Hi everyone
Since I don't have any aquarium at home anymore I will write some about a reef tank at my work. I works as a marine biologist at Sjöfartsmuseet Akvariet, or The Maritime Museum & Aquarium in English, in Gothenburg Sweden. We are a small non profit public aquarium/museum. I am the curator of some of our tropical exhibits, the coral nerd to be more exact
Background
The tank was built in 1986 in concrete covered in plastic/epoxi with a large laminated glas window. The tank is 3,5m x 1,5m x 1,8m (lenght x width x depth).
When I started working at the Aquarium in 2009 the tank was a freshwater habitat with Swedish fish. Later we cleaned out the tank and built a background in plastic/epoxi. Not the best background, it was our first try, but it was cheaper than buying artificial rock. For two years we experimented with keeping swedish kelp in the tank, with mixed result(corals are much easier). After that experiment we decided to have a go on tropical corals. At this time we had a number of smaller reef tanks and a coral propagation setup behind the scenes and all theese tanks where getting crowded. And just like the kelp project, this reef tank would be a pilot study before we go into our coming rebuild of the whole Aquarium. We will close down the Aquarium in august 2018 and reopen in 2021. Our hopes is to have a really large reef tank when we open up the new Aquarium.
So that’s where we were in may of 2014. An empty 10000L tank with some lights and pumps left over from the kelp project.
The startup
We had five days from empting the tank until starting filling it up again with new saltwater. During theese days we started to scape with dry live rock. Since live rocks are expensive we were not able to cover all of the background from the start. Our thoughts was to get some rocks hanging on the background, with some help from PVC-pipes, and then get coralline algae to cover the rest of the background. It didn’t work out so well since we also added a bunch of sea urchins later and they keep the background nice and clean. So we’ve been adding more rocks whenever our budget allowed us to buy more.
We also attached two dry coral flatbed with PVC and covered the PVC with reef concrete.
We started to cure some of the dry live rock in freshwater, lowered the pH with CO2 and so on, but that was a bit too time consuming. So we decided to take care of the possible phosphate problem later instead. We used about 150kg of dry live rock from the start, and then we have been adding more. My guess is that it’s about 250kg rocks in the tank now.
On the bottom in front of the background we did a little wall of reef foam to get the sand to stay where we wanted. It’s about 150kg coral sand in the tank and the sand is only in front of the window where you can see the bottom.
We mixed reverse osmosis water with salt(Red Sea salt and Reef Crystal) in a mixing tank, 3000 liters at the time. Then pumped the mixed water to the tank. The idea was to get the old sand pressure filter running as soon as possible, and hopefully get some bacteria from the old sand we reused(silica sand). It took us five days to fill the tank because of our small reverse osmosis unit..
My colleague Jörgen who was working with me 2014.
I reuse some slides from a talk I did this spring
The system at startup 2014:
We started the tank with almost the same technique as was used to the kelp project. Return pump is a pool pump at 6500L/h. A small sand pressure filter at 6500L/h. Two Tunze Masterstream for circulation(2 x 150000L/h). A KorallenZucht skimmer (L) and a calcium reactor from Schuran. The sump is a plastic box with the volume of 500 liters. Heaters are two 500W Titan heaters controlled by GHL profilux aquarium computers.
And since I like to have macroalgae somewhere in a reef tank system we connected a 500L tank as a refugium/algae filter.
The system today:
We have upgraded the calcium reactor to a Deltec 1370. We have 2 extra Jebao RW20 in the tank for extra movement in the surface. We also have connected our coral propagation systems, 800 and 1000 liters, to this system. And some cuttlefish tanks as well. We breed Sepia bandensis. So it's a lot in one system Yes, and we put in an extra skimmer. And a lot more light, but I will come to that later.
Here are some numbers!
Equipment list and tank volumes:
Aquarium
Display 10000L
Sump 500L
Propagation tanks 800L & 1000L
Cuttlefish tanks 500L
Algae refugium 200L
Skimmers: 1 Deltec SC3070 and 1 Korallenzucht L
Calciumreactor Deltec 1370
Flow in display
Tunze Masterstream 150 x 2
Jebao RW20 x 2
Returnpump
Aqua medic poolpump - 7000L/h
Sand pressure filter – display tank 7000L/h
Controller
Profilux GHL aquarium computer
Phosphate reactor - Deltec 40L
Display lights
3 x 1000W Metal halide – BLV 14000K
2 x 400W Metal halide – Reeflux 14000K
3 x 150W Ceramic metal halide – Solljus
1 x 600W LED – Heliospectra LX602
Okey. That was some kind of an introduction. A lot of boring numbers and filters. Now I will go trough some old pics and share the progression of the tank, from may 2014 until today! Stay tuned
/ David
Since I don't have any aquarium at home anymore I will write some about a reef tank at my work. I works as a marine biologist at Sjöfartsmuseet Akvariet, or The Maritime Museum & Aquarium in English, in Gothenburg Sweden. We are a small non profit public aquarium/museum. I am the curator of some of our tropical exhibits, the coral nerd to be more exact
Background
The tank was built in 1986 in concrete covered in plastic/epoxi with a large laminated glas window. The tank is 3,5m x 1,5m x 1,8m (lenght x width x depth).
When I started working at the Aquarium in 2009 the tank was a freshwater habitat with Swedish fish. Later we cleaned out the tank and built a background in plastic/epoxi. Not the best background, it was our first try, but it was cheaper than buying artificial rock. For two years we experimented with keeping swedish kelp in the tank, with mixed result(corals are much easier). After that experiment we decided to have a go on tropical corals. At this time we had a number of smaller reef tanks and a coral propagation setup behind the scenes and all theese tanks where getting crowded. And just like the kelp project, this reef tank would be a pilot study before we go into our coming rebuild of the whole Aquarium. We will close down the Aquarium in august 2018 and reopen in 2021. Our hopes is to have a really large reef tank when we open up the new Aquarium.
So that’s where we were in may of 2014. An empty 10000L tank with some lights and pumps left over from the kelp project.
The startup
We had five days from empting the tank until starting filling it up again with new saltwater. During theese days we started to scape with dry live rock. Since live rocks are expensive we were not able to cover all of the background from the start. Our thoughts was to get some rocks hanging on the background, with some help from PVC-pipes, and then get coralline algae to cover the rest of the background. It didn’t work out so well since we also added a bunch of sea urchins later and they keep the background nice and clean. So we’ve been adding more rocks whenever our budget allowed us to buy more.
We also attached two dry coral flatbed with PVC and covered the PVC with reef concrete.
We started to cure some of the dry live rock in freshwater, lowered the pH with CO2 and so on, but that was a bit too time consuming. So we decided to take care of the possible phosphate problem later instead. We used about 150kg of dry live rock from the start, and then we have been adding more. My guess is that it’s about 250kg rocks in the tank now.
On the bottom in front of the background we did a little wall of reef foam to get the sand to stay where we wanted. It’s about 150kg coral sand in the tank and the sand is only in front of the window where you can see the bottom.
We mixed reverse osmosis water with salt(Red Sea salt and Reef Crystal) in a mixing tank, 3000 liters at the time. Then pumped the mixed water to the tank. The idea was to get the old sand pressure filter running as soon as possible, and hopefully get some bacteria from the old sand we reused(silica sand). It took us five days to fill the tank because of our small reverse osmosis unit..
My colleague Jörgen who was working with me 2014.
I reuse some slides from a talk I did this spring
The system at startup 2014:
We started the tank with almost the same technique as was used to the kelp project. Return pump is a pool pump at 6500L/h. A small sand pressure filter at 6500L/h. Two Tunze Masterstream for circulation(2 x 150000L/h). A KorallenZucht skimmer (L) and a calcium reactor from Schuran. The sump is a plastic box with the volume of 500 liters. Heaters are two 500W Titan heaters controlled by GHL profilux aquarium computers.
And since I like to have macroalgae somewhere in a reef tank system we connected a 500L tank as a refugium/algae filter.
The system today:
We have upgraded the calcium reactor to a Deltec 1370. We have 2 extra Jebao RW20 in the tank for extra movement in the surface. We also have connected our coral propagation systems, 800 and 1000 liters, to this system. And some cuttlefish tanks as well. We breed Sepia bandensis. So it's a lot in one system Yes, and we put in an extra skimmer. And a lot more light, but I will come to that later.
Here are some numbers!
Equipment list and tank volumes:
Aquarium
Display 10000L
Sump 500L
Propagation tanks 800L & 1000L
Cuttlefish tanks 500L
Algae refugium 200L
Skimmers: 1 Deltec SC3070 and 1 Korallenzucht L
Calciumreactor Deltec 1370
Flow in display
Tunze Masterstream 150 x 2
Jebao RW20 x 2
Returnpump
Aqua medic poolpump - 7000L/h
Sand pressure filter – display tank 7000L/h
Controller
Profilux GHL aquarium computer
Phosphate reactor - Deltec 40L
Display lights
3 x 1000W Metal halide – BLV 14000K
2 x 400W Metal halide – Reeflux 14000K
3 x 150W Ceramic metal halide – Solljus
1 x 600W LED – Heliospectra LX602
Okey. That was some kind of an introduction. A lot of boring numbers and filters. Now I will go trough some old pics and share the progression of the tank, from may 2014 until today! Stay tuned
/ David