My 350G through-wall tank

[spacedcowboy]

This is the rewrite of a build log that I managed to lose all the images and data to on Reef-Central, so hopefully it'll stay around a bit longer this time

The original reason for starting afresh was disaster. The gorgeous hardwood floor underneath the existing tank had warped, and the subfloor was damaged too. This was a result of a small leak that (over a few years) just pushed too much water down into the floor, and it then expanded up to make a significant bump in the floor - large enough to trip over, in fact.

So, the obvious thing to do was to get a bigger fish tank, right ? And this time "do it properly". That means new floors (duh!), a self-contained fish-room, and an in-wall tank rather than a tank-on-a-stand.

I live in the Bay Area, CA, and housing space is somewhat at a premium, so the house isn't huge at some 1500 sq ft. That meant there was a problem: There was no space for such a thing because the sliding-doors that exit out into the back garden are in the way. The part of the house we're talking about (when the on-a-stand tank was there) looks like:

With some trepidation, I suggest to my darling lovely wonderful amazing wife (who's still thinking about her ruined floors) that we might want to ditch the french-doors, put up a wall that shrinks the living room, and generally let me have everything I want. Somewhat surprisingly, this went down well... We end up with something looking like:

A few things to note here:

• You can see we're right up against the outside of the house, and in fact the one-car-wide driveway to the detached garage is on that side of the house as well, so there's absolutely no way to expand out in that direction
• The sliding doors have been removed, and we've converted over to a single door (we actually love this door now. Because only half the doorway was accessible before, we actually find it far easier to get large things in and out of the house)
• The tank. It's sticking out of the wall. No, that's not a mistake in the diagram

 

[spacedcowboy]

The tank was to be built by Miracles, starfire glass on the front and the back. I made the stand extend out the back a bit, to provide a shelf onto which I could place a shadow-box to give the illusion of depth ... except that I also considered going whole-hog on the back of the tank and getting two outdoor-spec TV's that I could drive with OpenGL from a mac-mini or some such. I could create a virtual landscape on the computer that complements the rocks I have in the display tank, and put some kelp waving in the distance etc. etc. The only limits here are imagination. Of course there'll also be a Cthulu-rising mode...

The overall effect ought to be to give far more depth to the tank than would normally be apparent. The cost is that I'll be keeping the glass pretty darn clean. It's been several years since this idea, though, and it still hasn't happened, mainly because I can't come up with an easy way to clean the back of the tank and keep the screens there but who knows. Maybe one day.

The big thing I wanted though, was for the tank to "stick out" of the wall, to become more than just a flat part of the wall. I thought it would become a focal point of the room (which it is, tbh) if it was pushing its way in, demanding your attention So the design was always to make it look like:

... there's nothing else at all at that end of the room. Nothing on the top, bottom, left or right - the only thing to draw the eye is the tank itself. From the other side, it's a little more complicated, of course ...

.. and also significantly more cramped. I wanted to go for a coast-to-coast overflow, and a Bean-Animal return. There are two Reeflo Dart Gold pumps plumbed in at all times, but only one is in action - the other is sitting waiting to be turned on and both can be isolated using ball-valves. That way if something goes wrong with the return, it's a simple matter to turn off the current one, switch to the reserve, and fix at my leisure.

The return pumps force water up into a manifold which extends out over the sump. In the diagram it's shown connecting all the way to the top spray-bar, but in practice we didn't put in the left-hand side of the circuit, so the lower manifold dead-ends before it gets to the end of the sump.

Water is therefore forced over to right where ball valves can divert some of it through the Emperor Aquatics Smart high-output UV, which has a flow-gauge plumbed in so I can adjust for correct flow depending on circumstance. Anything that doesn't go through the UV goes up to the spray-bar at the top of the tank, which is hidden behind the wall when viewed from the front. Water flows into the tank and completes the circuit by overflowing down into the sump. With ball-valves in place, I can divert all returned water through the UV and dial down the flow if necessary to help (I realize it's not an absolute cure, but it'll probably *help*) contain any outbreak of disease. During normal use, the UV will polish the water

The sump has 4 filter-sock placements, and an emergency overflow into the back in case they get clogged, this feeds the skimmer section and then, through baffles, the return section.

You can see the exterior door from the outside just about opens without impacting the back-brace of the tank. There really isn't much room back there at all, but it all fits. Just.

To make the design a little clearer, here's a cut-out with just the tank, sump and some plumbing, looking from the front...

You can see the stand extending out to support the front of the tank, and then the 24" of visible tank, then the 8" of extra height that fits behind the studded wall.

 

[blaxsun]

And you even kept the bean bag chair! Cthulu-rising sounds like a wicked idea.

 

[spacedcowboy]

That bean-bag has since multiplied and we now have 3 of them. I'm still not quite sure how...

 

[Glenner’sreef]

Very nice! How far into this are you?

 

[spacedcowboy]

Very nice! How far into this are you?

Pretty much all the way. There's been a few ups and downs, and some paths where I had to backtrack along the way, and I went through a lean patch in the middle where things didn't get the attention they deserved, but it's pretty much at the point where I can start adding corals etc. There's a few of the more-hardy ones in there already so I can "test the waters" as it were.

Well, more accurately, it will ready be soon. We went away on a 3-week staycation to the relatives, and the very nice lady who came to look after the koi, cat, and tank didn't really notice that the skimmer stopped working. By the time I'd figured out what was wrong remotely, I had a bad case of GHA, and I've been wrestling with it for a few months now. The skimmer was one of the few things I didn't plug into an EB832 because I thought "it'll always be on". Lesson learnt: alarms are useful.

It's slowly getting better (why do things only improve *slowly* when they can go wrong so quickly...) and I'm using Reef Flux to get rid (added a lawnmower blenny as well) but the extent of the outbreak in a large tank... well it's taking time.

 

[Glenner’sreef]

Pretty much all the way. There's been a few ups and downs, and some paths where I had to backtrack along the way, and I went through a lean patch in the middle where things didn't get the attention they deserved, but it's pretty much at the point where I can start adding corals etc. There's a few of the more-hardy ones in there already so I can "test the waters" as it were.

Well, more accurately, it will ready be soon. We went away on a 3-week staycation to the relatives, and the very nice lady who came to look after the koi, cat, and tank didn't really notice that the skimmer stopped working. By the time I'd figured out what was wrong remotely, I had a bad case of GHA, and I've been wrestling with it for a few months now. The skimmer was one of the few things I didn't plug into an EB832 because I thought "it'll always be on". Lesson learnt: alarms are useful.

It's slowly getting better (why do things only improve *slowly* when they can go wrong so quickly...) and I'm using Reef Flux to get rid (added a lawnmower blenny as well) but the extent of the outbreak in a large tank... well it's taking time.

Bummer! GHA is something you just have to mess with constantly! If you don’t mind some advice. Do everything and anything to it. You’ll win. Better days ahead. Again great project!

 

[spacedcowboy]

It is getting better - there's about half as much in the tank as there was when I came back. And freaked. The Reef Flux really does seem to help, and I've been adding Vibrant as well from time to time. So far the Blenny doesn't seem to be doing much, but he's still relatively new, so I live in hope I don't expect him to get rid of it - there's way too much - but I am kind of hopeful that he'll help keep it in check once I beat it down as far as possible.

 

[spacedcowboy]

So one thing I didn't have to take into account before the fish-room was built was humidity - up until then the tank had been in a relatively large room, with good airflow, and the back door was frequently open in the day. Now, though, it's a small room, with no windows, and the only thing keeping the evaporation under control is an extractor fan.

I bought a Green Air Products humidity controller to manage power to the extractor fan. This was more an exercise in hope than anything else - as far as I can tell, the fan has been on constantly since, well, since it was put in To be fair, there is no condensation or anything like that in the room, but I've yet to see the fan switch off under control of the controller (which I tested and it does work)...

Speaking of moisture, because we'd had such a problem with the water causing the floor to buckle before we started all this, I asked the renovation folks to install the heaviest pond liner I could find above the newly-reconditioned floors. It's tacked up about 10" all the way around, and then there's a drain in the corner by the sink, so even if things go terribly wrong, it all ought to just drain away. This is from when we were having that installed:

You can see what might appear to be the plumbing for the sink against the right wall, but in fact these are two pipes that go under the crawlspace for the house and along the entire length, to tanks set up for NSW and RODI water at the other end. All I need do, then, is use a peristaltic pump to pull water (NSW or RODI) up the relevant stand-pipe, and make sure the tanks are full enough at the far end of the house. Given the lack of space in the fish-room, this was really the only way to do this.

 

[spacedcowboy]

The next thing to happen was that Miracles got in touch and said they'd finished the tank. Since I live a long way away from them, and shipping something like this isn't a joke, I asked them to water-test it, to which they graciously agreed

They filled it with tap-water (of course) which accounts for the green colour, and sent me the photo...

I'd had them make the stand and the sump as well, since it's easier to have a single source for the entire thing in case anything went wrong. The stand has two center supports on one side that can be removed, which came in handy because the sump wouldn't fit once the stand was in the fish-room (every time I type "room", I wince - it's more of a fish closet...). It'd have been pretty difficult to move both the stand and the (heavy) glass sump into the fish-room at the same time...

 

[blaxsun]

If you have a separate door where you can go hide from your significant other - it's a fish-room. If she can simply slide open the door, it's a fish-closet.

 

[spacedcowboy]

Resurrecting this thread, since I've been giving the tank a little more attention as some occupational therapy... Rather than dive in at the current time, I'm going to keep it going as a build-log and we'll see how long it goes for

The design above doesn't allow for any access from the front - in fact one of the design ideals is to have a plain wall, with all the focus of attention on the tank itself - especially as it sticks out through the wall a little way. With that in mind, experienced reefers will be shaking their heads and talking about access to the front of the tank, with good reason I might add.

So the plan finesses this problem using a lift-table at the back of the tank. I was originally looking at more industrial solutions (because I wanted a foot-actuated one - I wanted to be standing on the table, push down on a foot-pedal, and be raised into the air) - but these are (a) hideously expensive even on the scale of a reef-tank, and (b) generally designed for much larger spaces than I have behind the tank.

The eventual solution was an accordion-style dog-grooming table - they're relatively cheap (a few hundred dollars rather than several thousand), are fairly compact, and are designed to support larger dogs (so they'll take me, but maybe not my 200 lbs Newfie at the same time

So this lets me raise myself up by about 4', which is plenty to brace myself against the "front" wall above the tank with one arm and reach down with the other. There are still some locations which are hard to get to in the very front corners of the tank, so I leave those to "swimming space" and if I need to get anything from there, it's the garbage-picker tool to the rescue...

[Temporal shift] This has actually held up pretty well over the years. It makes it pretty easy to get to pretty much anywhere in the tank, and I'm happy with how it worked out

 

[spacedcowboy]

Coding it up...

So it seems I ought to read the building code more. A lot more. I've been more or less living in city hall recently, I'm on first-name terms with the building inspectors, all because I didn't do my homework.

First, my contractor tells me that due to California building codes (2013) I need a 3'x3' landing outside the exterior door that I want to create on the right hand side of the house. When I pointed out that other doors didn't seem to need that, he told me the CA building code had changed (which, to be fair, it has).

This is a problem because there's about 10' of space on that side of the house and it's all driveway to provide vehicle access to the detached garage at the rear of the house...

You can see the outside of the house abuts the driveway, and that far gate-post is the end of my land. If I put in a 3'x3' slab for the landing, I won't be able to drive the car up the path; I did think of making the whole driveway get "speed bumps" which would serve as the landings but the wife-unit didn't approve.

So, trip to city hall. Talk to the inspectors and find out that the fish room doesn't need an "egress door" because it's not a sleeping area. Therefore it can be counted as an "external door", which has lower requirements. Specifically I can put in a step that can be 11" proud of the wall rather than 3' [you know, like the ones I already have that I'd told the contractor about]... Having been told that I was pretty happy and left, so ....

... I didn't see that an external door isn't allowed to swing outwards over a step, it has to swing inwards. This is an issue because I specced a 28" door, and I only have 25" of room to open the door if it swings in. I didn't consider this because I always intended it to swing outwards.

Now the external doors to the house are all custom knotty-alder stained doors, so the door was ordered 2 weeks ago (it has a lead time of 8 weeks) in order for it to be here on time for the building work to progress. At this point, I think I'm just going to live with it. It may even be useful to have the larger door for taking stuff in and out. In any event, that's not the major problem...

... because (again!) I neglected to think it through. See where the external door in the "fish room" is ? Right up against the gate end of the house on that wall ? Even putting a single step in for the new door means the gate won't be able to fully open. It's a sprung gate so it needs to be able to be fully open to attach to the wall, to prevent it from closing immediately (we have a swimming pool, so there are code requirements on the gate).

... so I was back again to the city this morning ("Hi Bill"), and got another alteration granted to move the door to the opposite end of the fish-room. Now I think we're good to go. I think (I hope!) I'm better at planning the tank, plumbing, etc. than understanding all the minutiae of the CA building code (2013)!

In all of this, I have to say the city people were friendly and had a "how can we work this out for you" attitude rather than the "more than my job's worth to help you mate" that I'd feared. 10/10 city of San Jose. Would do more building work with you again.

 

[spacedcowboy]

Sound matters

One concern with the setup was how noisy it might be, behind what in the UK I'd call a studded wall - those things have a passing similarity to a loudspeaker, or so it can seem sometimes

So as far as sound goes, I'm taking a multi-level approach

• There will be 2 layers of greenwall/cementboard/whatever-the-water-resistant-one-is between the tank and the stand. That's the main barrier for sound.
• Then there's a rubber waterproof membrane that will also cover the floor. This will go up as high as the top of the stand.
• Then the stand will have rubber washers between its connections to the drywall and itself. I put the plates-with-holes to fasten the stand to the drywall on the rear of the 2" steel tubing, so there's plenty of space for rubber dampening, then a 2x4, then the drywall.
• The stand itself will sit on a mat of elephant-bark dense rubber - the sort of thing you put on workout floors. Doesn't compress much but will absorb some vibration
• The pumps I'm using are 2 (1 active at a time) reeflo dart golds. These are pretty dang quiet anyway, and they'll not be running at maximum throughput since they're only the return pumps. They'll be sitting on their own vibration-dampening mats - I did this with the last tank and the loudest component of the tank was the skimmer
• The new skimmer is a Royal Exclusive SuperMarin 250, which is (I'm told) a pretty quiet skimmer.
• Piping supports will be damped at their attachment to the wall - again with rubber washers.

So, overall I'm trying to use quiet equipment, dampening any vibration, and using a double-thick wall of drywall to try and limit the noise.

 

[spacedcowboy]

Let there be light, (um, part 1)

Lacking deity-level powers, my lighting will appear in 2 stages. The first part was solar tubes being installed, we've had great success with some 10" solar tubes we installed in one of the bathrooms we recently renovated (in fact I often think the light is on when it's just the tubes lighting it up so well), so after reading around (I was concerned about sunlight encouraging algae growth) and seeing that other people seem to cope well with solar tubes, I've decided to go ahead and get them installed while we renovate the "fish room".

They initially told me they'd only be able to fit 2 of them over the tank due to the solar panels we have powering the house-battery (3 Tesla power-walls). When push came to shove, though, they managed to get all three of the ones I wanted - one over the centre (ish) of the tank and one either side...

The sun can be a contributory factor in causing algae to grow, but I've read of several people who have solar tubes installed, and they seem to be doing pretty well.

You need 2 things for algae to thrive: the right light, and nutrients in the water. I guess I'm going to be making sure the nutrients are pulled out of the water pretty sharpish.

If all else fails, I can just cover them up, but it seems to me there may be something in sunlight that isn't in LEDs, and sunlight seems to work pretty well out in the sea, and you can't beat the running costs...

 

[spacedcowboy]

Just floored!

So, given that a rough estimate of the weight (including when people are hanging around looking at the tank) is ~7000 lbs, I got a structural engineer to draw me up some plans for floor reinforcement.

Just got back from vacation, and the contractors (amongst other things) have laid the concrete pads, and then the vertical 4x6's that support a lattice of horizontal 4x4's directly underneath the tank.

... before we seal the floor back up again. We're re-laying the floor in that area anyway due to (*cough*) unforeseen saltwater incursions from the against-the-wall tank that was previously there. Seemed like a good time to ... shore things up.

The above image shows that these new piers are 3' on centre apart. They're actually arrayed in a 2x3 configuration, to cover a 9'x6' space, with the tank centred in that rectangle. This is in *addition* to the existing flooring... There ought to be plenty of support.

 

[spacedcowboy]

(Re)Finishing the floor

And here it is with the new floor laid down and merged into the old one.

They did a really good job merging the new wood (the far part over by the wooden door) into the existing wood (everything else), and it looks even nicer stained...

So the floor is done, recovered from its old buckled structure (the, er, aforementioned slow saltwater leak over the years...) . It took a while to get this all done - sand everything down so the new floor integrated with the old one well, then stain to match and wait for that to dry, then there's 3 coats of a clear polyurethane coat, all of which we have to wait to dry before doing the next. We're currently on coat 1 today... Flooring is expected to be finished next Tuesday.

One point of interest wrt the flooring... We wanted the tank to be removable if we ever moved house, which meant making the room be able to be restored back to a non-tank situation as easily as possible. From a position of "what's best for just the tank" it would clearly be better to stop the hardwood at the point where the new wall will go, and hot-mop the tank area as if it were a shower, to make sure the water didn't damage anything again. That, however, would make moving pretty dang hard.

So, the actual design calls for the new flooring to go all the way throughout the main room of the house; for the area that the tank will go into to be waterproofed (to protect the hardwood) using a pond liner; and for the wall dividing the "fish-room" from the living room to be non-structural in any way. That way, there's only a minimal cost to repair the damage if we ever decide to remove the tank, or move house.

Even the wall-mounted sink, and the water stand-pipes that supply NSW and NFW from the tanks at the other end of the house are routed through the wall cavity, and do not impact the floor. They're not visible from this angle, but you can see the stand-pipes in previous images.

 

[spacedcowboy]

Tank Time

The long-awaited day dawns...

Apologies for this one, it's going to be image-heavy

So, today the tank arrived. To get ready for moving it in, we first laid the waterproof membrane (usually used to line ponds, so it's pretty thick and tough) over the area where the tank was going to be placed. The liner will cover the entire floor, and go all the way up the wall by the sump, and at least 20" up the other walls, apart from where there are doors etc... The membrane will be held in place against the wall by roofing nails (with the washer thing to disperse the load), and we'll put a strip of wood along the floor/wall junction to keep it properly positioned.

We also laid RAM-Board throughout the living room, where the new floors had just finished being stained/polyurethaned (3 coats of polyurethane, each with 24 hours drying time...). I didn't want those new floors getting marked.

On top of the pool-liner we placed some elephant-bark rubber matting, to absorb any low-frequency vibrations that might otherwise be transmitted through to the floor. But while we were doing that, the tank turned up...

It had been stored at the local depot for the last couple of weeks, and I hired "Mike" who has this recovery-vehicle and a fork-lift. He puts the forklift on the vehicle, drives to wherever the job is, and can transport stuff as you see above, it's a pretty unique combination AFAIK. He basically drove up, disconnected some things, and lowered the forklift to the ground by remote control using the winch on the truck... Anyway, then he drove it up the path and maneuvered it into place behind the house. I thought his sign was pretty funny...

... so then we took the sump and the stand inside the house. The helpers were under the impression that the sump *was* the tank, not being reef-tank-savvy I'd been building them up for the effort involved in moving the tank... There were several comments along the lines of "that wasn't so bad", etc. I'm not sure what they thought the crate was for...

Once they'd been carried inside we made sure the stand was level, and the sump was placed correctly inside the stand, and that both were in the correct position, because once the tank was on top, nothing was moving thereafter.

You can just about see the "Elephant Bark" vibration-reducing rubber mat under both the sump and stand in this photo. Miracles took my design for both the tank and the sump, and were true to their name. The stand they designed themselves, all I told them was the height I wanted, and it has a removable back-middle leg, so the sump can be removed at some point without having to destroy it.

... Then there was the whole 'uncrating' of the tank itself. Cue several "Ooohhh" and "Ahhh"'s from the crew I have to say that Miracles have done an excellent job with the tank, the seams are gorgeous, there are no obvious scratches or defects anywhere. I'm completely happy with the tank. Suckers (nine of them, each of which can apparently handle 200lbs) were attached, so we could start actually moving it into place...

... but (of course) the the tank was back-to-front relative to how we wanted it to be, so we had to swivel it around by 90 degrees and then swivel around by another 90 degrees to get the front face looking in the right direction... Glad we'd put down that RAM board...

The next job was to get everything positioned just so, so that the wall that will be built around it is properly aligned, and that the tank is dead-center of that wall, and the correct distance out from the rear wall. It does sort of show just how little room there is behind it though. I managed to persuade my wife that a "fish room" would be a good idea, but since every inch of it had to come out of the dining room, it really is the bare minimum possible. There are 25" behind the stand before you hit the wall. Not 24, it needs to be 25... The stand had shifted slightly when we put the tank on top, so we had to get everything perfectly back in place...

And here it is in all its glory, ready for the rest of the renovation to proceed around it. We'll be covering it with RAMboard to protect it while the guys work around it... While it's uncovered, though, you can see the optical clarity of the glass - starfire all round and for tempered 3/4" glass that's very little green being introduced onto Pablo's white shirt in the above photo

I have to say that this tank was phenomenally heavy. Really, really, really heavy. Even with 10 of us lifting, it was a real struggle to get the tank up to the stand's height. It took 3 of us to lift the old glass-cages 240G tank onto the back of a pickup, and that was nowhere near the effort of lifting this tank up onto its stand - 3/4" glass is ridiculously heavy...

The other thing this doesn't really show is how the tank utterly dominates that end of the room. As it should, of course

A very happy camper...

 

[spacedcowboy]

I've Been Framed!

So, more "renovation" than "reefing", but the framing is now done, for the tank surround, the new door out to the back garden, and the wall adjacent to that door.

There's no need for framing underneath the tank because the stand has 6 2x6's screwed to it, isolated using anti-vibration washers, which will act as the support for the greenboard later.

As I left for work this morning, they were jack-hammering out the old door base (60 something years old cement) presumably ready for the new door to go in. For some reason they like installing the door before they stain them, but hey, they're the experts

At this point, wiring and the extraction fan are also in. My sockets are all about 6' off the floor, 4 sockets (pictured) on one side of the tank, and another 8 on the other, with one 20A circuit per 4 sockets. Ought to be enough to be going along with - I'm not expecting to use halides or a chiller...

​

The extractor fan is controlled by a humidistat. from Green Air, but this seems to be more in hope than anything else. I've never yet seen the fan go off after the tank was filled with water - the perils of a small "closet" for a fish room There's also some normal LED ceiling lights so I can see when groping around under the tank...

At this point we had the (rather long, if I'm honest) wait for a city inspection, which passed apart from needing tempered glass to be put into the window pane next to the door (before, it was a sliding door, which apparently didn't need it). Make sort of sense, and we have until the final inspection to fulfil the demand, so no problem...

 

[spacedcowboy]

Finding one's wal

So after inspection, and framing, and wiring, and no doubt more construction-related phases, the next step was to try and make it look presentable again. I think they did it well...

I absolutely love the plain wall and the tank just ... there. Once it's lit and alive, it'll be a real eye-catcher. You can see how it sticks out from the wall on the "living room" side...

Looking good to me