450 96x36x30 Build

degrandfish · Jan 27, 2026

Ive been out of the saltwater side of the hobby for about 10 years now. Just had several 75 gallon planted tanks around the house for recent years. I did have a build thread on here for a 500 gallon Custom Aquariums tank back then. We picked up this running 180 gallon late November/Early December from marketplace and have been running with it.

It came with a Hydros controller setup which I did not like, preferred the Apex I was used to years ago. Swapped it out and now running a full Apex setup with a Trident as well. Put the Hydros on another smaller 75 gallon setup we had picked up off of marketplace in the basement.

(The one facing the camera is Asher, our youngest who just turned 18 months)

We added a bunch of coral and fish to the tank. The Sohal Tang and the Vlamingi Tang actually came with the 75! The Tang Police would be very angry on this one! The Sohal was resold, but we did keep the Vlamingi since he is such a gentle giant. The Sohal was on the aggressive side and way larger than the rest of the tank mates. Tried to keep the Sohal for an entire week and decided it was not going to work, stressing out the rest from the frequent torpedo chases.

Long story short the wife got way more into this than I expected and we are already on to more before we got far into the 180. We are ordering a Tsunami 450 gallon 96x36x30 acrylic tank any day now to add to the mix. The 180 will be used for some of those not so reef safe fish that we both would like to have.

It will all be plumbed together in one system through the floor into the basement. Im hoping this helps with pH as well as it's been a struggle. The wife runs a licensed daycare so we have many little one in the house every day and not enough fresh air. I did run an airline down and outside and it did help but still have a ways to go, can barely get to a pH of 8 on a good day. So Im hoping with the filtration in the basement with a different air supply surrounding, it will help.

I use the red box of Fritz RPM salt which has a high alkalinity of around 10, so it's higher compared to most. Dosing Kalkwasser and BRS from Magnesium. As well as Tropic Marin K+ and A- for the trace elements.

Im an IT guy and there is a lot of overlap with that and setting up a system like this again. I have already put together a little website with a live camera stream of the current 180 tank and live parameter readings as well are displayed.

Picked up the 150 and 27 gallon stock tanks this past weekend, and have most of the plumbing supplies I will need coming during the week. I opted to get some Apex flow sensors as well to dial in the UV, instead of winging it like I am now, and monitor return flow to the tanks, and reactors. Should be many updates coming soon on this approximately 800 gallon system.

The apex stats and livestream

degrand.fish

Gumbies R Us · Jan 28, 2026

Well, that is an exciting upgrade! Can't wait to see it!

degrandfish · Jan 28, 2026

Gumbies R Us said:
Well, that is an exciting upgrade! Can't wait to see it!

Thanks, a rather quick upgrade but that how I like to roll lol.

Some flow sensors arrived last night. The 2" is rather large. Will need a second one later on, but one will get me started for a return to the 180. I was on the fence for the kit as it comes with a pair of 1/2" sensors but they seem rather useless given the 250 gph max flow. I can't think of much of a use for them with that little flow rate other than like a carbon or GFO reactor I suppose. For sure not UV like I have seen as it's not enough. But doing the math one of them is free if you buy it all separate. The 1" will be used for UV.

We still need to decide on the blue backing and overflows for the tank, or the black. I would rather black, but the wife wants the blue. Since she is so excited over this and actually letting this happen, I suppose she should just get her choice lol. Also the 180 now has one of those cheap blue backdrops stuck on the back and I think it looks fine. It will be the rear trapezoids, with both ends being viewable along with the front obviously. The back will be against a wall.

degrandfish · Jan 29, 2026

Woot ordered the tank today with blue backing. 8-10 weeks we were told for it. Also ordered the Reeflo Hammerhead/Baracuda pump to run the system. Same pump I used over a decade ago and it was a set it and forget it, never had to touch it.

lubeck · Feb 1, 2026

foxvalleypcgeek said:
Woot ordered the tank today with blue backing. 8-10 weeks we were told for it. Also ordered the Reeflo Hammerhead/Baracuda pump to run the system. Same pump I used over a decade ago and it was a set it and forget it, never had to touch it.

Congrats on the new build!

Bruttall · Feb 1, 2026

foxvalleypcgeek said:
It will all be plumbed together in one system through the floor into the basement. Im hoping this helps with pH as well as it's been a struggle. The wife runs a licensed daycare so we have many little one in the house every day and not enough fresh air. I did run an airline down and outside and it did help but still have a ways to go, can barely get to a pH of 8 on a good day. So Im hoping with the filtration in the basement with a different air supply surrounding, it will help.

I have 2 suggestions for you, both with help with PH if not fix the issue entirely.

On a system as large as you are talking, I would hit my skimmer link and build something very similar definitely using a Venturi to introduce Fractionation (air bubbles) to a water column. Then run an Air Line for that Venturi from outside your house. Circled in red is the intake I ran thru a Casement Window in my basement using 1 inch pvc and spray foam insulation. The Arrow at the bottom of photo shows the Airline connection to the Air Intake on the 1 inch Mazzei Venturi I use on my skimmer.

Here is a picture of my Apex PH monitor. That air line usually is all it takes, but if that doesn't stabilize your PH at about 8.15, then add some air stones to your sump and air pump. I used an 1100gph air pump on stones for a while before porting the air from outside into my skimmer air intake.

Good Luck to you.

degrandfish · Feb 2, 2026

lubeck said:
Congrats on the new build!

Thank you!

Bruttall said:
I have 2 suggestions for you, both with help with PH if not fix the issue entirely.

Here is a picture of my Apex PH monitor. That air line usually is all it takes, but if that doesn't stabilize your PH at about 8.15, then add some air stones to your sump and air pump. I used an 1100gph air pump on stones for a while before porting the air from outside into my skimmer air intake.

Good Luck to you.

That is some good pH there! I'll see what happens with my level once Im running in the basement with my current airline running outside. The line will be much shorter not having to go all the way upstairs like it is now.

degrandfish · Feb 2, 2026

Got a wall built this weekend to separate the fish setup area in the basement from the little ones. Rayton hands me screws and is a big help, Asher on the other hand is just like let me throw them all over the place lol. I had to shim it a lot along the floor with some composite shims due to the slope of the floor to the drain. But keeps the wood out of contact with the floor except for the very ends which is up a slope anyways, I meant to get treated lumber for the bottom but messed that up on my order.

Also decided to add another 60 gallon stock tank to the mix and made their platforms.

This one is right on the other side of the wall below the stairs.

degrandfish · Feb 3, 2026

Got the manifold made for the most part last night. There is a spot left there for a second 2" flow sensor. I came to the conclusion that the wall cabinet will have to be removed for more room. The amount of space occupied by this thing with the sensors is a lot! I don't plan on using two of the outputs either but figured it didn't hurt to add them if I wanted them for something down the road.

degrandfish · Feb 6, 2026

An Ai Prime Fuge Light arrived and got that hung from the ceiling to see what it looked like.

The Hammerhead is plumbed in now. Can either 3d print something or I found a 2x4 is a perfect fit to wedge under the plumbing coming out of the stock tank there to provide additional support. Second 2" flow sensor is arriving tomorrow, and my protein skimmer is arriving today!

degrandfish · Feb 9, 2026

Quite the productive weekend with progress.

Got the second 2" flow sensor mostly installed. It's not actually running to anything, but ready for when the new tank arrives. The first 2" is running to the 180 and is plumbed all the way to the bottom of the tank stand.

The 60 gallon stock tank for the refugium is all connected as well. The new Regal 300 12" skimmer is on some small 6.5 liter HDX bins from Home Depot to put that at a perfect running height of 9 inches since it calls for 8-10. The plan is for 15 inches of water in the sump out of its total 25 inches of height. And since the rings get bigger as you go up, it's probably only around half full, allowing for water to flow back in a power outage or shutting the pump down.

I am 3d printing brackets for all the power bricks, and tried to match the Neptune orange color for some things. Im not sure if I live the brick mounted vertically or if it would be better horizontal. I'll have a better idea when all the electronic gadgets get moved down here. I tried to space it all out perfectly, so the water was on the bottom half, and electronics on top.

The small little 27 gallon is also hooked up under the stairs with a Kessil 360 mounted above to put some frags in or something. Not exactly sure but this was going to be the refugium, and then decided to go bigger. This one requires a little yoga to get past the plumbing if I absolutely needed to (especially when the lines run to the 450 through here as well), but I'll probably just store some things there that I rarely or never use. This one is just drain fed with a valve to limit the flow. I have some extra pipe upstairs for that return line I can pull back once Im done with it on the tank connection, and then I can add another clamp or two holding it more out of the way.

Last night I stated to fill with RO water and turned the skimmer on its lowest setting to get some water circulation with a heater in the sump, and maybe start to get rid of the film that is on new skimmers. I swapped out the Hammerhead impeller for the lesser Barracuda to turn down the flow, since it's not going to be needed until the 450 arrives. But I figured if I ran a temporary piece of vinyl tubing from the manifold to the 27, I can actually fire up the pump and get water moving between these 3 tanks and mix in salt and get it all up to temp.

I ran an Ethernet cable here which is dangling down from the ceiling and also a second one for a PoE camera so I can keep an eye on the room.

degrandfish · Feb 12, 2026

Lets try this again since the site had an issue yesterday and had to be restored losing the post.

Got the system filled up with RO water, mixed in the salt, and up to temp now as of yesterday. Put some temp filter socks on the other stock tank drains to get the little bit of junk that was floating in the water, looked to be all gone this morning.

Currently have the Coralife 36 watt UV sterilizer on the running 180 and replaced the bulb in it about a month ago. So I ordered a second one and will run both of them in series so I can increase my flow rate and still get the same contact time with both. Same with the DOS, currently using 1 of them, so added a second one. They should fill in the blank space perfectly on the wall once I convert the system over.

I had an old iPad Pro 9.7 that didn't' hold much of a charge anymore, so found a good use for it mounted on the wall to display fusion.

The black flex pvc coming out on the bottom left with a T on the end will be used to hook up to the existing ReefMat, I can attach each hose coming off of it to each side of the T. But I am undecided if I want all the drain water to go through the ReefMat or not. I may do a half and half kind of thing so it doesn't go through the roll so fast and doesn't starve the skimmer from doing its work. Im going through about 50-60 inches a day currently. I could add a second one with the new tank and do something similar so some of the drain water bypasses.

But with this part up and running all this week, I plan on doing the switch this weekend when I have a full day to do it. So the 180 will be running down to here, and I can eliminate the 40 gallon sump from it, and bring down all the electronics. And of course sell some items that are being replaced like the Nyos 220 skimmer and a Vectra L2 return pump.

Kooma · Feb 12, 2026

foxvalleypcgeek said:
Ive been out of the saltwater side of the hobby for about 10 years now. Just had several 75 gallon planted tanks around the house for recent years. I did have a build thread on here for a 500 gallon Custom Aquariums tank back then. We picked up this running 180 gallon late November/Early December from marketplace and have been running with it.

It came with a Hydros controller setup which I did not like, preferred the Apex I was used to years ago. Swapped it out and now running a full Apex setup with a Trident as well. Put the Hydros on another smaller 75 gallon setup we had picked up off of marketplace in the basement.

(The one facing the camera is Asher, our youngest who just turned 18 months)

We added a bunch of coral and fish to the tank. The Sohal Tang and the Vlamingi Tang actually came with the 75! The Tang Police would be very angry on this one! The Sohal was resold, but we did keep the Vlamingi since he is such a gentle giant. The Sohal was on the aggressive side and way larger than the rest of the tank mates. Tried to keep the Sohal for an entire week and decided it was not going to work, stressing out the rest from the frequent torpedo chases.

Long story short the wife got way more into this than I expected and we are already on to more before we got far into the 180. We are ordering a Tsunami 450 gallon 96x36x30 acrylic tank any day now to add to the mix. The 180 will be used for some of those not so reef safe fish that we both would like to have.

It will all be plumbed together in one system through the floor into the basement. Im hoping this helps with pH as well as it's been a struggle. The wife runs a licensed daycare so we have many little one in the house every day and not enough fresh air. I did run an airline down and outside and it did help but still have a ways to go, can barely get to a pH of 8 on a good day. So Im hoping with the filtration in the basement with a different air supply surrounding, it will help.

I use the red box of Fritz RPM salt which has a high alkalinity of around 10, so it's higher compared to most. Dosing Kalkwasser and BRS from Magnesium. As well as Tropic Marin K+ and A- for the trace elements.

Im an IT guy and there is a lot of overlap with that and setting up a system like this again. I have already put together a little website with a live camera stream of the current 180 tank and live parameter readings as well are displayed.

Picked up the 150 and 27 gallon stock tanks this past weekend, and have most of the plumbing supplies I will need coming during the week. I opted to get some Apex flow sensors as well to dial in the UV, instead of winging it like I am now, and monitor return flow to the tanks, and reactors. Should be many updates coming soon on this approximately 800 gallon system.

The apex stats and livestream

degrand.fish

I want to chat about that site and the cameras. Also a IT guy here.

degrandfish · Feb 12, 2026

Kooma said:
I want to chat about that site and the cameras. Also a IT guy here.

Mine is a little complex probably. It's 100% entirely self hosted at home on my Kubernetes cluster. It's using Prometheus to get the metrics from the local apex api, and then Grafana to display them. And then this grafana instance is set for public viewing. Each graph can be embedded with an iframe into a website. It's just a Wordpress site in this case.

I have a mostly Unifi rack in my basement and the camera is a Unifi G6 Instant, which makes a pretty good image with the blue. I tried a much cheaper Reolink camera I had at first and it did not like the blue and I had to set it up to reboot everyday about an hour after the lights started to come on to get it to snap out of a really blue look. The G6 has no problem at all and is 4K. The stream your seeing on the site is degraded from the original but still pretty good.

Kooma · Feb 12, 2026

foxvalleypcgeek said:
Mine is a little complex probably. It's 100% entirely self hosted at home on my Kubernetes cluster. It's using Prometheus to get the metrics from the local apex api, and then Grafana to display them. And then this grafana instance is set for public viewing. Each graph can be embedded with an iframe into a website. It's just a Wordpress site in this case.

I have a mostly Unifi rack in my basement and the camera is a Unifi G6 Instant, which makes a pretty good image with the blue. I tried a much cheaper Reolink camera I had at first and it did not like the blue and I had to set it up to reboot everyday about an hour after the lights started to come on to get it to snap out of a really blue look. The G6 has no problem at all and is 4K. The stream your seeing on the site is degraded from the original but still pretty good.

nice! I self host everything and have thought of setting up a url to access my tank camera. I use cheap tapo wifi cameras that do 1080p and night vision, and cost about $22 to check on things.

I’ll have to play with software to grab my feed and give me something I can imbed.

degrandfish · Feb 12, 2026

Kooma said:
nice! I self host everything and have thought of setting up a url to access my tank camera. I use cheap tapo wifi cameras that do 1080p and night vision, and cost about $22 to check on things.

I’ll have to play with software to grab my feed and give me something I can imbed.

You may be able to use https://datarhei.github.io/restreamer/ to do that. I use it for a few things, including this.

degrandfish · Feb 16, 2026

Spent all weekend changing the 180 upstairs over to the basement setup. I had a couple issues but was able to resolve them and continue on. Also don't bother with thread sealant on the flow sensor pipe threads. It leaks under pressure and good old fashioned plumbers tape does the trick much better. Seems fine on all drain bulkheads but not anything pressurized.

Ended up getting a massive bacterial bloom and could tell its was depleting the oxygen from the water with the fish slowing down and not doing much by the next day (Sunday) and sitting at the bottom. I took some of them out as it was very easy to do with them slow and lethargic. Did not expect it to be that bad from doubling the water volume. They went into the two 75's we have running and recovered pretty quickly. Weird thing is the bigger Vlamingi Tang seemed like it didn't bother him all that much as he stayed out making passes from one end to the next (slower though), I would have thought he would be the first due to size and consuming more oxygen. Made a run to Petco and got another large air pump and added some air stones to the tank and has been getting better and better since. This was Sunday morning at this point. So that was a little bit of a scare but I think we are ok now. Water is slowing getting clearer from the white haze and remaining fish are coming up from the bottom of the tank and moving.

I had also added two ceramic bricks that soaked in a bucket of water Friday overnight with a bacteria in a bottle at the same time to the refugium tank, so not sure if this was a good idea or not.

My chronically low pH has been on the rise steady as well now as I hoped. We started out at 7.66 initially and now at 7.82. It's very slow but keeps going up and up. ORP dropped down to 249 initially and now back up to 362. Just a slow steady mostly diagonal line for both. The pH barely even dropped overnight (.03) and picked right back up this morning! I have a line for fresh air feeding the skimmer from outside.

This is as it sits currently, another ReefMat will be added in preparation for the 450. Some more macro algaes should be arriving a day this week to put in the refugium. Currently just has the chaeto from upstairs.

I still have to figure out a better plan for the output from the reactor then just two rocks on top. But I was kind of exhausted.

The 180 now is virtually silent upstairs, did not expect that to happen as it was mostly the drain noise, but it disappeared now!