DmitryB
Community Member
Everyone always rags on rock walls, but I think they can be awesome and yours is awesome!So, this has been a long time in the making. That said I don't necessarily know what I'll have for pictures but I'll post what I can find and update as we go. More pictures is my 2025 reef tank resolution.
The backstory:
(TL;DR If your primarily interested in my current tank)
So, *ahem* let's start way back when. In approximately 2015/2016... SIDE NOTE: I'm terrible with dates. You'll notice that becoming a trend, lots of "around this time" or "sometime last month" but I digress... AND WE CONTINUE: I had a 55g tank. I would call it a reef tank but that's a sore sore stretch of the imagination. I had a home made stand, that I built around a 40g breeder, that was so snug I couldn't even service it.
I got all of my information from my buddy, and though he genuinely meant well, he also had different priorities and goals than I did. Or at least than I do now. He had these awesome fish, and they were super healthy. I had never seen a saltwater tank so it blew my mind. He had a pair of clowns, a Starry blenny, some chromis, a FAT mandarin, and a few others that I don't really remember, but very few corals.
He mostly had a couple softy varieties, gsp, a couple mushrooms and some Kenya trees. Which I thought were the coolest thing ever. (For a 23ish year old I spent a surprisingly small amount of time online and was unaware of anything besides what I saw at petco and didn't even know what an Acro or Monti was)
I knew I loved the idea of growing corals, and I already had experience with freshwater so we got to building me my first tank. Looking back I laugh at the stuff we did...
We started by siliconing baffles into my 40g breeder, made from extruded acrylic from homedepot. I had it done right from a design stand point, I had the first chamber setup for filter socks, followed by a bubble trap, to a refugium, followed my one more bubble trap and the the return chamber. That being said, siliconing plexiglass baffles to glass doesn't go the best. Especially when the baffles aren't incredibly rigid.. Remember when I said I couldn't really get into it to work on it? That thing was the bane of my reefing existence. Baffles popping off left and right, trying to glue/epoxy it in place..
I had a small mag drive pump plumbed up and over and into the tank with a HOB overflow with a aqualifter pump hooked up so help pull a siphon after a power outage, and all in all water flow wise that worked ok. Most of my equipment was cheap crap from local fish stores, petco, petsmart, and 1 or 2 small mom and pop stores. Including my powerheads, heaters, lights, return pump, and all my live rock, which i bought a lot. At a premium price from my lfs.
My lighting was kind of humorous compared to what I have now.. I bought a fluval reef light. It was a led strip light that you adjusted by touching the button and the longer you held it the more it would either dim or brighten (i can't remember which way) and if you tapped the bottom it would go on/blue/off. It was a nice light as far as color went and I remember it looked great, but I could barely grow anything. I did grow some Kenya trees and gsp I got from my buddy, but nothing I would call good growth.
The funniest part comes now. I was trying to grow clumps of my buddys red bubble algae with a small CFL in a metal lamp shade like you'd put a heat lamp in for your chicken copp or something. SIDE NOTE: I am glad R2R saves your post if you navigate away from the page your on by accident as I just about gave myself a heart attack right now trying to google and make sure it was in fact red bubble algae and it brought me to a R2R post and away from this... LETS CONTINUE: Lucky for me, my lights couldn't grow anything so I did not have a red bubble algae infestation.
I wasn't sure what I was doing, but conveniently I also I didn't know how expensive reefing could be... because my mentor was the master of cheap, but not a good reefer by any means. I say this with love, as he is still one of my best friends, but by golly, the only thing he could grow was GHA and briopsis.
Now, my experience was a nightmare. I didn't understand why everything failed and I never figured it out. I bought whatever fish looked cool at petco. I didn't quarantine, I didn't look to even see if the fish was behaving normally. I just saw a kole tang and bought it and it never went well. Now that being said, it wasn't like I went through many, many fish. I just went through enough to get discouraged and shut down my tank the first chance I got, because "i can't keep anything alive"
My wife and I decided it was time to move, and the house we were moving to didn't want a fish tank so i told my buddy I had to shut my tank down, but I needed a place to send my last few surviving livestock, a coral banded shrimp, a pair of clownfish, and a chromis. He took them eagerly, and I ripped everything out of my tank and stuffed all of my live rock into his 55g tank.
Here's the only picture I can find of my old tank, which as on right now I kind of miss since it was such a quick tank due to all the live sand and live rock, my current tanks giving me issues with the lack of diversity.
Fast forward about 8 years, he's got like 130lbs of live rock in a 55g tank. It's just a pile, with a super deep sand bad, and a MASSIVE GHA/briopsis problem. Like, the clownfish and chromis had tunnels in the gha and briopsis that they swam through, there was no open water. His wife would put in a cube of frozen food for the fish everyday, as well as some pellets here and there and they did some water changes, but they weren't about to buy a protein skimmer and there was "no way you can keep an reef tank without a skimmer, or your going to have algae" so he's about had it and wants to shut his tank down. Problem is, he has a couple fish that need a home. ;) The coral banded made it like 4 years after i gave it t him, or something crazy like that. The chromis and 2 clowns were still going strong.
The now:
Episode 1: The Display Tank
These two look familiar?
The somewhat finished product.
So by this time, he said he wanted to shut his tank down and i needed to get a tank going. I had been regretting shutting my tank down the last few years whenever I went to visit. I just loved sitting by his tank and watching my old clowns bobbing and weaving through the GHA and seeing all the brittle stars, amphipods and copious amounts of other life crawling around.
My wife and I talked and it was time to get my fish back. Little did we know our timing was impeccable, because unbeknownst to us, she was pregnant and my long journey was going to become primarily a solo one lol. We went to the LFS and bought a 120g marineland tank. I was going to buy the stand as the had a deal for the combo but I thought I could build a nicer one. I got the tank home and started designing. I knew this time I wanted to do everything right. None of the problems from last time. I'm 6'3" so I did not want to crawl around on my hands and knees to clean a sump, I didn't want rocks that prevented me from cleaning my glass, I didn't want an overflow that might not siphon.
So i planned.
From paper plans to a pain in my backside:
So my build gets it's name, because even though I meant well, I didn't do it well. This has been a massive learning experience and I still have a lot to learn, Im just glad i have R2R now. Let's dive into the basics.
Overflow:
I drilled my tank myself, two 1" holes in the back for my return lines. 3 1" holes in the left side for my overflow. This is probably... 70% of my regrets. I wish I hadn't bought a marineland. All in all, there's nothing wrong with my current tanks, but I wish I had bought a reef ready tank, and if not, at the very least, done a different layout. I started bouncing around and everyone online, said I needed a bean animal overflow. I also found a lot of people praising coast to coast overflows. So I basically copy and pasted BeanAnimals designs from his web page.
I got my design all drawn up and ordered hole saws and bulkheads. I got a local glass shop to cut me some glass. I researched how much water I would need to flow through my system per hour and in turn, how much water would flow over my wier. All in all, the math side came out pretty decent and my water line is 100% where i planned on it. There were other problems though.. it wasn't until all three of my overflow holes were done that I realized I had quite the learning curve and i was pushing a little hard on the drill while i drilled. I got it all drilled and noticed some chipping on the inside of the tank as i was drilling outside in. So i flocked to google and found people saying i could put the bulkhead either way as long as my gasket was one the flange side and it would seal if the chip wasnt terribly big and structural (which it wasnt i just didnt trust it to seal). So thats what i did. The next problem was my dimensions for my overflow were off somehow in relation to where my drain pipes entered the tank and my final outcome was noisy.. like really noisy.. and with my bulk heads sticking way into the overflow, I also made the brilliant decision to glue all my fitting into place... so no adjusting... my water flows and falls roughly 2.5-3" and my overflow is a perfect L shape so water flows smoothly 50% of the time and splashes 50% of the time. It's not great. It works, but it's really not ideal. *UPDATE* THIS HAS SINCE BEEN MOSTLY ADDRESSED, PROGRESS PICTURES INBOUND SOON
Backdrop:
I then decided that this time I wanted something on the back to hide all the cords and plumbing because last time I had to see that. So I went and bought a roll of the plastic backing with black on one side and blue on the other. I was going to tape it but someone on a Facebook group said to use Vaseline and it makes it look deeper and sticks better so that what I did. I don't know if it was a temperatur thing, idk if it was just someone played me for a fool, but it only looked good for a week before it started bubbling crazy bad. Here's a good picture that shows all the bubbling. I've contemplated pulling it off the back, as I already did the left side, but there's no real going back, and I hate seeing plumbing and cords more than bubbling...
Returns nozzles:
My returns are actually ok, I bought some of the VCA random flow generator tips and really like them. My only gripe is that there isn't 1" loc line that can slip right into my return bulkheads (which somehow in managed to not glue, so there's 1 win i suppose) so i have some white pvc for now. Some day I may figure something else out. You can see them well in the above picture as well.
Powerheads:
I currently have 2 Jebao SDW-16, 1 mp-40 and a small sicce powerhead in the display. The sicce is primarily used for surface agitation, probably unnecessary but I had it and it don't draw much for power so why not.
END OF EPISODE ONE.
I might as well drop a sneak peak.... its not done yet and needs a lot more work, and my work stations a mess so ignore that as i'm doing some spring cleaning/reno work down stairs... but this was my plumbing project today...
