So my friend set up a frag tank....

[Leishman]

Post from my local Club Forum:

I'd like to show everyone a little bit about what's involved in building and running a commercial coral farm. This is my second one, which is a lot smaller than the first one I built in Florida. I've learned a great deal about growing cnidarians in the sunlight over the past 4 years, and I am really excited to see how "version 2" does in practice.


First, in order to grow a lot of coral, you will need big tanks. Lesson learned: make sure the fiberglass builder packs them properly. Oops! This one was ok though.

Next, you need a place to put those tanks, most importantly, a solid foundation so all that weight doesn't crack the slab. Here we have a 6" thick 4000psi with #4 rebar slab.

Getting all that concrete to the back of my house required the use of this bad@$$ piece of machinery:

Here is the finished floor, a nice stamped concrete slate pattern. Only the finest of floors for my coral tubs.

We moved the tanks into place before starting on the structure. Why did I do this?

...Because I needed space in the garage to store 11,000 pounds of glass and aluminum. This is an entire 28' trailer full of solarium parts:

Now, I just had to build the thing. Step one: find cheap child labor. This is my wife's cousin Kevin, who got to learn how to use power tools and practice his geometry and trig skills. Thanks Kevin!

Fast forward about 8 months. Winter is not a good time to work on this sort of project. The peak of this structure is 17 feet. After setting the first few main ribs with 5 guys and only a ladder, I knew I needed to find some scaffolding. Thanks to craigslist, I got some mismatched parts for next to nothing, which did the job well enough. Don't tell OSHA!

Finally, it's starting to look like a project! This is in March of this year (09)

We had to build a gable to connect the solarium to the house.

 

[Leishman]

Part 2 of same post:

Fast forward another month. With Howard's excellent help, we got the glass installed in a few weeks.

Soaking in that balmy March sunshine

Here is another shot showing the reflectiveness of the glass. This will turn out to be a huge mostly-unforseen benefit. At last, I have a building for my tanks.

Fast forward to June 09. Solarium is finished close enough to start on the tanks. Step 1: water test to make sure they didn't develop leaks after sitting out in the snow all winter. A few of them did, but were fixable. Obligatory mermaid shot:

Step 2: get a few lengths of pipe and some fittings. I did almost everything in 3" to reduce friction.

Step 3: glue it all together! Only two leaks, one was not my fault, sort of. I usually don't like using DWV fittings but 3" sch40 gets really expensive, and I wanted to be able to run to home depot whenever I needed another fitting, which was often. I used the green-label heavy duty glue with very good success.

Many corals we keep in our tanks can't handle full sunlight in very shallow water. I get around 1400 umol of light (PAR) through that glass on a cloudless day. That will fry the majority of corals in the hobby. So I use blue chromatinet to alter the spectrum and provide shade. This gives me the equivalent of 10-12k 400w metal halide lighting, roughly 500 umol of PAR. Interestingly, sunlight does not drop off significantly from the top of the water to the bottom, unlike MH & T5 lighting in our tanks. This is because light intensity is a function of distance of the light source, an inverse square relationship. I get 500 umol on the top and roughly 490 on the bottom.

Here is 60% shade over the entire room:

Here is what 2500 square feet of shade cloth looks like spread out over my yard.

Finally, on July 16th the first corals go into the greenhouse! It has been 2 years since I settled on a solarium supplier. I love building things, so doing this large DIY project was a way for me to test my abilities. It was a good experience but next time I will pay someone to put it together in a few months.

Here's a wide-angle shot of the inside, courtesy of dshnarw:

The first tank filled with broodstock colonies:

Another shot of the same tank. The corals look brown in the sunlight, but looking at them through a viewbox shows that they still have good color.

A neat panorama that dshnarw stitched together:

The next two tanks will be online as soon as I get water made. I have some neat aquaculture experiments that I am going to run in one of these tanks, stuff that hasn't been done on anything resembling a commercial level, if at all. The final two tanks will get filled as soon as I need the space, which probably won't be long.

I'll continue to post updates as I have them. The next part will deal with equipment, design, and maintenance procedures. Feel free to ask as many questions as you can think of. Thanks for reading!

 

[macawmagic]

yea...i'm just a little bit jealous!!! OMG SOOOO NICE!

 

[revhtree]

Wow that is awesome!! How many gallons will this handle?

Thanks for sharing!

 

[Leishman]

I think the tubs are 1400g each:

As for equipment, here is how I'm doing it for now:
All coral tubs are combined into one large system along with my display tank[/url]. I decided that I only want to maintain one system rather than a bunch of independent ones. It is true that some corals do better in "dirty" water, but the tradeoff of less maintenance for slightly lower growth rates of some species is worthwhile to me. Besides, most of the really nice corals out there are pristine-water loving species anyway. So I built a system that focuses on excellent water quality.

Protein skimmer: Custom-built 8'x22" fiberglass semi-cone, powered by ReeFlo hammerhead with custom needlewheel impeller. This thing holds 115 gallons of water yet only draws about 330 watts.

Calcium/Alkalinity supplementation is currently provided by Korallin C-10002 reactor. As demand outpaces this reactor (It's nearing max capacity now), I will add a second chamber by converting an old Deltec fluidized media reactor. Also I plan to add a Kalkwasser reactor in the next few months.

I use UV to keep bacterial populations down, as well as slow down algae growth. There is one thing that grows faster than xenia in sunlight, and that is brown algae. The UV really cuts down on this. I also feel that by keeping bacterial loads low, the chance for opportunistic infection (brown jelly, STN/RTN, etc) is a lot lower. UV = better coral health. I chose an Emperor Aquatics 150w HO single bulb system which I have been very happy with so far.

Here is the skimmer, UV, and you can see the Ca reactor peeking from behind the UV:

The big grey tube to the left of the skimmer in the picture will be my new ozone reactor. I want to use ozone to maintain water quality, but not run it in my skimmer as I feel that the amount of ozone I need to keep the water clean will cause skimmate production problems. So using a separate reactor is the way to go. This design uses a high pressure atomizing nozzle to inject microparticles of seawater into a pressurized chamber with ozonated air, sort of the opposite approach to injecting microbubbles of ozone into a body of seawater. I will revisit this piece of equipment in more detail once I get it finished and installed.
Here is a shot of the sump, which is currently housing broodstock waiting to go outside. Although the sump is 270 gallons, it is too small and I am thinking of ways to fix this without getting a new one.

Water circulation is managed with these three small pumps:

Total system volume will be near 5000 gallons, so if you think about that, a pair of hammerheads and a dart isn't all that much pump. I am able to run all 5 greenhouse tubs from one hammerhead- about 1000gph turnover each. By using 3" plumbing for all return lines, I minimize head loss due to friction and get nearly all 5800 gph of the pump. The other hammerhead feeds my display tank and the equipment loop (skimmer, UV, CaRx, ozone rx). The Dart runs my small "color-up" tanks- 5x 30 breeders with T5s that will be used to color-up any stubborn corals that don't want to look nice under the sun.

In-tank circulation is done by Tunze streams.

Here is a shot of the heat pump, it is a 3 hp model. The extra valve connects into my saltwater mixing tank, so all I need to do to add new water is turn one valve. I can dump saltwater by the bottom valve, but I won't have to use it much since most water will be lost when packing & shipping.

My new water mixing tank, a 600 gal HDPE vertical storage tank.

Finally, a shot of one of my favorite corals, neon green sinularia that I am growing by the bucketful.

 

[Stray32]

Holy expensive project! Nice though.

 

[cherokee_dude]

That's awesome!
Any pics of other stock? Otherwise that's going to be really expensive GSP and leather!

 

[da6d2003]

Holy cow!!!

 

[Leishman]

That's awesome!
Any pics of other stock? Otherwise that's going to be really expensive GSP and leather!

There are ~50 SPS colonies in there right now - ranging from 4 or 5 Tyree corals to the good old green slimer. Corals were added 2 weeks ago and several are already encrusting the mounts.

 

[cherokee_dude]

I figured as much Will there be a place to shop? That's very cool!

 

[Leishman]

I know there are in ther as I gave him my colonies when I tore down my 250g for the new 135g

and this is one of his own colonies

 

[Leishman]

I figured as much Will there be a place to shop? That's very cool!

No retail. No online. He's only selling to LFS's.

 

[xiongaquatics]

wow. nice project.

 

[El Camaron]

WOW that must have cost some pocket change... sweet set up for sure.

 

[Reef Pets]

Thats a sweet nano tank for sure.
Awesome!

 

[amore169]

Very impressive project.

 

[Leishman]

All this is tied into his 550g display. Here's an older picture

 

[Ian]

So he's starting his own wholesale gig Rik?

 

[Leishman]

So he's starting his own wholesale gig Rik?

No. He is all about aquiring good brood stock and doing true aquaculture. He wont be finding a sweet colonies smashing them up and selling all the frags chop shop style. No new corals will even be fragged for several months, 'till they have displayed good growth and sustainability.

Justin (the guy this all belongs to) is a 1st class guy. He was at my house in minutes with 200g of new water for my 250g after I lost power for 3 1/2 days (I was in Maine). He loaned me a $1500 deltec carbon reactor (full of ROX carbon) and countless other tools to help save my reef.

 

[revhtree]

So when is he going to join us at R2R?