700 Gallon ReBoot of My Dream Tank

[cumbeje]

The short story first is I had an existing 730 gallon reef tank installed in my office at our first commercial location. Tank was purchased online from an outfit(not to say who but they don't have a very good record). Needless to say that I could not turn down the price of this tank. It was at least 50% cheaper than every other tank I could find. Like the saying goes you get what you pay for. One day I came to work to find a broken center brace. Luckily the tank did not fail and I knew I needed to make a change. At this same time we were in process of moving location so it was time to do a full reboot. There was several things that I wanted to correct and things I learned from old tank that I was determined not to repeat. Here is pic of my original tank.

We were doing a full retrofit of the new location so it lent me time to do things the way I wanted to fix the issues that I felt were holding me back from having the dream SPS dominated reef tank that I always wanted.

The short list of what I thought were issue in this first setup;

1) If I was going to do this again I am going to get a better built tank.
2) Had main pump fail while I was gone. Redundant return pumps needed!
3) Sump was poor quality acrylic that started cracking 4 years into use.
4)Poor space for equipment. I had equipment stacked on top of each other. Made it very hard to work on tank.
5)Live stock. Mushrooms, mushrooms, mushrooms everywhere stinging my corals and spreading uncontrollability. RBA's taking over tank. Pests that I could not get rid of. Ich ect...
6) Better testing, meaning I would test regularly.
7) Media reactors being fed with small pumps that would fail and not know it.
8) Move away from the 6 400 watt metal halides that used a tremendous amount of electricity and created a lot of heat.

Just a short list but what I thought was really keeping me from obtaining my dream tank SPS dominated tank.

 

[cumbeje]

The idea of new tank started May 27,2016 when my wife and I settled on a new location:

 

[jsker]

Now that the teaser is out, hows that new tank looking? Fowling now!

 

[cumbeje]

So while we had to work on a complete redo of the building I was also working hard on my design of my new tank. First step was deciding on a tank manufacturer. This time I wasn't going to look at only price but a well recommended custom builder of tanks. With help I settled on a tank manufactured by Planet Aquariums out of Texas. Here is design:

 

[cumbeje]

With the tank design done I turned my attention to the plumbing. I decided to get away from the glass tube heaters and go with something more commercial. I ordered a Aqua Logic 2KW Titanium inline heater.

I also wanted to do away with the multiple phosban 550 reactors for GFO, Carbon ect.. So I decided on BRS jumbo reactors and would tie them into a manifold so I didn't need to worry about those annoying pumps that failed all the time. Returns pumps would be redundant with (2) hammerhead Barracuda Hybrid Gold return pumps. Also, I wanted to do away with those cheap valves from the hardware stores that the handles break off every time you want to actually use them. Went with all SCHED 80- CPEX BALL VALVES;

I am sure I am forgetting something in the plumbing but time for a picture or two.

 

[cumbeje]

October 5, 2016 tank finally arrives but not a minute too soon because contractor is pushing me to place tank so he can close up the walls.

 

[jsker]

Good choice on the tank.

 

[cumbeje]

Good choice on the tank.

Thank you that was a real struggle because of the cost increase based on the original tank.

 

[cumbeje]

Because of the size of the tank there way no easy way to get this in before walls were built. Also with the weight of tank it would be extremely hard to move. So contractor left a whole in block firewall so we could drive fork lift through opening to set tank.

 

[cumbeje]

With help of fork lift we were able to push tank right onto stand.

 

[cumbeje]

One big thing I was not going to be without is a backup generator at our new location. I made sure that new generator would not only backup our mission critical items but would have enough extra juice to run aquarium in the event of blackout.

 

[cumbeje]

Finally tank in place and drywall wrapping finished.

 

[cumbeje]

January 17th 2017 day 1 plumbing. After hours of discussion our plan it came down to using the tank as our white board. Hey what ever works.

 

[chefjpaul]

Amazing.
Can't wait to see this develop

 

[cumbeje]

Didn't want the cheap sump that I had before that was failing in just 5 short years so upgraded to a Tideline sump by trigger systems.

 

[cumbeje]

I do have to say plumbing is not my forte and with being in the middle of construction there way no way I would be able to complete this in time. So I got help. We started on January 17.2017 and it took 3 of us well mostly 2 since I was just supervising over 2 days to install.

 

[cumbeje]

 

[cumbeje]

We were in such a time crunch in construction we were working around the clock and so were the contractors.

 

[cumbeje]

Picture of my dual hammerhead Barracuda Hybrid Gold return pumps. Not pictured here is I tied in a T with a ball valve so if anyone pump failed the T could be opened to put flow through both return circulation pipes. The flow would be reduced but there would be flow.

 

[cumbeje]

January 20th 2017 plumbing nearing completion.