Luc Vogels's 600+ gallon CoralCare Reef

[reefguyty]

Beautiful tank, corals, fish, and photos!

Is that huge trumpet coral the same one from your 180 gallon?

 

[exonn]

I have black glass too and hate cleaning it, but when its clean i love it so much. Great tank, great corals, great pictures.

 

[Luc Vogels]

Great work and gorgeous reef!

Beautiful! I think I'm going to use one of them for my laptop background!

Just amazing! I agree with keeping the back clean!

Thanks!! Great to hear this.

Wow! Awesome tank. AND you got to design an LED fixture for Philips!! Not bad at all.

Please make your next goal getting those fixtures released in NA!

I am certainly not complaining... and don't worry, the US version has our main priority.

Beautiful tank! I agree, it looks much deeper with the back glass clean.

Looks great. I agree with clean.

Love your thread and great story! Keep up the good work, and keep posting, you have a beautiful aquarium.

I have black glass too and hate cleaning it, but when its clean i love it so much. Great tank, great corals, great pictures.

Thanks guys! Clean it is.

Beautiful tank, corals, fish, and photos!

Is that huge trumpet coral the same one from your 180 gallon?

Yes, correct.
Some corals are over 5 years old!

 

[lavoisier]

Beautiful build. Beautiful tank.

 

[Luc Vogels]

Some months ago I bought a Nikon 40mm Nikor micro.
I Love this lense for aquarium shots

Some random shots with this lense:

and the last

 

[Jason mack]

Wow !awesome tank .. !!!

 

[Luc Vogels]

Some tank shots from last July

Stenopus Tenuirostris shedding skin

Aquarium during evening hours (between 9 and 10)

Aquarium during evening hours (between 8 and 9)

And some random shots :

 

[Luc Vogels]

A small video and some pictures from my tank (last September).
I could not resist Two cute young Paracanthurus hepatus.
I played around with my camera settings and tried some different lighting techniques.
I made over 1000 pictures and these are worth sharing

Some pictures from above:

I like this one very much!!

And a picture from above with an additional indirect flash

Some detail shots of my fish (macro lens and additional flash from above)
Hoplolatilus purpureus

Pseudanthias squamipinnis (male)

Pentapodus emeryii

 

[Luc Vogels]

And aliens!!!

 

[reefwiser]

Great images Luc.

 

[revhtree]

A small video and some pictures from my tank (last September).
I could not resist Two cute young Paracanthurus hepatus.
I played around with my camera settings and tried some different lighting techniques.
I made over 1000 pictures and these are worth sharing

Some pictures from above:

I like this one very much!!

And a picture from above with an additional indirect flash

Some detail shots of my fish (macro lens and additional flash from above)
Hoplolatilus purpureus

Pseudanthias squamipinnis (male)

Pentapodus emeryii

Just crazy awesome!!

 

[BMMMW]

Thank you for sharing this amazing tank with us. One day I hope to be able to grow SPS.

 

[David29price]

Hi Luc, fellow Philips employee here (US) and fellow reefer. Very impressive display. I was just in Eindhoven a few months ago and wish I had seen this then so I could have possibly seen your impressive system. Very well designed and thought out! Congratulations!!!

 

[Luc Vogels]

Some more recent pictures of the tank (November Last year)

And (on popular request) a (smartphone)shot of the tank without its top covers (so the Coralcare fixtures are visible)

In the past months I was (and currently still am) busy construction a aquarium room in the garage.
The filtration system (currently under the aquarium) will move to the garage.
I am also adding a 220x75x40 frag tank to the system.
I will share some details and pictures in the upcoming weeks .

 

[fftfk]

Hi, my name is Luc Vogels and besides being the lead design engineer of the Philips CoralCare LED lighting system, I am also a fanatic reefer with approx. 10 years of experience. In this thread, I want to share my aquatic experience from start to present, as well as the plans I have for my tank in the future!

In the past years, I only blogged on a Dutch marine aquarium forum (zeewaterforum.info). I will summarize my aquarium journals in a few upcoming posts.

It all started in 2007 when I was only 17 years old.
After some years of experience with freshwater aquaria I decided to take my aquatic hobby to a new level: A 60 Liters marinewater nano (financed by newspaper rounds) became the new challenge!

I had the nano tank for about 2 years. It was lots of fun and I learned a lot about the hobby. The ecosystem of a nano tank is very vulnerable and the slightest mistake results in an imbalanced system. This tank taught me to be patient and to always overthink before making changes to the system! Being this enthusiastic about the hobby, it didn't take long before the entire tank was packed with corals.

2009... time for an upgrade.
At that time I was living in my parents’ attic, so expanding was a challenge.
Not only space, but also weight was a problem.
After weeks of nagging and complaining I persuaded my parents to allow me to upgrade my tank.
With a steel beam construction bolted to the walls we were able to place a 180gallon tank in my bedroom. The aquarium was partly hanging from the wall to spread the weight over the floor and walls. The construction was EXACTLY located above my parents’ bedroom... guess how good they slept the night after I filled up the tank.

Looking back on this (7 years ago) I still can’t believe they agreed to this J.

After three years, I moved out of the house and found my own place.
This was a great excuse to upgrade to a new tank!
A small sneak peak:

In the upcoming days, I will share a detailed build of this tank (which is still my current tank)!

You should buy your parents dinner!

 

[revhtree]

Some more recent pictures of the tank (November Last year)

And (on popular request) a (smartphone)shot of the tank without its top covers (so the Coralcare fixtures are visible)

In the past months I was (and currently still am) busy construction a aquarium room in the garage.
The filtration system (currently under the aquarium) will move to the garage.
I am also adding a 220x75x40 frag tank to the system.
I will share some details and pictures in the upcoming weeks .

Very beautiful!

 

[Preme]

Stunning reef

 

[Luc Vogels]

Time for a new update

The tank is doing great but I had to minimize the maintenance because I am very busy with some home reconstructions. We decided to reconstruct the garage (which was previously used to just store junk) to form a separate hobby room (woodworking and electronics) but more importantly to also expand my water volume J! In short.. building my ideal mancave.

In the first pages of this thread you can read how I integrated all filtration equipment in the cabinets around my aquarium. Space-wise it is very efficient but it also had some practical limitations. Mainly because I had to use the kitchen to clean aquarium stuff like the skimmer.

It was not really appreciated that I cleaned the skimmer on the same counter that we use to prepare our food (Note that I work a bit messy… and cleaning is also not one of my strongest points).

So eventually we thought about the idea to move the filtration equipment of the tank to our garage. But there is one major problem…. The house is built on sand (cement floor) and there is no easy way to connect the main tank with a system in the garage...

So how to solve this?

Well the answer is quite simple… with drastic measures .

(the picture is mirrored)

We have created a track between the living room and the garage by removing 10meterx25cm of concrete floor. This track is used to place 4 50mm tubes to connect both systems.
I can hear you thinking… how could his girlfriend possibly say yes to this plan… well I prepared a very good story J.
This plan has 3 advantages. By placing an additional kitchen cabinet in the garage, I made a promise to never use the main kitchen to clean aquarium parts ever again.
All equipment around the aquarium will be removed. Not only reducing the noise in the living room, but also creating cabinet space to store the porcelain .
Unfortunately, this also meant that the floor in the living room had to be removed.
So, we also agreed to place a new tile floor in the living room (with integrated heating).

So here some impressions of the work we’ve done so far:

Part of the garage. The “to-be-removed” concrete is marked on the floor.

Top part of the floor in the living room removed.
Ready to saw!

And the result!

After removing the concrete, we also had to remove part of the sand bed under the track.

This was done to create additional space for the tubes (while reserving sufficient space for the floor heating and overall construction strength).
We first placed an isolation layer of approximately 10 centimes on top of the sand.
On top of this we placed 4x50mm tubes (1 inlet, 2 returns and 1 spare).
These pipes were packed with additional isolation (to prevent cross-talk with the floor heater).

We also added steel wiring to the track to connect the two floor parts again.

The part in the garage

And the final result (after pouring in the concrete)

To be continued!

 

[maroun.c]

Thats a load of changes.
Youll love having the filtration in the garage, can upgrade equipment or add frag tanks. Also maybe add a few more tanks. Still 4 50 mm tubes isnt that a bit overkill?

 

[reef_ranch]

Very nice! You'll be happy you went with 50 mm at least for the drains. I had 1.5" (40mm) drains and returns running 12 meters or so between my tank and sump room. After a couple of years the drains were bio fouled so much that they could not keep up with the return pump. Rather than reducing the flow, I dug them all up and replace with 2". THAT was a pain in the rear. I have found that 1.5" is plenty for the return. You can pump a lot of water through a 1.5" pipe, much more than I want running though my sump.