5/9/2016 - Day 1 - The Purchase
As I've been wanting a reef tank for over 20 years, I can't really call this an impulse buy, but really - it kind of was. I'd had one of those days where I needed a pick-me-up and I told my wife (for what must have been the hundredth time) that I would love to have a saltwater tank. And for the first time, she didn't say, "Not yet". Instead, I got silence. Silence that eventually because, "I can't think of a reason why not".
Loaded the baby in the SUV and drove to the LFS (which we'd gone to several times before, of course). On a previous visit, we'd priced out a sample system, so we weren't starting from total scratch on this visit. But it turns out we were, because what we ended up with (spoiler: Red Sea Reefer 525XL) was not a setup we'd ever looked at specifically.
My memory is spotty about the sales process (I was in a gleeful haze, mostly), but I recall that the tank was sold as an "all-in-one" solution - I wouldn't have to piece anything together and the white cabinets will match our kitchen/great room perfectly once we put a few spare handles on the doors. Great - sold! The sales discussion moved on to lights, but at this point, our 18mo child had tired of looking at fish and was starting to pull the walls down. They had to order the tank anyways, so we could buy the rest of the stuff when we picked it up...
5/13/2016 - Day 5 (AM) - Mor Stuff
Tank arrived! We move some furniture around to make room for the tank and then drive the SUV out to the LFS to pick it up. Again - gleeful haze. Rocks; yes - we want the rocks now. Sand - yes; we'll need that. Sump pump. Heater. Power heads. (Wait - I thought this was an all-in-one?!?) We talk skimmer. Skimmer later. We talk lights. We talk more about lights. LEDs; yes (because - technology!) We settle on the Radions because, with them, we "can have whatever we want in the tank, and it'll grow". Lovely. Let's do that. XR15's or 30's? Ugh. Baby is getting restless... Decide on 2 XR15's on the theory that they might be enough to cover the tank if spread apart wide enough (can't do that with the 30), but we can add a 3rd if not. Not in stock, so we order them and the tank-mount kits. Baby is pulling apart store displays. We grab a bucket of salt, a small mixing pump, and a test kit and load it all up into the car. Barely fits (the salt bucket is at my wife's feet).
On the drive home, we talk about how what we just spent (not counting the tank - which was multiples more expensive) was 50% of our estimated set-up budget for this tank, and we don't even have anything to put in it yet...
(Side note - the LFS folks had a hard time understanding that we were starting from scratch, never having had a saltwater tank before, and were buying this large of a system. They kept expecting us to know things we didn't (but likely should have) known. This should have set off warning bells for us, but - again - gleeful haze. And baby tearing up the store - that didn't help...)
5/13/2016 - Day 5 (PM) - Assembly
Get the car load home and unpack it all. The boxes for the tank stand are barely out of the car before I'm cutting them open to get at the assembly instructions and pieces. The stand is more sturdy than Ikea furniture, of course, but assembly is much the same in practice. We get it all together and slide it into place.
Lovely! So clean. So white. So empty.
But we've got a birthday party to get to, so this will have to do for now. We'll fill it tomorrow.
5/14/2016 - Day 6 - It Begins
As soon as the baby is fed and settled into playing, I start filling 32gal garbage cans with tap water (okay - honesty: before she's fed, I start filling. Priorities...). Grab the hydrometer and the scale and start mixing salt. Meanwhile, the sand is poured into the tank (oops - rocks first, then sand around them, I know now) and the wife - who was a civil engineer - starts to build retaining-wall quality piles our of our live rock. I've "only" got two 32gal garbage cans that hold water and some quick napkin math confirms that they won't hold the full 136gal that the tank will need, so I start to pump in water into the tank. Huh. Sediment. A LOT of sediment. That made it hard for the wife to finish her stacks. Likely should have been more patient, but I've got a bachelor party to get to at noon (no really - I'm not a party animal; it was just one of those "perfect storm" weekends of people celebrating stuff), so need to get this done! We push through and end up with a cloudy mess both above and below in the sump.
Oh well. It'll settle out, right?
5/18/2016 - Day 10 - It's Settled. Mostly.
Geeze that took a while. And everything is covered in silt. :-\ But hey - we have rocks and sand in a tank of glass!
Now to just finish cycling the tank so we can add some fish. Should just be a day or two now, right...?
6/2/2016 - Day 25 - It Begins (Again)
The past few weeks have been a rollercoaster. At this point, I've (finally) spent enough time doing research to understand just how much research I've not yet done. But we're making progress. A few notables:
- The LFS didn't order the lights on time (despite having them pre-paid), and the stands are backordered anyways. But that's okay, because at this point I've found out that the stands only work for 20" deep tanks (525XL is 24" deep). Likely would have been okay, but my wife and I are super OCD about symmetry, so that may have been an issue. Doesn't matter anyways; by now I've found BRS. So I order 3 XR15's and the hanger kits. Easy to install and look great in the room (we have other hanging lights, so they sort of match). Someday, I'll use left over cabinet parts from our kitchen remodel to build a hood and install some T5's alongside the LEDs. But for now; we've got light. Fiddled with the programming to get something that I think will work, but I'm tired of guessing. Ordered a Seneye sensor the other day for both par sensor and "piece of mind" monitoring.
- Turns out, our tap water is on the high end of the chloramines scale. Joy. That meant we had a tank full of practically toxic water. I look into chemical treatments, but adding chemicals to remove chemicals (while potentially valid science) just seems wrong when the goal is to get to a "natural" environment. Instead, I order the RO/DI kit from BRS. Initially, I figure 75gal/day is fine, so not the "water saver" kit. Somehow, I didn't grok that the "water saver" means "saving water" (important here in drought-prone CA). I order the add-on. Meanwhile, a trip to the local feed store results in two 55gal drums. Didn't know they were used (for food-grade stuff), but the price was nice. One was for wine (52 wineries in town; no surprise there); the other for soy sauce concentrate. Lovely; the soy sauce reeks, but it's just the waste water anyways. Wine barrel cleans out nicely with some beer/wine cleaner, so at least the RODI will be fine. Started to fill the tank days ago, transferring water into the garbage cans, 5gal buckets, etc. to get up to the desired volume. Takes a few days as I can't store the 4x waste water (eventully 2x with the extension) all at once. Brew stuff saves the day again; I have a spare March pump to make pulling out the waste water easier. Baby gets an inflatable pool and the lawn gets some much needed extra water; nothing wasted.
- Skimmer added. Not sure why the LFS thought it was optional... (To be fair; they said it was optional to start. True, I guess. But also not.) I order that from them (my last piece of gear I'll get from them, most likely) and order some biomedia from BRS to put in the sump just to be sure.
- Added handles to the doors. After installing 40+ of the things, three doors were easy. Removed the "easy open" hardware from the stand and replaced with magnetic child locks. Last thing we need is the baby getting into the test kit, etc...
- The return port was blowing all the sand to the back of the tank. I pick up some loc-line and mod the port using a t-junction and some aquarium sealant. Return water now breaks more surface tension, doesn't blow the sand around, and is slightly quieter (not that it was all that loud to begin with). I dial in the drain again - that's getting easier, at least.
- Aquascaping. So turns out that just piling up rocks isn't going to result in the best outcome when it comes to a stunning presentation. I'll not claim to be an artist, but I understand the mechanics that can help create visually appealing displays. Negative space. Rule of thirds. Use of depth. Once the RO/DI water is ready, I drain the tank and clean out all the sediment as best I can. Using scotch tape, I section off the tank and re-pile the rocks. A tall arch, a low shelf, a cave for shy critters, a tall pile of fiji rock in the back for contrast (and potentially some mangroves in the future?). Carefully, I fill the tank. This time I use the RO/DI water and Coral Pro salt. I begin the Red Sea Maturation Pro (RSMP) process (whoops - forgot to order an dKH tester; BRS is getting a lot of my money lately...).
Now, finally, we're actually starting.
6/7/2016 - Day 30 - Growing Brown Algae For Fun and Profit
Day 5 of the RSMP. Brown algae has spread throughout most of the sand. The Fiji rock (dubbed "Gecko Pinnacle") is almost entirely covered, the arch ("The Tunnel of Love") and shelf ("Start Destroyer Point") both have some on top. But my numbers are looking good (79F, 1.025, 8.9dKH, 7.9pH, 0ppm NO2, 15ppm NO3, 0.5ppm NH3), so I'm not worried (okay - screaming inside that I need to clean it, but not going to...).
There. All caught up. :-)
As I've been wanting a reef tank for over 20 years, I can't really call this an impulse buy, but really - it kind of was. I'd had one of those days where I needed a pick-me-up and I told my wife (for what must have been the hundredth time) that I would love to have a saltwater tank. And for the first time, she didn't say, "Not yet". Instead, I got silence. Silence that eventually because, "I can't think of a reason why not".
Loaded the baby in the SUV and drove to the LFS (which we'd gone to several times before, of course). On a previous visit, we'd priced out a sample system, so we weren't starting from total scratch on this visit. But it turns out we were, because what we ended up with (spoiler: Red Sea Reefer 525XL) was not a setup we'd ever looked at specifically.
My memory is spotty about the sales process (I was in a gleeful haze, mostly), but I recall that the tank was sold as an "all-in-one" solution - I wouldn't have to piece anything together and the white cabinets will match our kitchen/great room perfectly once we put a few spare handles on the doors. Great - sold! The sales discussion moved on to lights, but at this point, our 18mo child had tired of looking at fish and was starting to pull the walls down. They had to order the tank anyways, so we could buy the rest of the stuff when we picked it up...
5/13/2016 - Day 5 (AM) - Mor Stuff
Tank arrived! We move some furniture around to make room for the tank and then drive the SUV out to the LFS to pick it up. Again - gleeful haze. Rocks; yes - we want the rocks now. Sand - yes; we'll need that. Sump pump. Heater. Power heads. (Wait - I thought this was an all-in-one?!?) We talk skimmer. Skimmer later. We talk lights. We talk more about lights. LEDs; yes (because - technology!) We settle on the Radions because, with them, we "can have whatever we want in the tank, and it'll grow". Lovely. Let's do that. XR15's or 30's? Ugh. Baby is getting restless... Decide on 2 XR15's on the theory that they might be enough to cover the tank if spread apart wide enough (can't do that with the 30), but we can add a 3rd if not. Not in stock, so we order them and the tank-mount kits. Baby is pulling apart store displays. We grab a bucket of salt, a small mixing pump, and a test kit and load it all up into the car. Barely fits (the salt bucket is at my wife's feet).
On the drive home, we talk about how what we just spent (not counting the tank - which was multiples more expensive) was 50% of our estimated set-up budget for this tank, and we don't even have anything to put in it yet...
(Side note - the LFS folks had a hard time understanding that we were starting from scratch, never having had a saltwater tank before, and were buying this large of a system. They kept expecting us to know things we didn't (but likely should have) known. This should have set off warning bells for us, but - again - gleeful haze. And baby tearing up the store - that didn't help...)
5/13/2016 - Day 5 (PM) - Assembly
Get the car load home and unpack it all. The boxes for the tank stand are barely out of the car before I'm cutting them open to get at the assembly instructions and pieces. The stand is more sturdy than Ikea furniture, of course, but assembly is much the same in practice. We get it all together and slide it into place.
Lovely! So clean. So white. So empty.
But we've got a birthday party to get to, so this will have to do for now. We'll fill it tomorrow.
5/14/2016 - Day 6 - It Begins
As soon as the baby is fed and settled into playing, I start filling 32gal garbage cans with tap water (okay - honesty: before she's fed, I start filling. Priorities...). Grab the hydrometer and the scale and start mixing salt. Meanwhile, the sand is poured into the tank (oops - rocks first, then sand around them, I know now) and the wife - who was a civil engineer - starts to build retaining-wall quality piles our of our live rock. I've "only" got two 32gal garbage cans that hold water and some quick napkin math confirms that they won't hold the full 136gal that the tank will need, so I start to pump in water into the tank. Huh. Sediment. A LOT of sediment. That made it hard for the wife to finish her stacks. Likely should have been more patient, but I've got a bachelor party to get to at noon (no really - I'm not a party animal; it was just one of those "perfect storm" weekends of people celebrating stuff), so need to get this done! We push through and end up with a cloudy mess both above and below in the sump.
Oh well. It'll settle out, right?
5/18/2016 - Day 10 - It's Settled. Mostly.
Geeze that took a while. And everything is covered in silt. :-\ But hey - we have rocks and sand in a tank of glass!
Now to just finish cycling the tank so we can add some fish. Should just be a day or two now, right...?
6/2/2016 - Day 25 - It Begins (Again)
The past few weeks have been a rollercoaster. At this point, I've (finally) spent enough time doing research to understand just how much research I've not yet done. But we're making progress. A few notables:
- The LFS didn't order the lights on time (despite having them pre-paid), and the stands are backordered anyways. But that's okay, because at this point I've found out that the stands only work for 20" deep tanks (525XL is 24" deep). Likely would have been okay, but my wife and I are super OCD about symmetry, so that may have been an issue. Doesn't matter anyways; by now I've found BRS. So I order 3 XR15's and the hanger kits. Easy to install and look great in the room (we have other hanging lights, so they sort of match). Someday, I'll use left over cabinet parts from our kitchen remodel to build a hood and install some T5's alongside the LEDs. But for now; we've got light. Fiddled with the programming to get something that I think will work, but I'm tired of guessing. Ordered a Seneye sensor the other day for both par sensor and "piece of mind" monitoring.
- Turns out, our tap water is on the high end of the chloramines scale. Joy. That meant we had a tank full of practically toxic water. I look into chemical treatments, but adding chemicals to remove chemicals (while potentially valid science) just seems wrong when the goal is to get to a "natural" environment. Instead, I order the RO/DI kit from BRS. Initially, I figure 75gal/day is fine, so not the "water saver" kit. Somehow, I didn't grok that the "water saver" means "saving water" (important here in drought-prone CA). I order the add-on. Meanwhile, a trip to the local feed store results in two 55gal drums. Didn't know they were used (for food-grade stuff), but the price was nice. One was for wine (52 wineries in town; no surprise there); the other for soy sauce concentrate. Lovely; the soy sauce reeks, but it's just the waste water anyways. Wine barrel cleans out nicely with some beer/wine cleaner, so at least the RODI will be fine. Started to fill the tank days ago, transferring water into the garbage cans, 5gal buckets, etc. to get up to the desired volume. Takes a few days as I can't store the 4x waste water (eventully 2x with the extension) all at once. Brew stuff saves the day again; I have a spare March pump to make pulling out the waste water easier. Baby gets an inflatable pool and the lawn gets some much needed extra water; nothing wasted.
- Skimmer added. Not sure why the LFS thought it was optional... (To be fair; they said it was optional to start. True, I guess. But also not.) I order that from them (my last piece of gear I'll get from them, most likely) and order some biomedia from BRS to put in the sump just to be sure.
- Added handles to the doors. After installing 40+ of the things, three doors were easy. Removed the "easy open" hardware from the stand and replaced with magnetic child locks. Last thing we need is the baby getting into the test kit, etc...
- The return port was blowing all the sand to the back of the tank. I pick up some loc-line and mod the port using a t-junction and some aquarium sealant. Return water now breaks more surface tension, doesn't blow the sand around, and is slightly quieter (not that it was all that loud to begin with). I dial in the drain again - that's getting easier, at least.
- Aquascaping. So turns out that just piling up rocks isn't going to result in the best outcome when it comes to a stunning presentation. I'll not claim to be an artist, but I understand the mechanics that can help create visually appealing displays. Negative space. Rule of thirds. Use of depth. Once the RO/DI water is ready, I drain the tank and clean out all the sediment as best I can. Using scotch tape, I section off the tank and re-pile the rocks. A tall arch, a low shelf, a cave for shy critters, a tall pile of fiji rock in the back for contrast (and potentially some mangroves in the future?). Carefully, I fill the tank. This time I use the RO/DI water and Coral Pro salt. I begin the Red Sea Maturation Pro (RSMP) process (whoops - forgot to order an dKH tester; BRS is getting a lot of my money lately...).
Now, finally, we're actually starting.
6/7/2016 - Day 30 - Growing Brown Algae For Fun and Profit
Day 5 of the RSMP. Brown algae has spread throughout most of the sand. The Fiji rock (dubbed "Gecko Pinnacle") is almost entirely covered, the arch ("The Tunnel of Love") and shelf ("Start Destroyer Point") both have some on top. But my numbers are looking good (79F, 1.025, 8.9dKH, 7.9pH, 0ppm NO2, 15ppm NO3, 0.5ppm NH3), so I'm not worried (okay - screaming inside that I need to clean it, but not going to...).
There. All caught up. :-)
