Jury rigged trash reef; building on the cheap

Bett · Mar 28, 2021

If you ever realize your wrenches are a quarter inch short of spanning the nut for a bulkhead, squeezy clamps can come in handy for getting some leverage to tighten the fitting.

And if you decide to forget that your sump just barely fits under the tank as is and the whole reason you left the bulkhead off last week was to install it after the sump is under the stand... Then you'll have to loosen the whole thing up and tighten it all over again!

Bett · Apr 28, 2021

I've been slacking a bit on the tank lately due to some other things I've been working on. However, as of tonight I finally have it set up and running! I've had the tank half full of water with a powerhead and some frozen fish scraps going for a few weeks to cycle the rock. I also picked up a panel of suntuf polycarbonate roofing from Home Depot for $20 and cut some sections to fit the top of the tank. Nice and sturdy lid, and it shouldn't warp from the moisture like a flat sheet of plexiglass would. Also it's super easy to cut with tin snips and doesn't shatter or crack easily.

I finished up the plumbing this morning when my 1" silicone hose section came in the mail. The ratcheting plastic hose clamps I ordered ended up being a bit too small when the hose is on a barbed fitting, so I just have it press fit between the pump and hard plumbing for now. I've been filling the tank throughout the day and checking for leaks. Still gotta get the overflow to run smoothly since it doesn't want to restart the main siphon if I shut the pump off, but I'll mess with it in the next few days.

Bett · Oct 8, 2021

Wow, I've forgot to update this for quite a while. There's been a lot of progress over the summer. I'll post some of what happened in chronological order.

I went down to the beach and collected some seaweed and sand back in May to throw in the tank. Got all the major things set up for the most part so it was running smoothly enough. It was then time to order some gulf live rock from Salty Bottom Reef.

Ordered around 20 pounds of live rock and 10 pounds of ocean floor with all the fun worms and critters that come with it. Had it shipped submerged same day to to the local airport. If there's something I wasn't going to spare no expense on, it was the biodiversity in these rocks. They were loaded up onto a plane that morning, and by the afternoon I was picking up my heavy boxes of rocks and water from the Southwest cargo pickup. I put everything into my tank as is. I'll pick out any bad hitchhikers later on as they commit their crimes.

Here it is with the rocks in place. The biggest lumpy rocks ended up at the very top of the tank. I wanted to avoid covering too much of the sand bed. Now it was time to let everything run like this for a while and see what comes out of the rocks. I'd already found tons of sponges, red mithrax crabs, some hitchhiker corals, algaes, a skeleton shrimp, and some native anemone that I can't find an exact species name for.

At some point in May, I bought a few frags from a local sale as well as this coral banded shrimp. I also placed an order with reefcleaners and got some small conches and a variety of other snails and hermit crabs.

I bought some locline random flow generators on ebay from someone who 3D prints them. However after about a month of use, they cracked and wouldn't stay on the locline. A ty-wrap around the cracked part solved the problem.

Here's 'Googles' the conch and a couple fish I added in.

Bett · Oct 8, 2021

Got the skimmer set up some time in late June or July. It's an old Precision Marine beckett skimmer. Everything I read about them said they needed to be run off of some pressure rated power hungry pump, but guess who's running it off a 50 watt DC jebao? It's skimming nicely for me, and I have the skimmer external so it's not taking up any sump space. It even has an collection canister with an overflow preventer that worked better than I expected. I'll make a seperate post for the skimmer later.

Here's a mess of wires, pipes, pumps, and reactors. Just got a little bit of carbon, biopellets, and cuprisorb running in the reactors. I run straight well water into my tank for top off and water mixing, no rodi here. I put the cuprisorb in just in case to remove any copper or metals that might be a problem. I ran a biocube for years with very similar well water from a couple miles away so I'm not too worried. There's some rubble in the sump as a hiding place for some mysid shrimp I got from a local store. They've since populated into the main tank. The small pump that runs the reactors also feeds the wet/dry refugium sump that contains the crab prison.

My lights are an Orphek OR3 blue bar, and two bright white LED spotlights from Home Depot that I have set to a wifi controlled dimmer switch. I have the dimmer set to turn the spotlights up throughout the morning, leave them at full power for about 4 hours midday, and then dim them down again throughout the evening. I was going to switch to some more reef specific lighting, but these $15 dollar spotlights and $20 dimmer have been working as well as I want them so far. I have growth on everything including acros. What more can I ask for for around $200 in lighting?

Here's just some stuff growing on the live rocks a few months ago. The gulf rock came with some tiny urchins that have since grown considerably. They've eaten a bunch of the macroalgaes off the rocks.

Bett · Oct 8, 2021

I set up a panel for all the wiring and controls a couple months back. It's not very organized yet. I need to get some extension cords so the wires can reach a bit better and not be in the way. I want to be able to easily access the back of the tank and not have wires hanging everywhere.