Oberst Hajj
Well-Known Member
Hello R2R,
I have been reading a lot of threads here on R2R and gathering a lot of info from some of you on the current build I'm working on. So, I thought it only fair that I start a build thread to share my progress and setbacks so that others might learn from it as well.
My first saltwater tank was a 60g Cube mixed reef that has been up and running for 3.5 years. I've learned a lot from it, and it is still teaching me things to this day. One of the things it taught me was that I really wanted a bigger tank! Not only for the space inside the tank for more fish options, but for more room in the sump area as well. Having to contain your sump and all the equipment and electronics in a 2'x2' footprint is quite challenging and more than a little difficult to work on and clean. The other thing it taught me was that my family likes the critters in the tank more than the corals. This led me to wanting to do a FOWLR tank since it would allow us to keep any fish that we wanted to. I also wanted to reduce the amount of maintenance the tank would need, so the simplicity of a fish only tank was appealing as well.
Thus, the current build was born. Back in January I placed an order for a Planet Aquariums MEGA Matrix 270g (84x30x25) glass tank. It is one of their stock sized tanks, but I had them upsize the external overflow from their Tideline 16" to the 20". Not only did this give the tank more surface skimming, but it also increased the drain size from 1" to 1.5". The increase in drain size allows me to easily convert this tank to a reef tank in the future if I decide to go that route again.
Since the Wife and I are both particular on how our house looks, it was decided early on that I would be building the stand and canopy to best fit in with our interior. It would also save some money on the build, which is always good!
Researching on how to build a solid stand that would support this size tank, I came across the @RocketEngineer plans and decided to use those.
The initial plan was to have all the equipment and electronics under the stand, so I added the two center supports to help frame in a compartment for the Apex on the left side and a space for future expansion on the right if needed. The center supports also gave me a little piece of mind supporting this size tank. The opening is 46" to allow for a decent sized sump to fit in there. The plan is to use pocket screws and glue, eliminating the need for the "screw boards" in his design.
The Wife graciously agreed to turn our formal dining room into a sitting room so that we would have a dedicated area to enjoy the tank from. To get an idea on how the new tank would fit in the room and what type of new furniture she could get, I mocked it all up in Fusion 360. She looked at several couches and a few chaise lounges, but they were all to large for the room once the tank was in there. In the end she had to settle for getting two of our current chairs reupholstered in the fabric of her choice. Some where along the lines new drapes were added to the list of things needed as well.
Mocking it up on the computer also let us play around with color options on the stand easily.
In the end, she decided on an all-white stand with just plain trim and a simple style. Something we could have bought instead of me building, but we are still going to save a lot of money on the stand.
With the tank ordered and the stand designed, it was time to turn my attention to the equipment I was going to use on this build. Since this was going to be a FOWLR tank, I knew I would not need full blown reef lights, could go with a little less flow, and would not need to dose a lot. I wanted to do a Negative Space Aquascape (NSA) and probably a heavier bioload, so that meant I would need a good skimmer and probably a biopellet reactor. The Wife’s biggest pet peeve about aquariums is algae in the DT. To help combat that as much as possible, I’ll be installing a UV sterilizer and probably an algae turf scrubber as well.
After making a list of band and models of the equipment that I wanted, I started searching the various sites to see if I could find what I wanted used before buying it new. I had not made up my mind on which skimmer I wanted to go with, so when a fellow Colorado reefer listed his Precision Marine Bullet 3 skimmer setup for sale, it really piqued my interest. He has it running on a DC pump (same as I wanted to do) with an Avast Marine Swabbie and attached to an Avast Marine Davy Jones’ Skimmate Superlocker. Both addons would reduce the amount of daily/weekly maintenance that I’d have to do. He also offered it all to me at the rough price point I had budgeted for a new skimmer. Score!
Such a large skimmer did pose an issue with getting it in the sump below the stand and working on it. With only a couple of inches from the top of the collection up and the bottom of the stand top, I was not looking forward to having to clean it when the Davy Jones’ Locker was full. Water changes were also going to be more difficult with the sump under the stand then I wanted them to be. I would be back to putting a small submersible pump in the sump and dealing with running a hose outside to drain it and then another hose from the mixing station in the garage to fill it. The wall behind the tank is shared on the other side with our three-car attached garage. Since I was already going to be putting my mixing station in the garage, this got me to thinking about building a “fish closet” in there as well. Knowing that the harder the weekly maintenance is to do, the less likely I will be to do it, I decided that moving the sump and all equipment out there would be the best recipe for success.
Of course, our three-car garage is not laid out optimally for just closing in the 3rd bay to make the fish room, as the two-car portion is what is on the tank side of the garage. The Wife has become a little spoilt when it comes to parking in there as she is the only one that parks on the two-car side and has a lot of room to get in and out of her truck. Not wanting to (okay, not being allowed to!) encroach too much into her space, I had to limit the “fish closet” to 5’ wide. I was limited by the garage door rails to 13’ long. While not overly large, it is bigger than a closet and I should really call it a fish room… which the Wife loves to give me crap about! She doesn't mind really, as she knows I'll maintain the tank better since everything will be much easier to do.
As you can see, I still need to move the yard tools out of that spot and clean the floor before we frame in the room. With the fish room location and size determined, I was able to go ahead an plan out what was going in the room and were it was going to go.
The garage has some shelves and a counter with drawers which was not being used, so I am going to repurpose those into the fish room to give me a place to work and organize the small things.
I’m going to build a stand to hold the sump and water mixing tanks. My plan is for the stand to be 21” high. This will put the sump at a comfortable working height and raise the mixing tanks up so that I can get a bucket under the spigots for those times I need to manually draw some water out.
The mixing tanks are 100g each and I plan to plumb them and automate them as much as possible with my Apex. I have not decided on which pumps I’ll be using for the mixing station yet. I might reuse some of the pumps I have for the 60g Cube to start with, but I eventually want to have all DC pumps and I might go so far as to use the exact same pump on everything. I know this would-be major overkill on some of the systems, but it would give me several plug and play backup pumps if my return pumps (I plan on running dual return pumps) were to fail.
For my sump I’m still undecide on what I want to do. There are a couple of acrylic sumps out there that I really like, but they are quite expensive. I have also thought about building my own acrylic sump as well. I have a nice wood working shop in my detached garage that includes a table saw and router table. I also have a pair of Epilog lasers that will cut and engrave acrylic. So, I have all the tools needed to build my own sump and I already work with acrylic and have sources for it. The only thing I’m lacking is experience welding acrylic to make watertight seams. Until I make up my mind on what my permanent sump is going to be, I am going to buy a 75g sump off the same guy that is selling me the skimmer.
Without having the tank on hand and not knowing down to the fraction of an inch where the wall studs are between the two rooms, I’ve only been able to rough out how I’d like my plumbing to be. The pipes are going to be red like in these images, but the fittings are all going to be black. Since you can't buy everything in black, I ordered what I could in the typical Sch 40 white and I will use pvc dye to dye them black. The benefit to dying the pvc instead of painting it is that the dye actually penetrates the pvc a little and can not be scratched off like paint. If you scratch it deep enough you will expose the the white where the dye did not penetrate, otherwise it will not rub or wear off.
The orange colored unions in these images are Apex flow sensors, so in real life they will be black as well.
This image is looking straight down on the tank and into the fish room. The wall between them will be right on the line where the gray garage floor starts.
From inside the fish room it should look something like this...
I know that some of the wall studs are going to get in the way, so I’ll just have to address that when I open up the dry wall between the two rooms.
I have also not drawn up the manifold to run the UV and other reactors yet. I might not as I'm going to just have to free plumb that stuff once everything else is in. I'm thinking the UV might go to the left of the sump mounted vertically. I think the other reactors will fit on the wall above the sump and below the long return line. The orange bucket is where the Davy Jones' Locker will go. I might have to extend the sump stand into that area to fit the bigger DIY sump in the future, so I'll have to see where else that can go.
So far everything to this point as been just planning things out, but I have started to do some actual work on this build. In the next post I’ll share the NSA aquascape I’ve been working on for the past week. I’m hoping to finish it up this weekend if I don't run out of superglue. I've already used two 16oz bottles from @Glue Masters and I have two more on the way. Who would have thought I'd spend nearly $200 on superglue!
I have been reading a lot of threads here on R2R and gathering a lot of info from some of you on the current build I'm working on. So, I thought it only fair that I start a build thread to share my progress and setbacks so that others might learn from it as well.
My first saltwater tank was a 60g Cube mixed reef that has been up and running for 3.5 years. I've learned a lot from it, and it is still teaching me things to this day. One of the things it taught me was that I really wanted a bigger tank! Not only for the space inside the tank for more fish options, but for more room in the sump area as well. Having to contain your sump and all the equipment and electronics in a 2'x2' footprint is quite challenging and more than a little difficult to work on and clean. The other thing it taught me was that my family likes the critters in the tank more than the corals. This led me to wanting to do a FOWLR tank since it would allow us to keep any fish that we wanted to. I also wanted to reduce the amount of maintenance the tank would need, so the simplicity of a fish only tank was appealing as well.
Thus, the current build was born. Back in January I placed an order for a Planet Aquariums MEGA Matrix 270g (84x30x25) glass tank. It is one of their stock sized tanks, but I had them upsize the external overflow from their Tideline 16" to the 20". Not only did this give the tank more surface skimming, but it also increased the drain size from 1" to 1.5". The increase in drain size allows me to easily convert this tank to a reef tank in the future if I decide to go that route again.
Since the Wife and I are both particular on how our house looks, it was decided early on that I would be building the stand and canopy to best fit in with our interior. It would also save some money on the build, which is always good!
Researching on how to build a solid stand that would support this size tank, I came across the @RocketEngineer plans and decided to use those.
The initial plan was to have all the equipment and electronics under the stand, so I added the two center supports to help frame in a compartment for the Apex on the left side and a space for future expansion on the right if needed. The center supports also gave me a little piece of mind supporting this size tank. The opening is 46" to allow for a decent sized sump to fit in there. The plan is to use pocket screws and glue, eliminating the need for the "screw boards" in his design.
The Wife graciously agreed to turn our formal dining room into a sitting room so that we would have a dedicated area to enjoy the tank from. To get an idea on how the new tank would fit in the room and what type of new furniture she could get, I mocked it all up in Fusion 360. She looked at several couches and a few chaise lounges, but they were all to large for the room once the tank was in there. In the end she had to settle for getting two of our current chairs reupholstered in the fabric of her choice. Some where along the lines new drapes were added to the list of things needed as well.
Mocking it up on the computer also let us play around with color options on the stand easily.
In the end, she decided on an all-white stand with just plain trim and a simple style. Something we could have bought instead of me building, but we are still going to save a lot of money on the stand.
With the tank ordered and the stand designed, it was time to turn my attention to the equipment I was going to use on this build. Since this was going to be a FOWLR tank, I knew I would not need full blown reef lights, could go with a little less flow, and would not need to dose a lot. I wanted to do a Negative Space Aquascape (NSA) and probably a heavier bioload, so that meant I would need a good skimmer and probably a biopellet reactor. The Wife’s biggest pet peeve about aquariums is algae in the DT. To help combat that as much as possible, I’ll be installing a UV sterilizer and probably an algae turf scrubber as well.
After making a list of band and models of the equipment that I wanted, I started searching the various sites to see if I could find what I wanted used before buying it new. I had not made up my mind on which skimmer I wanted to go with, so when a fellow Colorado reefer listed his Precision Marine Bullet 3 skimmer setup for sale, it really piqued my interest. He has it running on a DC pump (same as I wanted to do) with an Avast Marine Swabbie and attached to an Avast Marine Davy Jones’ Skimmate Superlocker. Both addons would reduce the amount of daily/weekly maintenance that I’d have to do. He also offered it all to me at the rough price point I had budgeted for a new skimmer. Score!
Such a large skimmer did pose an issue with getting it in the sump below the stand and working on it. With only a couple of inches from the top of the collection up and the bottom of the stand top, I was not looking forward to having to clean it when the Davy Jones’ Locker was full. Water changes were also going to be more difficult with the sump under the stand then I wanted them to be. I would be back to putting a small submersible pump in the sump and dealing with running a hose outside to drain it and then another hose from the mixing station in the garage to fill it. The wall behind the tank is shared on the other side with our three-car attached garage. Since I was already going to be putting my mixing station in the garage, this got me to thinking about building a “fish closet” in there as well. Knowing that the harder the weekly maintenance is to do, the less likely I will be to do it, I decided that moving the sump and all equipment out there would be the best recipe for success.
Of course, our three-car garage is not laid out optimally for just closing in the 3rd bay to make the fish room, as the two-car portion is what is on the tank side of the garage. The Wife has become a little spoilt when it comes to parking in there as she is the only one that parks on the two-car side and has a lot of room to get in and out of her truck. Not wanting to (okay, not being allowed to!) encroach too much into her space, I had to limit the “fish closet” to 5’ wide. I was limited by the garage door rails to 13’ long. While not overly large, it is bigger than a closet and I should really call it a fish room… which the Wife loves to give me crap about! She doesn't mind really, as she knows I'll maintain the tank better since everything will be much easier to do.
As you can see, I still need to move the yard tools out of that spot and clean the floor before we frame in the room. With the fish room location and size determined, I was able to go ahead an plan out what was going in the room and were it was going to go.
The garage has some shelves and a counter with drawers which was not being used, so I am going to repurpose those into the fish room to give me a place to work and organize the small things.
I’m going to build a stand to hold the sump and water mixing tanks. My plan is for the stand to be 21” high. This will put the sump at a comfortable working height and raise the mixing tanks up so that I can get a bucket under the spigots for those times I need to manually draw some water out.
The mixing tanks are 100g each and I plan to plumb them and automate them as much as possible with my Apex. I have not decided on which pumps I’ll be using for the mixing station yet. I might reuse some of the pumps I have for the 60g Cube to start with, but I eventually want to have all DC pumps and I might go so far as to use the exact same pump on everything. I know this would-be major overkill on some of the systems, but it would give me several plug and play backup pumps if my return pumps (I plan on running dual return pumps) were to fail.
For my sump I’m still undecide on what I want to do. There are a couple of acrylic sumps out there that I really like, but they are quite expensive. I have also thought about building my own acrylic sump as well. I have a nice wood working shop in my detached garage that includes a table saw and router table. I also have a pair of Epilog lasers that will cut and engrave acrylic. So, I have all the tools needed to build my own sump and I already work with acrylic and have sources for it. The only thing I’m lacking is experience welding acrylic to make watertight seams. Until I make up my mind on what my permanent sump is going to be, I am going to buy a 75g sump off the same guy that is selling me the skimmer.
Without having the tank on hand and not knowing down to the fraction of an inch where the wall studs are between the two rooms, I’ve only been able to rough out how I’d like my plumbing to be. The pipes are going to be red like in these images, but the fittings are all going to be black. Since you can't buy everything in black, I ordered what I could in the typical Sch 40 white and I will use pvc dye to dye them black. The benefit to dying the pvc instead of painting it is that the dye actually penetrates the pvc a little and can not be scratched off like paint. If you scratch it deep enough you will expose the the white where the dye did not penetrate, otherwise it will not rub or wear off.
The orange colored unions in these images are Apex flow sensors, so in real life they will be black as well.
This image is looking straight down on the tank and into the fish room. The wall between them will be right on the line where the gray garage floor starts.
From inside the fish room it should look something like this...
I know that some of the wall studs are going to get in the way, so I’ll just have to address that when I open up the dry wall between the two rooms.
I have also not drawn up the manifold to run the UV and other reactors yet. I might not as I'm going to just have to free plumb that stuff once everything else is in. I'm thinking the UV might go to the left of the sump mounted vertically. I think the other reactors will fit on the wall above the sump and below the long return line. The orange bucket is where the Davy Jones' Locker will go. I might have to extend the sump stand into that area to fit the bigger DIY sump in the future, so I'll have to see where else that can go.
So far everything to this point as been just planning things out, but I have started to do some actual work on this build. In the next post I’ll share the NSA aquascape I’ve been working on for the past week. I’m hoping to finish it up this weekend if I don't run out of superglue. I've already used two 16oz bottles from @Glue Masters and I have two more on the way. Who would have thought I'd spend nearly $200 on superglue!
