VK Reef 2.0 - 75 Gallon Build

[kloverguy]

Welcome To My 75 Gallon Build - AKA VK Reef 2.0
I thought I'd drop in and share my 75 gallon build. I started this about a year ago and am getting quite close to having it up and running. I currently have a 32g ext overflow FijiCube that I won from BRS two years ago. As a noob, @rtparty helped me get that tank going and it's been an overall success, but I'm ready for something bigger.

Current 32g FijiCube - **Don't look close, you might find aiptasia**

When I built the stand for the Fijicube, it was built with the intention of being reused for a 48" tank. That's still the plan, but I need to do a little bit of freshening up. Inside, there is a partition to help separate the electronics from the sump. That is going to come out as well as the current 20g sump to make room for a 29g sump. All electronics are going to be moved to a separate cabinet that will be placed to the left of the stand. I will also be repainting the stand inside and out and adding heavy-duty leveling feet. I didn't know how badly uneven my floor was until we started to level the stand, and I just don't want to mess with shims this time.

So as for the 75, here's the plan. It's going to be a mixed reef tank, but predominantly SPS. Below is the planned gear for this.
Tank:
75g Aqueon Aquarium
Eshopps Prodigy M overflow
Single 3/4 return

Sump:
29g Aqueon Aquarium
Fijicube 29g sump baffle kit (filter socks removed to use filter roller)
Aquamaxx AF-2 Filter Roller
Aquamaxx FC80 Skimmer
BRS Mini GFO Reactor with Sicce 1.5
Sicce Syncra Silent 4.0 with possible upgrade to Sicce SDC 6.0
Kamoer X1 Pro x3

Flow:
x2 Tunze 6095

Lighting:
x2 Radion XR15s (1 G4 Pro, 1 G5 Pro0
x2 Reefbrite 36" XHO Actinic LED Bars
Ecotech RMS Mounting System

I'm sure I'm missing a good few bits of information, but I've gotta run out the door right now and will update the build more as I have time!

 

[NowGlazeIT]

Nice! let’s see the new display

 

[kloverguy]

Drilling Overflow and Return
My gosh - It's been quite a while. I really wanted to document a lot of this build as it was going up, but the time gets away from you super quick. I've currently got this tank up and running, and I've learned very quickly that plans for a tank are just as fluid as the water inside.

To start off, I had a 75g Aqueon from the $/gallon sale and started drilling it right after my first post here. I got the return drilled just fine, but when I finished drilling the overflow, there was about a 1/4" hairline fracture. This felt devastating at the time, but literally the next day the $/gal sale was on again (first tank was purchased more than 1 year before) so I decided to cut my losses and buy another 75gal. I made sure to check the tank at the store for tempered glass using the polarized glasses and cell phone method. I got the new tank home and drilled with no issue. I then threw on some black vinyl for the back drop. Luckily, I was able to sell the tank with the crack in it to a person that was going to use it for a lizard, so that worked out perfect.

 

[kloverguy]

Temp Stand for Old Tank
After I had the tank drilled, back wrapped, and bulkheads installed it was time to start plumbing. In order to do so, I needed to get my old 32g tank on to a temporary stand since I was going to be reusing the stand it was on. I started by building a temp stand. It wasn't pretty, but it was very sturdy and got the job done.

Now with the old tank of the stand, I took it to the garage and stripped down the top. The two years of saltwater, reagent, and items being slid across the butcher block top it was in pretty rough shape. I sanded it down, re stained it, and put a pretty heavy coat of water based polyurethane on top. In general, I prefer clear lacquer as a finish coat on wood, but I believe the poly will hold up better long term.... I guess we'll see. Right after the refinishing was done, I added the leveling feet to each corner. I didn't get photos installed, but I have a a picture of the foot next to a quarter for size comparison. I don't remember the exact numbers, but after some research I was MORE than comfortable using these feet, which had 3/8" all thread.

 

[kloverguy]

Plumbing and Light Mounting
Now that the top and feet were on the stand, I repainted the interior with Kilz original primer, and got the tank on top so I could start mocking up plumbing.

At this point, it was time to get the plumbing done and since my overflow is a Herbie to 1" lines and I have a single 3/4" return, and the fact that I was using vinyl tubing in between the overflow/roller mat and return/return pump it went pretty smooth. I also lucked out and my Home Depot had the lower profile Lasco unions in stock - SCORE!

Seeing the scale of everything was incredibly exciting - except the RMS system. It gave me super bulky vibes and I really started to dislike it the more I looked at it. Also, figuring out screens for the top was going to be a pain. @rtparty suggested using extruded aluminum mounted to the back of the stand. He helped me come up with a design for them and helped figure out all the cuts needed from Zyltech. Hindsight, I'm extremely glad that I scrapped the RMS. I feel like the custom mount we came up with looks amazing and functions even better. I think I spent somewhere between 3 and 4 hours making sure everything was square, centered, and level. Later pictures of it in the house will give a much better idea of what the finished product looks like.

 

[kloverguy]

Stand and Cabinet
Next up - Because I repurposed a cabinet from my FIL's cabinet shop, I needed to paint it. The 90's whitewashed ash wasn't really my style. While I was at it, I went ahead and put a fresh coat of paint on the base of the stand. Because I was using latex paint, I added Flood Floetrol to the paint to help with lay as flat as possible. I knew that the latex paint may not have been the most preferred paint, but that's what I originally painted the stand with and wanted some continuity in color. Overall, I was really happy with the results. After the paint was dry, I moved the stand and cabinet into the house. The side cabinet will ultimately be "temporary" as there are plans to build a new cabinet that suits my needs and the space better.

 

[kloverguy]

I'm severely lacking on this build thread progress. More coming soon.

 

[kloverguy]

Controller Board
Somewhere in between my earlier posts, I started mocking up a controller board. I had an Apex EL, Inkbird controller, Sicce controller, skimmer controller, and two Tunze controllers I needed to get placed. I knew that I was going to be placing these in the center section of the taller cabinet and wanted to make this as clean as possible without spending a ton of money. I started with adjusting the shelf to get an idea of how big I wanted to make the controller board. Once I had that all figured out I cut up a card board box and started playing around with where these could each go. Once I had everything laid out where I wanted them, I tossed the carboard in the cabinet to see how it looked and if I was ready to start building. I ended up dropping the shelf a few more notches and made the panel larger for future changes. I didn't get pictures of that but I'm so glad I expanded. My father-in-law owns a cabinet shop so I got some scrap melamine for a clean look. For the cord cutouts, I found some desk brush/flapper doors to try and make it look clean. They are a bit large but overall I really liked the outcome. If I had to do it again, I don't know if I would use these again, but I also don't know what I would have used instead. Overall, I'm really happy with the way it came out.

One thing I realized was the cords for the skimmer controller weren't long enough for what I needed so I ended up putting that in the stand, which ended up working pretty well.

So the last part of the controller board was trying to figure out how to get it to stand and stay in place. For some reason I have a fascination with magnets... I ended up using basic metal shelf L brackets as legs and used a forstner bit to drill out some space on the shelf and double stacked some small neodymium magnets that grab on to the legs and hold the board in place. I didn't get great photos, but you can kind of see it in this picture. Ignore the cords everywhere lol.

 

[kloverguy]

Final Setup and Adding Water
So at this point I've got all the big logistics worked out. I got the cabinet, stand, and tank in it's final spot and got all the plumbing back together. My original plan was to to have the stand right up against the cabinet, but after a dry run inside I realized I completely overlooked a few things. The biggest thing I overlooked was with the stand and cabinet touching, there was no way I'd have room to run all the cords and electrical into the cabinet because the access hole I cut was entirely blocked by the tank. The other issue was I would completely lose the use of the left side of the glass for viewing and for placing things such as flow pumps or anything else that would be mounted with magnets. I decided to center the tank in the leftover open space of this wall. While it now exposes the cords from the stand to the cabinet, I did gain some viewing access but it also ended up being a really nice spot to store a step ladder and camera tripod.

At this point I was too excited to wait any longer and started adding water. I got my sand in and started adding the saltwater I had been making in a few brutes and multiple 5 gallon jugs. After all was said and done with return running I'm at 86 gallons total water volume. I threw the 6095s in and added the rock I had been keeping in a brute for close to a year to get everything cycling. I only had one XR15 on because the other one was still running on the old 32gallon tank. Before anyone asks, I wasn't running the lights yet and only had them on for a few pictures to get the feel of things. I felt like I was making massive progress at this point.

 

[Gumbies R Us]

Love the blue stand with your tank!!!

 

[kloverguy]

Aquascaping
I had some 80lbs of rock going in a brute in my living room for a year or so and once the new tank was running I transferred all the rocks in. My mistake was not doing my aquascaping before. While I was building the aquascape, I kept the rocks in 5 gallon buckets of saltwater as much as possible to try and stop bacteria from dying off. If I had to do it again, I think I would get the aquascape completed before cycling in the brute. Lesson learned.

As far as building the aquascape, I taped up a few boxes to mimic a 75g tank and used painters tape to layout horizontal and vertical thirds. I didn't really know which way I wanted to go so I started stacking rocks in different ways to see what I liked. I ended up finding a two island scape that I really liked. Both islands are a total of 3 smaller rocks that are held together with a combination of acrylic rods and AquaForest StoneFix. Breaking each side up into 3 smaller pieces made it really easy to maneuver into the tank and I think it may help in the future if I need to pull them out to catch a fish, etc. Here's a few shots of the process and the final scape is at the bottom. In the last picture, I do have some extra rocks in there that weren't used in the two main structures, but I wanted to keep them in for extra filtration. I ended up moving these around a little bit down the road and have used them for extra rocks for coral placement.

 

[kloverguy]

Love the blue stand with your tank!!!

Thanks! We have a blue theme in this family/breakfast/kitchen area so it worked perfect. I do have some nice warm brass hardware to go on the doors and drawers but I haven't gotten around to installing them yet. I love the blue and gold look.

 

[Gumbies R Us]

Thanks! We have a blue theme in this family/breakfast/kitchen area so it worked perfect. I do have some nice warm brass hardware to go on the doors and drawers but I haven't gotten around to installing them yet. I love the blue and gold look.

Curious to see what that brass hardware will look like once they are on the doors!!

 

[Fish Styx]

Nice work so far. Loving the stand and cabinet.

 

[kloverguy]

Cycle and Stocking
For reference, at this point in the process we were in the first week of November which was about two weeks after getting saltwater in the tank.

After getting the scape done, I started dosing MB7 and dosed it daily as directed until the bottle was done and did some light ghost feeding. Because I knew there was some bacteria on the rocks even though they were in and out of water while building the scape I was pretty sure this would be a quick cycle. After about a week I was getting untraceable ammonia. I threw my pair of clowns in and bought a small $10 Hollywood Stunner frag to test the waters and as I expected it went great. I have a red firefish that I know is a jumper so I also had to throw some screens together real quick. Once I had those done I started moving everything over. I had two fish left in the old tank, a firefish and lawnmower blenny. I moved over the firefish first because he's fairly timid and I wanted to give him a chance to find a hiding spot before moving the lawnmower over since the lawnmower is a tad more aggressive. At the same time I was also moving over one coral per day, but again I didn't have a whole lot of corals to move over so this only took about a week. One thing to note is that for the most part I was moving corals directly over to the sand since I wasn't positive where their final placement would be. As of today, I still have some corals sitting in the sand.... I'm sure most of you have gone through this dilemma too.

One other thing, in the picture of the screens below you can see some shades on the XR15s. I got these on Etsy from the seller Unreef. My wife can be a little photo/light sensitive and since the 75 is so much taller than my 32 was, the higher light mounting put the lights right at eye level for her and was causing headaches for her. The shades were a massive improvement for her. I have plans to build a floating canopy in the near future so I can pull the shades off since I have a hunch they're limiting spread to some extent. I have not been able to run the XHOs since there isn't a shade for those, but I have a temporary solution that I'll show you in a later post.

 

[kloverguy]

Curious to see what that brass hardware will look like once they are on the doors!!

I'll try and get them on and post a pic in the next day or two just for you . I'm sure my wife will appreciate the push!

 

[kloverguy]

Tidying Up
I got really excited to get water in and things moved over and I rushed getting the lights up and cords in the stand so I went back and started tidying those up to get cords out of the way and clean up things in the stand. I used a few different cable management clips from Amazon to help with this. As a tip of the day, use 91% isopropyl alcohol to wipe down surfaces you're going to put an adhesive clip on. The 91% dries really quick and makes a huge difference in adhesion.

Lights: I ran the cords for the XHOs on the left side and zip tied them to the inside of the XHO brackets so they were out of sight. I then took all the cords up to the top of the 3030 and placed them down in the slot as much as possible. I don't think it's perfect, but I was able to get them out of the way to a point where you really don't notice unless you really look.

Sump: The sump is still in progress since I have some other changes I'm planning. At this point, I was just trying to get things placed in a way that works well for the time being. The biggest improvement was getting an LED lightstrip in there. I can't believe how much of a difference that made and that I took so long to get one in there.

Controller board: I don't have a picture from behind, but you can kind of see some of the cable management tabs up at the top. I also added some led lights in here as well as a new powerhead controller I'll touch more on that in a bit.

 

[kloverguy]

Curious to see what that brass hardware will look like once they are on the doors!!

Just for you - I noticed after putting them on that the two knobs are just a hair different. I don't know that I love them though. I'll give it a week to see what I think.

 

[IJustThinkItsNeat]

Final Setup and Adding Water
So at this point I've got all the big logistics worked out. I got the cabinet, stand, and tank in it's final spot and got all the plumbing back together. My original plan was to to have the stand right up against the cabinet, but after a dry run inside I realized I completely overlooked a few things. The biggest thing I overlooked was with the stand and cabinet touching, there was no way I'd have room to run all the cords and electrical into the cabinet because the access hole I cut was entirely blocked by the tank. The other issue was I would completely lose the use of the left side of the glass for viewing and for placing things such as flow pumps or anything else that would be mounted with magnets. I decided to center the tank in the leftover open space of this wall. While it now exposes the cords from the stand to the cabinet, I did gain some viewing access but it also ended up being a really nice spot to store a step ladder and camera tripod.

At this point I was too excited to wait any longer and started adding water. I got my sand in and started adding the saltwater I had been making in a few brutes and multiple 5 gallon jugs. After all was said and done with return running I'm at 86 gallons total water volume. I threw the 6095s in and added the rock I had been keeping in a brute for close to a year to get everything cycling. I only had one XR15 on because the other one was still running on the old 32gallon tank. Before anyone asks, I wasn't running the lights yet and only had them on for a few pictures to get the feel of things. I felt like I was making massive progress at this point.

Love your build! We're actually working on some side cabinets for our tank and having a hard time with color. We were thinking a darker blue, but our builder recommended going lighter due to the blue lights on the tank. Are you happy with how your cabinets look with the lights on? Or do you think lighter would be better? Sorry for the odd question. We have no reef friends that understand our light dilemma.