer workin' away...

 

Things were pretty stable after about a week.

 

Edited December 30, 2007 by FishWife

[Connor]

nice purple tang.

 

Connor

[Origami]

Marcia (and Scott). So Cool! It's inspiring the way you guys set up the bathroom as a temporary homeless shelter. Best of luck setting up the new system.

[vaironman]

I love those Vlamingi Tang..... Watching it eats Nori like a bull is so fun. Big boy needs a big tank. And the beautiful Maroon gold bar clownfish in the back of the tank is a real Red Bull.

[jason the filter freak]

I loved seeing this tank in person, let me know if you all need any help down the road

[FishWife]

Meanwhile, we broke down and said good bye to our beloved 80 gallon bowfront...

 

and completely dismantled our mudroom (engine room) and sump...

 

And added another holding tank to the bathroom system, with our clown and yellow-eyed Kole tang sequestered. We had the SPS's in with these fish under our T-5's, and our softies and LPSs in with the new fishies under a PC. So now there were two tanks connected to our tub-sump and Dan's skimmer. Oh, and there were other tubs of tank sand, live rock, and sump sand all with various heaters, power heads, etc. scattered all over the house.

 

And began planning for the new tank "done right."

 

After plotting and planning, we decided on a four-manifold closed loop, using our dart. We plan to buy a new dart for our sump/fuge/return system. Scott sized up the job, while I played with foam...

 

 

Scott: starting to plumb required putting a fan in the tank to dry it out...

 

 

Left manifold complete...

 

 

We started by using the same ideas we'd been so happy with in bowfront 80 for the lower manifold, but split in two so that we have more control in the larger application. Each side will come from the same dart pump, but be controlled from inside the stand with a ball valve.

 

 

 

The half-inch outlets are painted purple so they will better blend with the coraline algae of the mature system in time. White looks great against new sand, but stands out like a sore thumb after the sand turns brown.

 

Then, we had our Christmas adventure...

Edited December 29, 2007 by FishWife

[FishWife]

On Christmas morning, we awoke to find ich on all our salvaged fish. Arghhh. We dipped the fish and quickly added a third holding tank to our bathroom system. We then spent six hours on Christmas afternoon moving all corals to one tank, lowering salinity while controlling temperature in the fish tanks, etc. It's taken until yesterday to stabilize everyone.

 

After the first day, the hippo tang, who had it worst with a cloudy eye and all look GOOD. Our worst victim so far is our copperband, who still (after two dips) has white parasites on her tail and fins. :(

 

We've decided to use hyposalinity rather than copper treatment.

 

This has set the new tank back at least four weeks. Oh, well, it means the pressure's off! Happy New Year, and on with the plumbing!

Edited December 29, 2007 by FishWife

[FishWife]

Scott's been hard at work with the dart and the four branches that will run up the back of the tank to feed the four manifolds (two bottom and two top).

 

First, we had to take stock and see what could be cannibalized from the bow 80...

 

 

Scott assembled the dart and branches from parts we had, then drew a diagram and highlighted those parts we still needed from Home Depot. (No, the long cross piece isn't part of the final answer! LOL)

 

 

It was pretty late when Scott began playin' those PVC blues!

 

 

Edited December 29, 2007 by FishWife

[FishWife]

We do have a couple of engineering hurtles to cross yet...

 

The first is our canopy. It isn't one, really. It's a shield that blocks the halide fixture so you're not blinded, but gee! I'm only 5' 2" and I can barely reach my hand over the edge of this tank to feed. Since I'm the main caretaker of the animals, I've been concerned about needing to REMOVE this canopy whenever I need to feed. It adds a good 10" to the height of the tank.

 

It LOOKS good... here's someone else's picture of how it looks when in use...

 

But it's completely flimsy plastic. It sits on the tank rim... here are a few shots from on top to show the problem...

 

 

 

And then this GREAT light strip (halide) which we got essentially free (tank, stand, lights, canopy for $700 all told--did I mention a deal we couldn't refuse?) needs to be suspended above the tank somehow...

 

 

 

Enter our idea: see if you think this will work:

 

We have, in our display tank viewing room (quaintly called the grotto by Scott) strip/bracket bookshelves that look like this:

 

We wonder if we can use longer brackets and strips to hang the light out over the tank, and then make a rigid PVC skeleton to hinge the canopy to the wall?

 

Here are the bracket/strip combo: we think four will do it.

 

And, in the next post, I'll put up pictures of Scott's ingenious PVC skeleton inside the canopy.

[flowerseller]

And, in the next post, I'll put up pictures of Scott's ingenious PVC skeleton inside the canopy.

Why don't you put a commercial here or a trailer for the 6:00am news or was this the end of the first season?

 

I'm deffinately coming back to watch next season.

 

Looks neat and sounds like the hypo is working well.

[Connor]

You should just buy a 300 gallon tank so you dont have to upgrade your tanks anymore

 

The 180 also looks really good i might try to steal your plumbing idea for my 92 gallon bow front.

 

 

Connor

[FishWife]

LOL, Chip! (I just didn't want anyone to think Scott didn't HAVE a fix! Whether it works or not -- we'll see!) We are NOT handy enough to build a wooden replacement, so we're trying to make this "canopy" work for us. All I really NEED is the ability to swing it up for feeding.

 

Scott's ingenious (imho) fix...

 

 

 

Uncemented, it bowed a *little.* Cemented, it's rigid and light!

 

 

 

Then, we need to hinge it to the wall... using the bracket/strips we hope, and T's attached to those ends you see... and a hollow PVC that will swing like a hinge. The PVC frame will rest ON the brackets, and the light fixture can hang FROM them. But, we're concerned about head room. It's about 10" all told to play with.

 

So, we also need figure out if we can suspend the light from the PVC without melting it. Anyone know? Do these lights generate heat from on top, or mostly down into the tank?

 

ALSO: Does anyone know how far above the plastic struts that cross the top of the Oceanic tank we can safely hang 4 250 halides and not melt them??? They do not hang DIRECTLY over the struts; these do not trisect the tank evenly. They form a larger midsection, with two smaller sections, one to each side of the center section. Thus, the two middle lights MOSTLY hang over water. Their EDGES hang over the plastic support struts. The two lights on the side hang dead center over the two side openings. SO, the question is: how far up do they need to be.

 

And, while I'm on this, has anyone ever shielded them with something reflective, like aluminum foil or mirrors? I'm thinking that if I could reflect light, it might deflect heat too...

 

TIA!

 

You should just buy a 300 gallon tank so you dont have to upgrade your tanks anymore

 

The 180 [did you mean our 80?] also looks really good i might try to steal your plumbing idea for my 92 gallon bow front.

 

Connor

 

Tisk. You shouldn't steal. This thread (and club) are all about sharing! So, borrow away! We REALLY liked how it worked for our bowfront 80: See other tank build thread

Edited December 29, 2007 by FishWife

[bigJPDC]

FYI, I went with 90's for my outlets, and get great flow across the sandbed. I see the rockwork deflecting current up and around as well. Maybe mix some 90's in with your 45's to get an even wider flow dispersion.

 

jp

[zotzer]

Good thing the two of you are "in this together"! There are now many men on here wondering how to get the wife to give up her bathtub for a sump, I'd imagine. ROFL

 

Great job as always, guys.....looking forward to more!!

Tracy

[MOT]

I loved your 80 gallon build thread! I can't wait till you post again for this mamma jamma. Thanks!

[FishWife]

Thanks! Here's progress over the last week:

 

We had electricians come and redo our wiring, giving us three dedicated circuits in the mudroom and one switch to an outlet in the basement, near our RO/DI unit. Scott plans to have his Mag24 down there with two large garbage cans of warm water: one fresh, the other salt. Water can be pumped up from either, using this switch, or he can go down to the basement, switch the Mag from salt to fresh, and throw the switch from down there.

 

We also built shelves: one right above the sump spot for fresh and salt water cisterns, and one higher than that for our frag tank to be. Here are mudroom shots:

 

 

Next, we have redone our sump. After ripping out all our dividers from the 80g bowfront...

 

(before)

 

... we started by drilling a 2" hole in our 75g converted tank.

 

We have four drilled holes from two overflow boxes in the new tank. All of these will return water to our mudroom/sump area while powering different parts of our cleansing/nutrifying system behind the wall. Of the four holes, two are 1" and two are 3/4".

*One of the 3/4" holes will be directly plumbed to gravity-feed our skimmer (a Grey Seas Standard 8). This will dump into the far left side of the skimmer as you look at it in the mudroom.

*The other 3/4" hole will drain into our deep sand bed/benthic zone (a la Shawn Wilson of Reef and Rainforest design's ideas seen Here: second from left, top row: Sump Concept) to provide slow flow to a quiet, natural filtering zone. This flow will be controlled by a ball valve.

*The two remaining 1" holes will drain into that first, left-hand compartment where the skimmer does, into 50 micron bags that will catch large detritus.

 

Similar to this design--Model H on Melev's Reef site--all the water will flow from either the left or right chambers to the middle and then back to the Dart doglegged in back of the first chamber, on the left. In our case, like this model, the water is cleansed on the left, goes through a bubble baffle to the center, mixes with water flowing from the sand bed/benthic zone right, and then flows behind the left, cleansing chamber to the Dart, and out.

 

We added one feature of our own: because we HATE microbubbles, and because the sand bed/benthic zone is high up, we decided to create a bubble tower. This way, water comes out (fairly slowly) from the benthic zone, down through a chamber filled with live rock that hopefully bursts most bubbles on the way down, and then out the bottom, thru egg create. You can see this in the pictures below, if you know what you're looking at.

 

Here are some construction pictures:

 

Making the bubble baffle chambers as one piece out of acrylic. The soup cans hold it nice and square, since we don't own clamps.

 

Here it is done, and backwards to my description. You are looking at the sand bed side from the wall that it will eventually sit on, as it were.

 

Our plan is to use two Sequence Dart pumps in all: one to do a closed loop with four manifolds in our display tank, incorporating a large UV sterilizer inline. The second Dart will be in the mudroom, taking the water from the sump to various points: our frag tank, our up-high refugium (that will gravity-feed the display), and eventually, our kitchen display tank.

 

Here's the sump all in place; I added our old sump sand back in last night!

 

Next, Scott tackled our halide light fixture. We got it used for a song, and it had several problems: broken clips, missing screws, etc. He worked for a couple of hours at it:

 

And, voila!

 

Pretty exciting

 

Finally, we have been plumbing the closed loop...

 

And moved the tank into the actual room where it will live (a front office on our ground floor that is now our tank-viewing room, quaintly named "The Grotto" by Scott and painted black by me... yikes!) We hung the halide fixture as we planned from bookshelf brackets:

 

Tonight, we plan to cement the closed loop, and tomorrow, do a fresh water test for flow. It's getting close to SALT water time... maybe by Friday!!!!

Edited January 8, 2008 by FishWife

[zotzer]

Where are you guys? Do we have water yet?

 

Tracy

[phisigs79]

How the PVC-ONG working

[Connor]

bump, any updates?

Edited January 28, 2008 by Connor

[jnguyen4007]

That is absolutely incredible on your work. Can I recruit you and your hubby for help when the time for me to set mine up?

[jason the filter freak]

congrats on the progress keep up the good work, hopefully all is going well. let me know how those 20k bulbs work out for you

Edited January 29, 2008 by jason the filter freak

[FishWife]

Whew!

 

Between fish who need diaper changes in hyposalinity (read: ammonia really does get high fast when you don't have live rocks!) and building the tank, we've made the jump to hyperspace and have achieved liftoff. WHEW again! THANKS for the encouragement and inquiries. It feels good to know we were missed!

 

But, may I say, "It's ALL worth it!" These pics don't do justice to how GORGEOUS and HUGE a six-foot tank is. The rocks we have are all large ones, so again, the tank is much more stunning in real life.

 

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

 

When we last heard from our heroes, it was "we plan to finish the closed loop tonight." But, due to fish needs, we suddenly realized we needed to concentrate on the "engine room" to get our frags and corals stable and out of the tank they were occupying in our bathroom and into a two-tank system with some live rock. So, about two weeks ago, we switched from trying to get the display up to getting the mud room finished. Scott has worked day and night (around his day job running our small company) to get our system built! First, as I say, it was "back to the mud room."

 

Last you saw, we'd built shelves for our cisterns to be and our frag tank. We now installed frag tank and plumbing:

 

Here's the frag rack I built using acrylic glue and egg crate:

 

And here's the frag tank with happy corals inside.

 

The main dart sequence pump feeds this tank, which overflows to the benthosphere I built in the right compartment of our sump:

 

 

And here is some of the plumbing, including the skimmer in final position.

 

With our fish set up with a two-tank live rock system (after a week of slowly raising the salinity) we stopped doing 40-60g water changes/day and could breathe. As I say, Scott worked heroically, and this past weekend we took the final steps to WATER!!!

 

First, after the plumbing was all in place (which took several nights and a full Saturday), we did the fresh water test:

 

You can see Scott's neat and ingenious plumbing in the picture above (painted black; back of tank). The two rectangles are the super-sucker returns for the Dart closed loop manifolds. They are a mod out of replacement pieces meant for HOB filters. The right, top manifold has a UV sterilizer inline (40Watt). The two open pipes are two of the four returns from the mudroom sump (they T downward as well). Our four drilled holes in the overflow boxes go to our sump, eventually. One is directly plumbed to feed our Grey Seas skimmer via gravity (one less pump). One feeds our benthosphere. And two join to go into a 50micron bag and then into the left compartment of our sump.

 

Yes, we had a few leaks on the freshwater test, and some air bubbles in the closed loop to troubleshoot. But, by Sunday eve two weeks ago, we knew aquascaping was just around the corner!

 

Of course, it took three days to fill the tank with IO water... .... .... .....

 

BUT, at last, we put in our new sand, then topped that off with cycled sand from our 80bow, and then added our first rocks.

 

I had prepared a double-layered egg crate screen (two layers slightly juxtaposed to form smaller openings and to block more of the view of our plumbing) as a background. I had wanted to do the foam and rock thing but could never make it work, so we went to a simpler idea. I simply got large plastic conduit brackets and painted them and the egg crate black. We glued it all together, zip tied it to the pipes in two pieces (for easy removal should anything bad happen) and voila! A wonderful place to display my beloved SPS's.

 

Aquascaping took ALL of last Saturday. We had to get to know the new rocks that came with the tank. Some were REALLY big. Here's the final effect, as of tonight:

 

Left side closer:

 

Right side closer:

 

We still need to add the fish. Their quarantine is up on Super Tuesday, so we plan to put them in then. Meantime, we're acclimating corals to the light and the fish are in our bedroom. BUT, check out our bathroom!

 

On a side note, do you remember these two corals from the bow 80g?

and

 

Look at them again in this frag tank a week ago: frogspawn left and hammer next to it.

 

Here's the frogspawn in the tank tonight under the halides, fully extended (use the eggcrate to get an idea of size):

 

Remember when I was worried that it was "turning brown" and dying? (See thread here) Somer of you wisely thought that it was the zooxanthellae returning to brown it up. So it was! It's now a spectacular brown with green grape-like nodules all over. And has doubled in size since Halloween when we rescued it from Ryan. (I hope he sees this, to know that his corals are all doing great!)

 

Thanks for all the support. We are excited to start enjoying this tank of our dreams!

Edited January 30, 2008 by FishWife

[zotzer]

Marcia,

It is gorgeous!!!! I was beginning to get worried about you. LOL

 

Nice recovery on the corals. They look VERY happy now.

 

Great job, as always!!

Tracy

[lletellier]

looks great, nice recovery!

[FishWife]

We had bought the idea of leaving a lot of room in our rock work for coral growth. To this end, we originally aquascaped our tank using large rocks, a low profile, and horizontal lines.

 

 

What we have quickly discovered is that there simply isn't enough space for us to plant all the corals we want. As we looked at pictures of TOTMs, we began to see that most tanks have levels of growth with different corals naturally thriving at different levels. So, for instance, mushrooms and LPS's can be low in the tank. Monti caps tend to grow laterally, and a bit vertically. Acros grow up, like trees.

 

Added to these considerations is the fact that LPSs need space from SPS's (because of sweeper tentacles) but can be clustered near one another. Our original design had the LPS's up on the eggcrate anchors, but this meant that we couldn't put acros in front of them where they could grow upwards.

 

Given all these considerations, we have re-aquascaped. Three substantive changes were made:

1. We repositioned our LPSs all on the left side of the tank. (Not all are moved off the egg crate on the right side of the pictures below, 'cause we haven't yet purchased all the SPS's we will eventually want and they're fine there for now. )

 

2. We added rocks so that we could have a mid-range.

 

3. In adding rocks, we moved existing mushrooms and zoas down, put some acro's and monti dig's that we own in the middle, and put at least one acro up high... a portend of future things to come.

 

Here's the result:

 

Full tank shot:

 

Left side closer:

 

Right side closer:

 

The difference is particularly striking on the right. (Here's the before shot for a quick comparison.)

Edited February 20, 2008 by FishWife