Dream reef super silent tank 170g

[aquatic_dad]

Excited to start my build thread. Just ordered most of the equipment and will continue over the coming weeks. I am upgrading from a 32 Gal Fluval Flex that I have had for over a year now.

for my build, I wanted to choose the quietest equipment possible because it will be in my home office. I work from home so I will be in there for 8 hours a day.

Aquarium & furniture:
- Planet Aquarium Mega Matrix 137 gallon (60x18x29), internal overflow
- Elegance stand and canopy
- Eshopps AR-300 sump + Klir 7
- Modular Marine external Refugium. I will be using the sump’s refuge as a frag tank

Rock / sand:
- Marco rock habitat negative space aquascape (HNSA)
- 1.5” deep sand bed using aragalive special grade

Plumbing:
I will be attempting bean animal. The tank has two 1” and two 3/4” holes. I will be using 1” as main drain and two 3/4” as secondary and emergency drain. I will then split the 1” return with a tee into two 3/4” locline returns.

Pumps + power heads:
- 2 Maxspect Gyre 350
- Reef Octopus Varios 8 for return
- Sicce SDC 3.0 for refuge and reactors

Lights: 3 Kessil A360X with 1 wifi

 

[blaxsun]

Good luck!

 

[Royal_pudding]

Good luck!
Excited to see how this plays out, hope to attempt something similar soon.

 

[aquatic_dad]

Not completely done yet, but wanted to share progress so far of my HNSA (habitat negative space aquascape). #HNSA

 

[aquatic_dad]

Rock scape has been cycling for about a month in the garage. Temperature was a bit high in the garage but still got a successful cycle. Ammonia and Nitrite is finally zero and Nitrate is about 30.

I have a couple more weeks before the aquarium is here.

 

[aquatic_dad]

Rock scape has been cycling for about a month in the garage. Temperature was a bit high in the garage but still got a successful cycle. Ammonia and Nitrite is finally zero and Nitrate is about 30.

I have a couple more weeks before the aquarium is here.

 

[aquatic_dad]

Last week the beast arrived. I picked up with a couple of friends from my local fish store. It was really heavy but we managed to put in my office.

I am keeping the canopy off for now while I finish plumbing and wiring. I have immediately started the fishless cycle with microbacter kit. Ammonia is reading zero today down from 1.0, Nitrite is 0.25, Nitrate 5. I am guessing a couple more days and will be ready for first fish once Nitrite is 0. The cycling in the garage idea did not work well, I never got ammonia down to zero despite being in there for 2 months. I am guessing because the

I did have to break one of my scape pieces into two in order to pass it through the tank bracing. I will have not glued it back together yet, thinking of a way to keep it balanced without having to glue it so it is easy to remove in case needed.

While the tank is cycling I am working on the plumbing and electrical.

 

[lucidblue]

Nice aquascape! I'd love to have a big tank in my office. Agree it would need to be super quiet. I have my QT tank temporarily in my office and the sound is making me crazy.

 

[aquatic_dad]

Nice aquascape! I'd love to have a big tank in my office. Agree it would need to be super quiet. I have my QT tank temporarily in my office and the sound is making me crazy.

So far I only have the Maxspect gyres running and I would say they are pretty quiet. I do hear a slight whine when they reverse direction, but nothing that I notice if I am not actively trying to hear it.

I have tried the Varios 8 Pump in the garage to mix some saltwater and couldn’t hear a thing out of it. I haven’t tried it in the tank yet, gotta finish plumbing first.

 

[aquatic_dad]

Ok, plumbing is complete. Or almost complete, I made a mistake by ordering a 3/4” braided tubing instead of 1”. Oh well hoping Amazon will deliver the hose this morning so I can run water in the plumbing.

After so much research I found that bean animal is the quietest plumbing possible. However, I found everyone doing it with external overflow not internal. Mine is internal but I still wanted to do bean animal instead of herbie. In my planet aquariums I have 3/4”, 1”, 1”, 3/4” holes in that order. I used first 3/4” for secondary drain, 1” for main drain, second 1” for return, and second 3/4” for emergency drain. I also used a tee with reducer to split the 1” return to 2 x 3/4” and connected each to two loc lines.

I also bout two Maggie mufflers for the main and secondary drain, however found them to thick and the secondary one kinda didn’t fit with the return. I am still thinking how to fix this and will update once I have a solution.

last pic is my external Refugium plumbing which is very simple.

 

[aquatic_dad]

Ok, the missing hose arrived yesterday and I was able to finish the plumbing and get this thing going. I am truly impressed with how silent the Reef Octopus Varios 8 is. It’s really hard to tell if it is running or not.

For the first run the tank was surprisingly silent, with the exception of the trickling sound inside the sump and the overflow. I am trying to fine tune with gate valve but I think I made some mistakes on the drain pipes length and I still need to figure out an alternative to the Maggie muffler. Maybe I will do street elbows. Will see.

i was also able to add the three Kessils and the canopy. I am very happy with the progress so far.

One thing I noticed yesterday before I added more water, Nitrite has been stuck at 0.5 for three days now with ammonia zero and Nitrate at 10. I added more bacteria with the water. Will see how that looks tomorrow morning.

 

[aquatic_dad]

Alright, I have achieved the silence level I wanted. I get 37-38db on my watch when sitting at my desk with gyres at 80%, Varios 8 at 100%, SDC 3.0 at 40%.

I had to ditch the Maggie mufflers, though they are a great design, they just didn’t fit in my planet aquariums overflow. I decided to go old school with 90 deg elbows / street elbows. It worked like magic. To eliminate the trickling noise from overflow, I had to raise the main drain a little bit with a 1” coupling.

I call it a successful weekend. Nitrite is at 0.25 and Nitrate at 10ppm. Hoping by next weekend the cycle would have completed and I can add my first few fish.

 

[aquatic_dad]

Still waiting for the cycle “patiently”. Nitrite 0.25, Nitrate 10ppm. Meanwhile started thinking about my stocking plan.

Phase1: (hopefully this coming weekend)
- Move my clownfish pair (Darwin + Ocellaris)
- Move my Banggai Cardinal, and add 2 more
- Pajama cardinals x3
- Purple firefish
- orange firefish
- Royal gramma
- Add amphipods and copepods

Phase2: (after some algae has started growing, and pod population grown)
- Move my lawn mower blenny
- Move my rainford goby
- Move my yellow tail damsel fish (that’s everyone from old tank)
- Green mandarin
- Clean up crew

Phase3:
- Six line wrasse
- Blue hippo tang
- Powder Blue Tang
- Powder brown tang
- Yellow tang

That will be it for fish. Let me know if you have any thoughts.

 

[aquatic_dad]

Water mixing station installed. So today I had sometime in the morning before I started work. I decided to prepare my water mixing station plumbing and have it ready before the weekend.

I will be using a 25 gallon tough tote for RoDI to use for ATO, and a 55 gal Brute Trash Can for salt water mixing. I figured my system volume is 180 gal but my actual water volume is 135 gal, so if I want to change 10% every week, the brute can would last me a month.

I placed the mixing station in the attic on top of my office. I will be using a Neptune Dos to pull water from the brute can to the tank and from the tank to a drain on the attic as well. ATO on the other hand will just use gravity and in the sump I will have a float valve and a solenoid valve controlled by APEX. Stay tuned for more pictures this weekend.

 

[aquatic_dad]

This was a very busy weekend. Apex A3 pro arrived and I started setting up in adaptive reef deluxe panel. This was by far the most difficult thing I had to do. Doing all the wiring in a tight space and then making sure there is enough slack when I want to adjust things.

Oh and I also added led strip in the sump area that turns on when I open any of the doors. I didn’t wire this one to apex, just did manually using Reed switches.

I also finally finished setting up the mixing station. All I am waiting on now is the RoDI tubing DOS adapter. On the bright side I have ATO up and running using gravity and a Neptune ATK sensor and solenoid.

The cycle has finally completed. I noticed that I may have already had denitrifying bacteria as my nitrate also went down. I mean it makes sense, I started cycling my aquascape back in May. I was ghosting feeding once a week through this period. The good news is that I was able to add the first few fish from phase 1, only missing the Royal Gramma. It also turned out to be very challenging to catch my clownfish. I will have to remove the aquascape so I am saving this for another day.

 

[aquatic_dad]

I finally managed to catch my clownfish and Banggai Cardinal and moved them to the tank.

I found a thread on here that really helped. Someone suggested to try catch the fish at night. So that’s what did, a couple of hours after lights out and the room was really dark, I went into the room slowly, opened the lid in the dark, and netted the fish where they usually sleep using the flash light on my phone. The fish were really disoriented and it was an easy catch. This was probably very stressful for them. I acclimated them immediately to the new tank and released them to finish this terrifying night.
In the morning they looked really stressed still so I avoided turning on the lights and left them alone. On the second day they went back to normal, they were swimming around and started eating like pigs again.

 

[aquatic_dad]

Water changing setup is complete. I finally received the adapter that go on the DOS to convert to 1/4” rodi tubing.

I used some Teflon tape to attach them and then hung the dos back. I ran a test after priming the lines and everything seem to be working fine.

Oh by the way. The fan you see in this picture is to reduce humidity inside the cabinet. I noticed the tank temperature was getting up to 83 deg F. So I cut two holes in the canopy, and one in the wall inside the sump area and installed these silent fans (160mm and 120mm). All three fans are super silent, I can’t tell when they are running, but they did the job. I set them to work when temp get to 80 Deg F, and they stop when temp is at 79. I may further reduce the temp before I add corals.

I also added two security cameras, one inside the sump area and one outside to watch the tank when I am not home.

 

[aquatic_dad]

Last weekend I installed the trident, klir, and moved all my corals once I confirmed my parameters were good.

I programmed the Klir with my apex and an optical sensor. I connected the Klir motor to a strap down from 24. Below is the code I used.

Klir
Set OFF
Fallback OFF
OSC 000:00/000:03/000:30 Then ON
If Output Klir_VO = OFF Then OFF
If Output RetPump = OFF Then OFF

klir_vo
Fallback OFF
Set OFF
If SumpHi CLOSED Then ON
Defer 000:15 Then ON
When On > 002:00 Then OFF

 

[aquatic_dad]

This weekend I added the tang gang.

 

[aquatic_dad]

Tank update.