Louie's Red Sea Reefer Peninsula 500

[LV3]

I basically have all equipment needed just want to mount controls and wires like you have!

All you need to do is go to a hardware store and get a piece of shelving board. I believe it is called melamine and was made by rubber maid. You'll find it in the organization section of the hardware store. Next but a few grommets. These are the plastic circle pieces that the cords run through. You normally see them on the top of desks for wire management. So what I did was cut the shelving into two pieces. The vertical piece is where the controllers are mounted and a base piece that acts as a stand of the vertical piece. I used metal L brackets to screw the two pieces together. Building it this way allowed me to avoid screwing anything into the cabinet. It can be removed easily as well.

On the backside of the vertical piece, I organized the cables with some zip ties and routed the cables through the grommets. It's tight back in the dry side of the cabinet but once I've setup the tank, I've never been back there since. Let me know if that helps.

 

[OriginalUserName]

Sure, this post shows the plans and some of the part numbers I believe. https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/louies-red-sea-reefer-peninsula-500.313036/#post-3863978. It is the 15 series in the anodized black finish. The rack is mounted onto a 3 1/2 ft piece of shelving and wedged between the wall and and the aquarium cabinet. This allows me to remove the entire rack if needed and I didn't have to drill the cabinet. The deflection is minimized using the corner bracket between the horizontal and vertical runs of the profile. Cables from the lights run through the channels of the profile and give it a nice sleek look.

Thanks!

I have a kessil a360 right now and I'm thinking I will add 2 more and 2-4 T5s. I want to do a cleaner version of the aquatic life LED/T5 hybrid system.

 

[sergio706]

Wow I have the peninsula 20g but that looks amazing!!

 

[revhtree]

Very nice!

 

[kyevey]

I'm looking into purchasing the Reefer Peninsula 500. If you don't mind me asking, what are the dimensions of the "sump-side" of the stand cabinet area. I'm thinking about replacing the sump, but I can't find anywhere that provides these dimensions.

 

[kyevey]

duplicate post...

 

[Quinn]

Any updates? Love the light fixture. How do you like the retro with the Kessils? Gettting ready to setup a Peninsula 650 myself soon

 

[LV3]

Yeah I suppose it’s been a while since I last updated my build thread. Honestly, this tank has been running like a top. Maintenance has been minimal and includes:

Topping off the fresh water reservoir every week
Cleaning out the skimmer cup every 2 weeks
Filling the dosing containers every couple weeks
Changing out the CO2 scrubber media
Clean pump heads as needed

This tank is finally growing acros and other SPS well. I added a Kessil A360w at the end of the tank to bring more light to the island rock of zoas. Giving them a bit more light has helped and I can see a difference in growth and coloration. I moved the AP700 over to focus on the top portion of the tank on the left and that area now peaks near 410 PAR. That has been a big difference in getting the acros to only grow but color up and keep their color.

I changed the doser from the BRS dozers to a four head doser. I was dosing Ca and Alk with the dosers and relying on water changes and a correction dose for Mg. The thought with the 4 head doser is to try to dose all three daily.

I changed up some of the fish selection to focus on smaller reef fish and 1 yellow tang to keep any algae under control. No nuisance algae at all other than the film on the glass that gets scraped every 3 days or so.

Issues:
I had the original Kessil h350 go out on me, likely due to the amount of humidity in the sump area. A fan would be a welcome upgrade in that space. I ended up replacing it with a Kessil H380 and it grows more chaeto than I know what to do with. I prune it back weekly or it clogs up the weirs in the baffle.

Future upgrades:
I’m walking that line on pulling the trigger on a calcium reactor. I just have no idea if I’ll be able to fit it in this cabinet. In that respect, it would have been nice to get the larger version of this tank.

All that to say that it’s been a lot of fun watching this tank and not constantly tinkering with it. Once I stopped messing with it and let it do it’s thing, positive thing a started happening.

Lessons learned up this point? Patience. Stability at all costs.

 

[LV3]

Some pictures from today

 

[LV3]

How do you like the retro with the Kessils?

I really like this setup in comparison to just running the LEDs alone. I run all 4 bulbs with ATI blue+ and use the Kessils to provide the white. The daytime is a cooler white look but the T5s subdue the aggressive shimmer and it looks natural to me. In terms of growth and coloration of the corals, I've noticed a significant difference in both after I added the T5s. There is a significant improvement in the amount of shadows in the sections where the rock blocks out the direct LED light and I'm able to grow low light corals in places where I wouldn't have been able to do so without the T5s.

 

[OriginalUserName]

Any updates? Love the light fixture. How do you like the retro with the Kessils? Gettting ready to setup a Peninsula 650 myself soon

Great choice on the tank. Quadruple check your stand though. Mine is slightly off but not causing a problem (knock on wood).

 

[LV3]

Great choice on the tank. Quadruple check your stand though. Mine is slightly off but not causing a problem (knock on wood).

What’s the issue with your stand?

 

[OriginalUserName]

What’s the issue with your stand?

Slight bowing on the end upright piece, just enough to make me slightly nervous, not enough to tear the tank down.

 

[erichuyn]

Great tank!

 

[Andre Arnold]

I know plenty of people have asked about your amazing light rack. I am sorry to ask another question about it. I am curious what you have a the very end of the rack? Is it a special bracket? Also how is the T5 fixture attached to it? I have the same light setup and I am switching to a 500 Peninsula as well. I order all the parts I need from 80/20, I just don't know what you have at the very end. Thanks

 

[LV3]

At the end of the rack is a 90 degree angle fitting. It has two mounting holes on it. I attached one side to the profile and used the open hole on the other side to feed the T5 fixture’s hanging cable through it.

 

[AllanBanks]

Fantastic build. Interested to see an update!

 

[LV3]

OK, time for another update on this tank. So much has happened since my last update that I'll try to remember everything that has changed.

Sump
I've moved the sump from under the cabinet into the basement directly below the tank. To accomplish this, I drilled holes for two 1" overflow PVC pipe and 1 1" return PVC. My wife was not thrilled with the idea but I made it as clean as I possibly could. Having the sump in the basement has the made the display tank incredibly quiet. I love it.

In order to pump back up from the basement, I switched return pumps to the Abyzz A200. The pump is an absolute workhorse. It's dead silent and pumps water to the display tank which is about 14' feet vertically, feed a carbon/GFO reactor, as well as feed a frag flat on the same system in the basement. My only concern is that I don't currently have a backup pump that can handle this load so I'll need to build a contingency plan soon in the event the pump needs to go offline.

Frag Flat
With the sump now in the basement, I added a 4'x3'x12" frag flat and have been using that for several months now to grow new colonies that are too small for the display. The flow in the flat is handled by a single gyre pump that keeps the flow ripping. As for lighting I stuck with the AquaticLife 48" T5/LED hybrid. This is the non-dimmable version. I added 3 Radio XR15 G4 Pros as well as the flat was primarily growing acros. With this setup, I had no problem hitting 400 PAR in the middle of the flat and the ends were perfect for low/medium light corals.

Nutrient Export
With the increase in water volume and bioload, I switched skimmers from the little guy I had running on the system to a Royal Exclusive skimmer. I got the skimmer from a friend and after changing the pumps to properly match the bioload in my tanks, it has been running flawlessly. I thought my previous skimmer was pulling gunk, which it was, but this is on a whole new level. I now see why there is such a thing as higher end skimmers in our hobby. Some just work better consistently for longer periods of time. The air draw alone is night and day with this new skimmer. I can now run the airline outside and boost my pH dramatically. During the day the pH will peak at 8.35 and at night drop to 8.1. This is something I could never do with the old skimmer or even by dripping kalk which I tried at one point.

Flow in the Display
Still running 2 MP40s on the back wall and that has provided all the flow I've needed for a while until some of the acros started getting bigger. I just added the Red Sea ReefWave 45 to the far end to push water back towards the overflow and create more of a randomized turbulent flow pattern. So far I like it but I've just connected it tonight so time will tell. My first impressions is that this pump is amazing. The build quality seems nice. It pushes a ton of water across the tank and is extremely quiet. For how much water it moves, it's more quiet than my MP40s.

Lighting in the Display
I'm still using 2 Kessil AP700s as the primary light source for the display. I've added 2 ReefBrite XHO Actinic bars for supplemental light and have gone away from T5. There was nothing wrong with the T5 fixure, I just wanted to try to go all LED and I like the way the corals look under the ReefBrites. The 80/20 light bar was also replaced by a canopy. I always thought that a canopy made a fish tank look too bulky and that the look of a rimless tank is more sleek. That's probably still true, but the benefits of the canopy outweigh the aesthetics in my new found opinion. I no longer have the light spill in the room which allows me to sit on the couch and not have light in my eyes when I'm enjoying the tank. I also find that the canopy focuses your vision on the tank in a way that it didn't before. As a room divider peninsula tank, the canopy really makes a clean separation of the two ends of the room.

Aquascape
I must have just piled rocks into a wall when I first setup the tank. Maybe I was lacking creativity at the time or maybe I was adhering to the old pound per gallon rule but the aquascape was feeling a little dated. Over the years as the corals grew, I lost a lot of the flow characteristics that I had in the beginning and ran out of room for new corals and growth. It was time for a change. I pulled all the old rock and put it in the frag flat. All the frags that I had been growing had turned into mini colonies and found a home in a newly re-scaped display tank. The new scape is half the height of the last scape with more branch-like and overhand qualities. There's more swimming room for open water fish and I've added only corals that I'm in love with. The most important thing is that I've left room for corals to grow and have decided that I don't want giant colonies in this tank. Rather, I'd like more mini colony sized acros in this now SPS dominant tank. When I started this tank, I couldn't grow an acro to save my life; and whereas I'm still confused on some, I can keep them going now. Maybe the tank has gotten more stable with the calcium reactor?

Calcium Reactor
I switched from 2Part dosing to a calcium reactor made by AquaMaxx. It's the middle sized reactor with the extra chamber for gassing off CO2. It's fed with a Kamoer STP wifi controlled peristaltic pump. That pump has been great for me as I had problems early with the Ecotech Versa. I'm sure Ecotech has resolved some of the early issues with the Versa but the timing of the version 2 of the Kamoer made the switch a no brainer for me. I still run the Neptune Trident to run testing for Alk, Calcium, and Mag and the calcium reactor keeps the system currently running at an average alk of 8.6 with a sway of only .2 dkh.

I'm sure I'm missing more stuff that I've either added or removed from the system, lessons learned, or things I would definitely not do again but that's enough for tonight. I'll be sure to add some pictures of the system before I took it down and replaced the aquascape as well as some shots of the basement build out and frag tank. Happy reefing!

 

[LV3]

 

[LV3]