50G SCA build

[SudoGeeks]

Very minor update, I have the last piece of rock coming later this week. I decided to get a jump on cycling the tank by ghost feeding.

That was yesterday, I suppose I will wait a day or two more and start checking for ammonia.

 

[SudoGeeks]

More news...I now have ammonia in the tank. We also have received the last pieces of rock for the tree.

My wife did some mocking up while I was at work and sent me this picture....

We decided to go a different route. More updates soon.

 

[SudoGeeks]

Big update today...

Edit: I forgot to mention we received our circulation pumps today, 2 x Jebao pp-4. We have them situated close to the bottom of the tank facing forward one on each side of the overflow.

Here is the basic concept we decided to go with.

With the plan in hand we decided to start locking them together.

Here we have both the large Tonga rocks epoxied together and are trying to figure out what to do for the branches.

We ended up tweaking the branch design slightly and start sticking them to the base.

The last branch gave us some trouble due to its weight, I rigged up a brace until the epoxy cured.

Top down

Final rockscape

With the rocks done I decided to weigh the structure, the whole thing comes in at 31.7lbs. In an effort to try and keep the new tank somewhat clean I then decided it would be a good idea to blow off any dirt and dust with the compressor. After that there was nothing left but to get it wet.

To get an idea of what it might look like with reef lighting we put my old dual 65W PC light above the tank.

I think we did a pretty good job creating our own version of that 10G tank that inspired this build. Please let me know what you think.

 

[SudoGeeks]

So one thing I have not yet put a whole lot of thought into is the order in which I should migrate corals from the old tank to the new tank or how to go about doing it.

Ideally I would like to move everything over to the new tank, but it will be difficult since a lot of softies are anchored to base rock in the old tank.

To make matters worse, the old tank has a very bad algae problem that I do not want to spread to the new tank so all the hard corals will need to get dipped in something to kill any algae that may be on the skeleton.

The current stock list includes the following:
~15 green mushrooms
~5 Florida ricordia
~4 single stock pom-pom xenia
1 Kenya tree
1 toadstool
1 frag and a larger mat of gsp
1 frag and a large 8+ head hammer
1 frogspawn
1 small 3 head frag of candy cane
3 psammacora frags
1 monti frag that is recovering from almost complete rtn

One concern is that I know some soft corals if not all release toxins in the water if you cut them. With that in mind should I cut them and move them first then run a bunch of carbon for a few days (weeks) before moving other coral and fish?

What can I use to dip the hard corals that will kill any algae that might be stuck on them?

 

[SudoGeeks]

Tomorrow will be the last day(7) for seachem stability, I plan to test ammonia nitrite and nitrate to see if we are ready for animals. I am getting super excited!

 

[SudoGeeks]

It appears it is not ready. Very high levels of ammonia still and it looks like nitrites and nitrates are rising. I will keep putting in stability and check again in a few days.

 

[SudoGeeks]

So...It has been a few months and I have gotten quite a bit done on the new tank setup. It's not completely finished yet but making a lot of progress and have life in the tank now.

It turned out that the Ammonia didn't drop to 0ppm until March 5th.

At some point between the last post and March 5th I also managed to get the Kessil mounts on the tank and lights migrated over.

Around this same time the tank started to get a case of the uglies as usually happens with new tanks.

About halfway through April I had started adding corals.

This leads us to this past weekend. I finally migrated over the last hard coral from my old tank and the clownfish that calls it home. I also went to the LFS and got my first torch for the tree.

 

[SudoGeeks]

I took some better pictures today so I figured I would post them.

Let me know what you think!

 

[Daniel@R2R]

Looking good! Cool idea on the scape.

 

[SudoGeeks]

Looking good! Cool idea on the scape.

Thanks for the kind words, I cant wait to get that tree filled with torches.

 

[SudoGeeks]

I took some quick pictures today with my phone.

FTS

Psammacora encrusting the rock.

Oldest euphyllia I have in the tank, branching hammer.

Frogspawn and candycanes, critter box is full of pulsing xenia that are going in the fuge.

Close up of the candycanes.

Long tenticals on on of my torches.

Curly tenticals on the other torch.

I have so many ricordia I don't know what to do with them.

Close up of one "ball" of ricordia.

Small ricordia I bought a while ago trying to get some more colors.

These guys used to be one big piece of montipora setosa, but my old tank nearly killed them so they are recovering.

Like the setosa above, this green psammacora almost died in the old tank. It is starting to encrust its plug.

Trying to get GSP to spread over the bottom glass. I tried gluing it down but the glue didn't stick.

In the old tank my hammer fragged itself, this is that frag. It seems to have developed sweepers.

 

[SudoGeeks]

Its been a while since I posted an update. I wont post a ton of pics in this post but I will kinda outline what has happened since the last post.

Since the last post I forged ahead with getting the 40B refugium and 20 long sump up and running. I acquired some sheets of acrylic from my work while back so I decided to use those for dividers in the sump and my fuge. I drilled 2 holes in the bottom of the 40B for the drains, one for constant siphon and one for emergency just like on the 50 cube. I decided that I would not do an overflow box and instead just stand pipes to try and conserve space.

I did some research and I decided to use GE silicone to hold the dividers for the sump and the fuge in place. After spacing everything in the sump out and siliconing it in place I did the same to the divider on the fuge and let it all dry for a few days before installing the sump into the stand. Once the sump was in the stand it was time to redo all of the plumbing on the 50 cube to the new sump. This ended up being a very long process of measuring, cutting and gluing pvc pipe. After what seemed like an eternity I was finally able to get the new sump and fuge wet.

Once I had all the new salt water made up I started filling the 40 and the sump. I got a little crazy while filling the 40 and ended up nearly blowing out the divider by putting too much in one side and not balancing it on the other. After getting everything full of water, there was nothing left but to fire up the pumps. We started looking around all the PVC joints and around the bulkheads checking for leaks, we found no leaks first try!

I thought it was all good but then after about 30 minutes I started noticing that the corals started to look like they were not doing so good, I thought it might have just been from sitting without much circulation for so long or something. After a few hours it became very obvious that something was not right, my wife ended up asking about the silicone I used as she saw something that I completely missed. It seems that I had purchased the wrong GE silicone, the stuff I had contained mold killer which was now contaminating my entire tank. We quickly shutdown the pumps and started trying to figure out what to do.

It was decided the only way to try to save everything would be to drain the tank, put all new water in and setup my canister filter and hope for the best. We drained the tank down until my chromis dorsal fin was out of the water(about 1" in the bottom) I didn't have any spare water on hand so I stayed up all night making new water on the fly to add back into the tank, meanwhile my wife was running new water over the corals to keep them wet which at this point had skin coming off. By the time I got all the water back in and started the canister with a ton of carbon in it there were corals that were clearly dead.

I removed all the components that I put the silicone on and razor scraped it off the glass. Aqueon aquarium silicone was purchased online and I went forward with rebuilding. All said and done I lost 3 corals and a fish.

The rebuild went pretty quick since I had done it once before.

Here is a pic and a walk around video of the finished setup taken pretty recently.

 

[Sin City Coral Addict]

Needs More NEMS! =P

 

[SudoGeeks]

Working on it, I seem to have 3 now.