After 20 years of wanting to build a reef tank I finally decided back in November to build one. I work from home and my home office has a closet with sliding doors so I decided to remove the doors and build a stand into the closet. I spent a good deal of time researching and have been taking my time to acquire gear and build things out though honestly I jumped the gun in a few areas. I decided to postpone putting water into the system till I have a better idea of how things need to fit in the sump area. I expect things to really come together this month so I figured why not do a build thread?
I picked up a 72x18x18 tank, with a stand, canopy and lights for $300ish from a local. It wasn't until getting it home and starting to clean it up that I realized I had my work cut out for me. The internal silicone was in bad shape, and as you can see the pic below salt had crept under the bottom bracing.
I stripped all of the silicon out of the seams and redid it using ASI aquarium silicone which has great bonding strength. Unfortunatly I wasn't able to get all of the gunk from under the bracing out, but it's sealed in there now. Once silicone cured I was able to sucessfully leak test it and it turned out fine.
The bottom of my stand uses multiple heavy duty leveling feet to distribute the weight and allow the whole thing to be leveled precisely
Once in the closet and leveled with the top on, the frame was also attached to the wall studs with lag screws.
The interior will be lined with plywood soon and I'll be adding face boards and doors using some 1 inch mahogany that I have. I just need the weather to warm up a bit so I can stand to be in the garage planing and cutting the wood.
The sump is a Trigger Systems Platinum 39 that I snagged during the BRS black Friday sales.
The tank was originally set up with a drain on each side a HOB return. I drilled it to add a Fiji Cube external overflow and will be using the old drain locations for my returns. I've got to fix the background as it got wrinkled moving the tank up to the office.
I made a video of my scape, but after seeing it actually in the tank I'm redoing parts of it. The piece on the right side will interfere with the gyre that's going on that side and the piece of the left need reworked because some of the back parts of it aren't going to be visible enough.
Right now I'm working on the plumbing, but I hate plumbing so it's going slow.
03-21-2022: Almost done with plumbing and mounting of the major pieces...
I picked up a 72x18x18 tank, with a stand, canopy and lights for $300ish from a local. It wasn't until getting it home and starting to clean it up that I realized I had my work cut out for me. The internal silicone was in bad shape, and as you can see the pic below salt had crept under the bottom bracing.
I stripped all of the silicon out of the seams and redid it using ASI aquarium silicone which has great bonding strength. Unfortunatly I wasn't able to get all of the gunk from under the bracing out, but it's sealed in there now. Once silicone cured I was able to sucessfully leak test it and it turned out fine.
The bottom of my stand uses multiple heavy duty leveling feet to distribute the weight and allow the whole thing to be leveled precisely
Once in the closet and leveled with the top on, the frame was also attached to the wall studs with lag screws.
The interior will be lined with plywood soon and I'll be adding face boards and doors using some 1 inch mahogany that I have. I just need the weather to warm up a bit so I can stand to be in the garage planing and cutting the wood.
The sump is a Trigger Systems Platinum 39 that I snagged during the BRS black Friday sales.
The tank was originally set up with a drain on each side a HOB return. I drilled it to add a Fiji Cube external overflow and will be using the old drain locations for my returns. I've got to fix the background as it got wrinkled moving the tank up to the office.
I made a video of my scape, but after seeing it actually in the tank I'm redoing parts of it. The piece on the right side will interfere with the gyre that's going on that side and the piece of the left need reworked because some of the back parts of it aren't going to be visible enough.
Right now I'm working on the plumbing, but I hate plumbing so it's going slow.
03-21-2022: Almost done with plumbing and mounting of the major pieces...
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