Aquavim 150 Gallon Corner Tank

[alabella1]

The rocks are in. The took much more space than I thought and I needed to shift them around a lot cram them in but I'm pretty proud of this considering it was my first time. Since I ran out of the crushed marco rock, i did baking soda this time and I almost feel like it worked better than the rock. Everything was very white, but i just threw a bit more glue on there and covered in sand.

 

[alabella1]

The bad part here is most of the coral in my old tank is on rocks already, so not really sure how that is going to work out, but maybe I can free up some of them.

 

[alabella1]

So... last week I ordered a few more fish plus a new LFS opened so I visited their grand opening. So... I grabbed fully QT'd - Lineatus Fairy Wrasse, Koi Scopas Tang, LT Tang and a Footballer Damsel. From the LFS I got a baby Purple Tang, a leopard wrasse, a yellow candy hogfish and a cleaner wrasse. The QT'd ones went in a 20g display tank for a couple weeks and the 4 LFS fish went into a holding tank but would end up in the QT once the other fish were moved out as their QT period ended this weekend

The Lineatus went a little nutty in the observation tank so I dipped him in Paraguard which he chilled and got his color back. I put him back on display and he seemed ok, was eating, being more social, but one morning I just found him dead. The yellow candy hogfish did not make it in the holding tank either.

This weekend was a wild whirlwind of fun. On Saturday I moved almost all my coral from the RSM250 to the big tank. Sunday I moved almost all the fish from QT to the big tank. I moved my Tomini and Gem tangs in with the Koi Scopas, LT and damsel so they could all get to know each other and work out their **** before going to the big tank. I wanted to do what I could to add the tangs to the big tank all at once so there's no fighting and territorial bs.

This morning I didn't like the way the Tomini Tang was looking in observation. He was being bullied for sure. Moved him to the DT and he seems to be doing better.

The Kessil light was in there alone, temporarily so I could see what the heck I was doing.

My 2x Neptune Skys are up and running now.

 

[alabella1]

My new custom Lifereef Sump and Refugium courtesy of @JJT at Lifereef. Can't wait to get this bad boy up and running!!

 

[alabella1]

Pro shots of the Sump by @JJT

 

[acropora4u]

dang...looking nice!

 

[Gumbies R Us]

Tank and setup are looking nice so far!!

 

[alabella1]

Working on the cabinet as we speak. Check it out!

 

[alabella1]

More work on the cabinet. Fuge is up and running, added third media reactor and painted the inside floor of the cabinet with floor paint and color chips.

 

[kishstl]

Looks great. I just received my sump from Jeff and I am starting the assembly now. I am new to sumps/skimmers/fuge/etc. How complicated was the set up? Looking at all the connections and pies, etc. is a little daunting.

 

[kados]

More work on the cabinet. Fuge is up and running, added third media reactor and painted the inside floor of the cabinet with floor paint and color chips.

Looks great!! You and I like that gray & orange!

 

[alabella1]

Looks great. I just received my sump from Jeff and I am starting the assembly now. I am new to sumps/skimmers/fuge/etc. How complicated was the set up? Looking at all the connections and pies, etc. is a little daunting.

Nice. Send me some pix and I'll gladly help you where I can. As for the daunting part... yeah... it def. was. Jeff's instructions are top notch though so take your time and read through them. He's not just giving directions, that **** has life lessons in it!! I've made a couple changes and tweaks to the setup but I can tell you one thing for sure... use his vinyl tubing for the overflow and the return... LIFE CHANGING!! I had to change my return to blcak instead of clear though because my lights were causing some algae to grow in there.

 

[alabella1]

Well, disaster struck my beautiful tank last week. My Apex **** the bed on super bowl sunday. It took 2 days but I finally got a hold of Neptune support and they determined I needed a replacement. They sent it out and it was due to be delivered by this past Tuesday. Well, at some point thursday night one of my Ranco temp controllers went rogue and boiled the entire tank. I woke up to a cloudy 99 degree mess. All fish dead but 2. My maroon clown and my pajama cardinal (oldest fish I own) somehow survived the ordeal. I would say just about all my beautiful corals are gone. Some of the softies may rebound, but I'm looking at many many white skeletons. Anything that even has a small sign of tissue I'm keeping to attempt a resurrection. My only luck here was I had a handful of frags, 8 fish and a pistol shrimp in my observation tank, so I can immediately begin my rebuild. I was able to catch the clown and cardinal and I moved them to observation with the other 8 and they are just fine.

Maybe the worst part of this whole thing is the Apex replacement ACTUALLY CAME EARLY. It was delivered on Friday so I was literally a half day or so away from avoiding this whole thing.

I was able to pinpoint this to a single point of failure. One of my ranco temp controllers was bugging out. It was in cooling mode rather than heating mode. I think the tank survived this long because the apex would turn off it's outlet before it could go rogue. So losing the apex definitely set things up for disaster. I think the reason I also made it from Sunday-Friday without issue was it was not very warm in NY... until Thursday. It was like 65 degrees out and my house was warmer than usual. Once the temp of the tank crossed the set temp of the Ranco of 79 degrees that cooling mode kicked in and ran my 800w finnex heater constantly thinking it was running something that would cool while all it did was cook the tank. That controller has been removed as it seems to be erroring out when I try to flip it to heat mode. It only wants to run on cooling so it's outta there.

After cleanup, water changes, carbon, gfo, etc, I got things back to being stable. I assessed all my damage and I removed a bunch of rock, rearranged/cleaned up what was left. I actually love the new aquascape I have created. I moved over the fish and put back the corals I'm going to try to rehab. This weekend I'll work on placement of the new coral which is still in observation. It just insane how my colorful and full of life tank is now this sterile almost colorless scape.

Last night I moved the fish and I was later just sitting and watching tv when my Apex again **** the bed. I've already reached out to support, but I am putting some extra safeguards in place so that I can continue to monitor and catch anything before I lose these fish as well.

Anyhow, thanks for listening to my venting and here are some before and after pix of the entire ordeal.

 

[alabella1]

Before

 

[alabella1]

After

 

[alabella1]

Current situation

 

[alabella1]

Slowly rebuilding. I have an observation tank full of coral, a QT full of fish and an almost done control board.

 

[beastium]

That tank is beautiful, is it glass? Sorry for the losses, new scape is nice though

 

[alabella1]

That tank is beautiful, is it glass? Sorry for the losses, new scape is nice though

Yes, it's 1/2" glass and boy am I terrible at keeping this thread up to date.

 

[alabella1]

Sorry I've been so awful at keeping this up to date. The tank is back up and running, but it was NOT easy. I picked up fish from a couple guys leaving the hobby and all was well. Got them back into the tank and poof, velvet hits again. Having been through it before I was much more prepared this time. Everyone was pulled as quickly as possible, reef rally pro and off to QT. Sad to say I lost a Chevron and a Purple I had just grabbed a few weeks prior. I was almost ready to throw in the towel and I ended up speaking with Alexander @ Reef Exclusive and we game planned. I went fallow for 6-8 weeks. In that time I completely emptied the tank. I removed about a 5 gal bucket of sand. Leveled everything out to 1" of sand. I cleaned the sand that was left in the tank the best I could. I cleaned my sump and fuge. I returned everything back to the way it was and began a slow mini cycle, fallow period, etc. I worked more on the control board cabinet (got a slightly taller one) and Worked on parameters and stability. I had 3 tanks of fish in various stages of QT. At the end of the fallow period I eased them all back in and now, well, things are going ok so far (knock on wood). I was even able to go on a family vacation for 5 days and my automation ran as it should and tank remained stable. I'm up to around 20 fish now, plenty of inverts and some coral. I do have a ton of frags growing out in another tank and will ease them in as they are ready. I changed up my pumps a bit for more flow/nutrient export. I have 2x Maxspect Gyre 350s on the back walls and about 8-10" down. I have my 2x MP40s about 8" from the bottom at the front of the tank running antisync at 45% as to not create a sandstorm. My return was completely redone. The Cor20 is 100% dedicated to the return and no manifold. I expanded the hose as large as it could at 1 1/4" and it runs 100% all the time. I increased my Lifereef skimmer pump from a MAG 9.5 to a MAG 24. I moved the MAG 9.5 to the return chamber and it's feeding the fuge and reactors. I also sold off all my hanna test kits and my trident and picked up a reefbot lab. So that's it. Lots going on... but you didn't come here to read did you? Yeah, you're here for the pix, i know. Ok ok. You made it this far, here are some new pix.