HooliganGunner
Community Member
Hello Everyone! Figured it would be a fun idea to post my current project here on r2r. I was currently making videos on tiktok as I am putting together a used 580 gallon (I think it actually only holds 560 but was told it was sold to him as a 580 from tenecor) 10ft x 3 ft x 31ish inch acrylic aquarium. Total facebook marketplace score I picked up back in december, guys wife said it was too big to keep in their home and it wasnt working out in his garage. The tiktok build thread has been really fun to do, but there is a lot I'm learning as I do this that I hope from posting on here I will be able to get some guidance and ideas from other members.
I wasnt planning on having the tank running this quickly, but the tiktok engagement has really pushed me to keep this project rolling and honestly its been super fun making progress with it. Thought I wouldnt even have the tank in my home until middle of the year and here I am 3 months later with it running
so the tank was dirty! Wasnt cleaned out prior to taking it down so had a lot of caked on algae on the walls. Original goal was to make this a peninsula tank so first thing I wanted to do was take off the paint from the back of the tank. Not fun at all, couldnt use chemicals so I had to be super careful lightly warming up the paint with a heat gun without damaging the acrylic so I could peel it off.
Got all the algae scraped off from the inside and wiped down, it made a world of a difference. Hard to tell here but the tank was pretty scratched up. Not sure what he was doing to clean it but it was rough
Next thing I did was test fill it (yeah probably shouldve been step one), was told it had no leaks, looked at all the seams before purchasing it and everything looked good, but before I went any farther I wanted to verify myself. After posting this to tiktok I learned that I shouldnt have only had it supported the way I did, but I just did a quick drain and fill. Figured if acrylic is going to leak it would be an instant leak. I did give myself a scare with this though! Didnt account for the returns sucking in water so when I walked out and saw water on the ground I freaked out until I realized it was just those siphoning from the tank. but other than that she held!
This next step is what worried me a bit. I wanted to get rid of those ugly side outlets from the overflows so I ended up removing those fittings and inserting patches over those holes. Did a 1/4 acrylic sheet and some weld on 3 on the inside, then weldon 16 around the edges of that patch because I was not happy with how it looked. Did a test fill and no leaks from those holes so proceeded with drilling my new 1" holes on the bottom, and then I made some circular plugs with 1/2" acrylic that I weld on 3 from the outside as an extra piece of mind.
The stand the guy was offering with the tank was wayyyy too small. As I mentioned he had his overflows on a closed loop with no filtration so his stand was only 2ft tall. Enough for his plumbing and a big pond pump. I originally made my stand super tall, excited to have room to work under the tank in the sump. I was concerned with room above the tank after moving it into the house and someone on here convinced me to chop it down, I'll be in the tank more than I'll be in the sump. Glad we went that direction with it!
This is also the point in the build where I realized the tank would not fit where I wanted it to go if we made it a peninsula, so we found a different spot in the house for her to go.
Since it was no longer peninsula I wrapped the back of the tank black. I prefer black to paint, never know if I will move again in the future and while I say "If I ever sell this house, the tank is going with it!" Realistically unless I can get something nicer and bigger, this tank is going with me and my peninsula dream may become a possibility.
Next we got the tank moved in. On its side it fit through the door, and with some bad math we thought we could lift one side and lower the other to get it around the blockade my stairs created. Boy were we wrong, so I had to cut out my back doors, confuse the hell out of my dogs, and recruited way more people to help carry it the extra distance around the side of my house and in through the back onto the stand.
so glad I didnt polish this tank in the garage! Much nicer working on this in the house with a/c!! Also ended up saving myself from polishing the back of the tank. But got in there with the novus polishing kit and got the inside and out polished multiple times until I couldnt see any of the scratches anymore.
Also built my self a custom sump with some 3/8 acrylic I picked up cheap. Just had to clean off some graffiti from a couple of them. for $200 and some risk vs the $2000 quotes local acrylic shops gave me it was well worth it and a fun learning experience. Gave this a solid week long test fill with no problems. Has enough room for my 2 reefmat 1200s and an oversized skimmer. Isnt pretty but isnt going to be on display
320lb of rock! Tried to keep a 6-8" gap between the front glass and any of the rocks. Don't want any accidental scratches and also want a nice clear zone for some sand bed corals at some point. The back has a nice 3" gap for flow and fish. Lots of super glue and mortar holding it all together. Tiktok is worried about me needing to remove some of it while the tank is running to adjust for flow? Hopefully that is never an issue, I always thought you set the scape adjust the flow and corals as needed, not your rock scape. Got plenty of caves and tunnels and area to place my corals though! Didn't do any weird gravity defying things like I did with the big branch arm rock on my 180 gallon scape but I'm happy with it and I'm sure my fish and coral will be too.
and finally after 4 days of my RODI running 24/7 to my water storage and pumping it over we had the tank and sump fully filled. I didnt take any pictures of the plumbing because 1 I HATE plumbing, how some of you just map it all out and make it look pretty and leak free in 1 go blows my mind. I had to fix at least 3 leaks, adjust routing of 1 but I got it all leak free, tuned with a herbie, and running. I did go budget with this tank, so I am running 2 DCP-13000 Jebao pumps for my returns. I also have 3 of the Jecod DMP-60 wave makers and am waiting on my 4th one to arrive for my flow. If that needs adjustment I will add on some more wave makers down the line.
I didnt pre mix the tank with saltwater, in case there were any issues with plumbing or the move I didnt want to have any waste in salt as I needed over 150lb of it for this much water. Once the leaks were all corrected and tank was running good for a couple days I just added salt to the sump slowly and let it naturally mix into the system.
Hopefully no one gets on me for this but I did a live cycle at this point. 3 lemon drop damsels at first while dosing microbacter start (which is their entire big bottle on day 1). Monitor the water parameters, everything was staying under control the first week so I added my powder brown and desjardini to start scaling up that bioload.
Next step I have is going to be my lighting, back to budget build I ordered 6 of the A8se max lights. Seen plenty of good reviews on here of those, and with issues I've had with big name brand ones in the past the price difference was an easy sell for me. I'll be mounting those here soon, got some light covers cooking in my printer right now. I want to make a extruded aluminum mount for them, not sure how I want to do that quite yet but I have made a wooden one as a stand in for the meantime.
Any ideas on what considerations I need to make at this point? Biggest tank I've had prior to this is my current 180 gallon that I've had. When we moved I had to break it down and sell off most of my livestock except for some fish. That has a few coral in it I will be slowly moving over, and I am hesitant on if I should move my BTA nexus burst nems too as I don't have an island to try and keep them on in this tank, but I also love the way they look.
Yesterday had someone add an extra 20amp circuit for the tank lights above the tank. Where we placed it I accidentally ended up right between a 15 amp circuit with only 3 un used outlets on it, and a 20 amp circuit with 4 un used outlets on it. so right now the tank equipment is able to be split between those 3 with no other loads on them so I think I am long term good on the power side of things, that and the home has an overbuilt solar system so I won't be worrying about power bills!
I think I am only about $5-6k into this build so far. I don't know if I'd call that budget still or not, but considering a new tank of this size is $10k I'd say I'm doing pretty dang good!
I wasnt planning on having the tank running this quickly, but the tiktok engagement has really pushed me to keep this project rolling and honestly its been super fun making progress with it. Thought I wouldnt even have the tank in my home until middle of the year and here I am 3 months later with it running
so the tank was dirty! Wasnt cleaned out prior to taking it down so had a lot of caked on algae on the walls. Original goal was to make this a peninsula tank so first thing I wanted to do was take off the paint from the back of the tank. Not fun at all, couldnt use chemicals so I had to be super careful lightly warming up the paint with a heat gun without damaging the acrylic so I could peel it off.
Got all the algae scraped off from the inside and wiped down, it made a world of a difference. Hard to tell here but the tank was pretty scratched up. Not sure what he was doing to clean it but it was rough
Next thing I did was test fill it (yeah probably shouldve been step one), was told it had no leaks, looked at all the seams before purchasing it and everything looked good, but before I went any farther I wanted to verify myself. After posting this to tiktok I learned that I shouldnt have only had it supported the way I did, but I just did a quick drain and fill. Figured if acrylic is going to leak it would be an instant leak. I did give myself a scare with this though! Didnt account for the returns sucking in water so when I walked out and saw water on the ground I freaked out until I realized it was just those siphoning from the tank. but other than that she held!
This next step is what worried me a bit. I wanted to get rid of those ugly side outlets from the overflows so I ended up removing those fittings and inserting patches over those holes. Did a 1/4 acrylic sheet and some weld on 3 on the inside, then weldon 16 around the edges of that patch because I was not happy with how it looked. Did a test fill and no leaks from those holes so proceeded with drilling my new 1" holes on the bottom, and then I made some circular plugs with 1/2" acrylic that I weld on 3 from the outside as an extra piece of mind.
The stand the guy was offering with the tank was wayyyy too small. As I mentioned he had his overflows on a closed loop with no filtration so his stand was only 2ft tall. Enough for his plumbing and a big pond pump. I originally made my stand super tall, excited to have room to work under the tank in the sump. I was concerned with room above the tank after moving it into the house and someone on here convinced me to chop it down, I'll be in the tank more than I'll be in the sump. Glad we went that direction with it!
This is also the point in the build where I realized the tank would not fit where I wanted it to go if we made it a peninsula, so we found a different spot in the house for her to go.
Since it was no longer peninsula I wrapped the back of the tank black. I prefer black to paint, never know if I will move again in the future and while I say "If I ever sell this house, the tank is going with it!" Realistically unless I can get something nicer and bigger, this tank is going with me and my peninsula dream may become a possibility.
Next we got the tank moved in. On its side it fit through the door, and with some bad math we thought we could lift one side and lower the other to get it around the blockade my stairs created. Boy were we wrong, so I had to cut out my back doors, confuse the hell out of my dogs, and recruited way more people to help carry it the extra distance around the side of my house and in through the back onto the stand.
so glad I didnt polish this tank in the garage! Much nicer working on this in the house with a/c!! Also ended up saving myself from polishing the back of the tank. But got in there with the novus polishing kit and got the inside and out polished multiple times until I couldnt see any of the scratches anymore.
Also built my self a custom sump with some 3/8 acrylic I picked up cheap. Just had to clean off some graffiti from a couple of them. for $200 and some risk vs the $2000 quotes local acrylic shops gave me it was well worth it and a fun learning experience. Gave this a solid week long test fill with no problems. Has enough room for my 2 reefmat 1200s and an oversized skimmer. Isnt pretty but isnt going to be on display
320lb of rock! Tried to keep a 6-8" gap between the front glass and any of the rocks. Don't want any accidental scratches and also want a nice clear zone for some sand bed corals at some point. The back has a nice 3" gap for flow and fish. Lots of super glue and mortar holding it all together. Tiktok is worried about me needing to remove some of it while the tank is running to adjust for flow? Hopefully that is never an issue, I always thought you set the scape adjust the flow and corals as needed, not your rock scape. Got plenty of caves and tunnels and area to place my corals though! Didn't do any weird gravity defying things like I did with the big branch arm rock on my 180 gallon scape but I'm happy with it and I'm sure my fish and coral will be too.
and finally after 4 days of my RODI running 24/7 to my water storage and pumping it over we had the tank and sump fully filled. I didnt take any pictures of the plumbing because 1 I HATE plumbing, how some of you just map it all out and make it look pretty and leak free in 1 go blows my mind. I had to fix at least 3 leaks, adjust routing of 1 but I got it all leak free, tuned with a herbie, and running. I did go budget with this tank, so I am running 2 DCP-13000 Jebao pumps for my returns. I also have 3 of the Jecod DMP-60 wave makers and am waiting on my 4th one to arrive for my flow. If that needs adjustment I will add on some more wave makers down the line.
I didnt pre mix the tank with saltwater, in case there were any issues with plumbing or the move I didnt want to have any waste in salt as I needed over 150lb of it for this much water. Once the leaks were all corrected and tank was running good for a couple days I just added salt to the sump slowly and let it naturally mix into the system.
Hopefully no one gets on me for this but I did a live cycle at this point. 3 lemon drop damsels at first while dosing microbacter start (which is their entire big bottle on day 1). Monitor the water parameters, everything was staying under control the first week so I added my powder brown and desjardini to start scaling up that bioload.
Next step I have is going to be my lighting, back to budget build I ordered 6 of the A8se max lights. Seen plenty of good reviews on here of those, and with issues I've had with big name brand ones in the past the price difference was an easy sell for me. I'll be mounting those here soon, got some light covers cooking in my printer right now. I want to make a extruded aluminum mount for them, not sure how I want to do that quite yet but I have made a wooden one as a stand in for the meantime.
Any ideas on what considerations I need to make at this point? Biggest tank I've had prior to this is my current 180 gallon that I've had. When we moved I had to break it down and sell off most of my livestock except for some fish. That has a few coral in it I will be slowly moving over, and I am hesitant on if I should move my BTA nexus burst nems too as I don't have an island to try and keep them on in this tank, but I also love the way they look.
Yesterday had someone add an extra 20amp circuit for the tank lights above the tank. Where we placed it I accidentally ended up right between a 15 amp circuit with only 3 un used outlets on it, and a 20 amp circuit with 4 un used outlets on it. so right now the tank equipment is able to be split between those 3 with no other loads on them so I think I am long term good on the power side of things, that and the home has an overbuilt solar system so I won't be worrying about power bills!
I think I am only about $5-6k into this build so far. I don't know if I'd call that budget still or not, but considering a new tank of this size is $10k I'd say I'm doing pretty dang good!
