My Custom Waterbox 90.3 SPS tank

Sidsreef

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Hello and welcome to my custom water box 90.3. And what I mean by custom is a custom sump, and I ripped out all of the plumbing and put my own plumbing into the system.

check out my youtube channel as well to see video footage:
YOUTUBE CHANNEL

This is very long and I’m sorry about the long paragraphs with my long explanations of things. I feel as though if I’m giving you something on how to see what I’m looking at and I’m putting you into my shoes…I promise if you just read through it and skim through it, there’s some good stuff in here I pinky promise.


A little background on myself I am 32 years old today’s my birthday (January 9th) and I’ve been reefing since 2012. My first reef tank was a 90 gallon display tank with a 20 gallon sump underneath for a total of 100 gallons. After some time I felt it was hard to keep up with this tank and its needs and water changes so I downgraded to a JBJ 40 gallon tank all in one. I ended up tearing down the JBJ 40 and giving it to my military friend because I was being deployed and he took it over and he still has it today and it has evolved tremendously. I then went and moved to Texas and didn’t have an aquarium for a while and after leaving the military. I found myself wanting to start up again in the hobby. So I ended up starting small with a nano tank and purchased a water box 15, Peninsula. When I go back and think about it, I should have got the 35 water box with the sump. That way I have a sump nano tank because they discontinued the water box 35. After some time and some years later, I ended up getting married and having a child and moving into a bigger house and my wife explained to me why don’t you get a bigger tank. And I thought I would never hear her say that, so I start doing some research and was dead set on getting a Waterbox 60. Well, my wife turnaround I said no how about you get some a little bit bigger so we both can enjoy it. I also was surprised to hear her say that and I did as she told me to, and had no problem researching bigger tanks. And as you can tell, she gave me an inch and I took a mile and I say that in the most loving way possible.
Some days later, ended up compromising on getting a Waterbox 90.3 marine X. And I got it on blue Friday so it was on sale.


And it began







Why a water box?
This is a great question and many people ask me why is it that I’m gonna get a Waterbox well, there were only three options to which I was secluded to the first being a red sea. Red sea to me is a horrible aquarium build just the aquarium not their products if that makes any sense and the reason why I say this is because that time and time again I see people that have seem breakage, and they flood out their house, so Red Sea was off the table. The next company that I was looking at for an aquarium was CADE. I was looking at the CADE 600 S2, but the price point at which they were trying to sell their aquarium was a little too much for me. The last option on the table was water box, so CADE was off the table. The water box aquariums were a lot more affordable and for what you’re getting on the display tank quality wise is unmatched on the market I still think cade aquariums is a very good company, and I can see myself buying one of those aquariums down the road as a second additional aquarium.

What I don’t like about water box:
So some of the things that I really don’t like about water box is there Sumps and plumbing.

The plumbing:

The water box plumbing is all metric and the reason why water box does this is because metric plumbing is cheaper. They’re saving a buck on the metric plumbing instead of using standard plumbing. It also gets manufactured in another country and unlike America, the rest of the world uses metric and not standard. Or at least most of the rest of the world, some others use different measurements. If water box put some time and money into it and they included the specific plumbing kits to the perspective country it would make putting together water box a lot easier on a custom ability level instead of going onto the website and ordering a custom water box and paying the extra money for them to not include plumbing or drilling the tank or anything.



The sump:

The standard marine X sump that they provide, for the tank are horrible. And the reason why I say this is because it’s a open top sump that can corrode any metal hindges on cabinet and have salt stains from water movement. Also you can put anything above the sump because it might fall in or something might fall in. Water box does offer a DX sump which is a better sump however, it still is horrible because there’s no place to add a fuge if you like. Unless you buy the REEF 100 model DX then it’s not worth it..so you’re paying extra money and just have a close top and a little auto top off reservoir. I myself am a fan of having a auto top off reservoir separate from the sump. A lot of people like having it in theirs in the sump or on top of their sump. I do not like this. I like having container that I can pull out that is very large and just fill it up with a tunez in it. For personal preference I also hate filter socks. I have a strong hatred for these filter socks I only like filter, Pads . The reason why I like filter pads is because it requires you to stick your head into the sump. And look at everything that’s in the sump. You’re also looking at the filter pad to see what’s in the filter pad just as you were if you were going to take a dump to make sure you have no blood in it same concept. Ever since there’s been this huge technology in the reefing community. fleece rollers, or whatever they’re called and I’m not a big fan of those and it would seem like those things stink. So why not put a little more attention to your tank instead of trying to forget about it and looking around and make sure you’re monitoring your aquarium.



So after doing some research online, I finally found Fiji cubes acrylic sumps and I ended up purchasing one



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This sump is great because it had different Chambers. It had the filter padding compartment that I wanted. It had enough room for a protein skimmer. It also has a little bit more room next to it so if I need to add anything, I can put an additional pump in there to have some sort of reactor or whatever and then has another chamber for a refugium or whatever you want and then it has the return pump chamber.


So now that we covered the sump and when I put the tank, let’s go over the plumbing, and then we’ll go over all of the stuff that I ended up buying for the tank.



Plumbing:
So just like every other build, you gotta have plumbing with your tank in order to start it up and water and I’m sure there’s no leakage . Well, this was no surprise because water box includes plumbing however, it’s metric as mentioned above. So I question myself and said, how am I going to fix this simple fix and very affordable if you go on bulk reef supply, they have a metric to standard coupler that you can put onto the metric plumbing and all you have to do is take a PVC pipe cutter cut the plumbing that the aquarium comes with put on the couplers and bam. You just have converted all of your plumbing over to standard so everything below the display glass is custom plumbing.

The way the overflow is constructed in these aquariums in such a way you’re going to need a PVC gate valve, not a ball valve. Let me just make that very clear a ball valve is for turning on and off things whereas a gate valve is used for fine-tuning and tweaking that you’re going to need a gate valve in order to find tune and tweak the water level in your overflow box. And it makes the overflow SILENT.



What I ordered for plumbing:
So you’re gonna need some 1 inch piping and 3/4 piping some 90° elbows and some 45° elbows. Don’t forget about your gate valve and do not forget about your metric to standard couplers.

here is a picture of the finished plumbing:
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i got some 45s from Home Depot for cheap and didn't match it but that's ok. i got some precipitation on my one-way valve. the white stuff around the pipe was to seal a small drip coming from the return pump bulkhead on the sump.

the plumbing is angled for drainage purposes

The list of things for my tank :

Controller: Neptune Apex, A3 pro with trident

Heater: BRS titanium 300 W

Return pump: Neptune COR15

ATO: Tunze

Skimmer: Bubble magus curve 7 elite (over kill)

Powerheads: (2) MP40 Ecotech

Lighting: (2) AI Prime 16HD (1) hydra 32 mounted on a T5 fixture two B+ and two actinic blue

Rocks: Aqua Rocks


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The goal of this tank is: SPS









With that being said let’s get started with the pictures.


The first thing i did was get the tank set up starting with the cabinet. next thing i did was put the display up on the stand and then install the sump and start the journey of putting in the plumbing. i hard-plumbed in my return pump in the sump. ( i later re-did the plumbing for maint. purposes.)

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After i did this i went ahead and put in the aqua rocks and then dumped 40 LBS of fiji pink into the tank. i then setup my controller cabinet and then installed MP40's and controller into cabinet. i then installed return pump and started up the tank and let it run and started my 48 hour leak test on all my custom plumbing i put together. this was on November 16th 2022



there was a small drop producing on the return pump bulkhead on the sump. i got my heater installed and ran just return pump heater for the 48 hours.
After sealing everything up I transferred a media bag and rock with nothing on it from my 15g to get the tank cycled and ready to receive fish



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After some time i decided to upgrade my lighting to T5 and LED hybrid for the SPS corals.

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I added my fish and corals no problem. The next step in this process i had to do is to make sure my chemistry is all good. some of yall have seen me post in the chemistry by randy area and I've asked a couple things and they have been answered and remedied by randy himself about CA, ALK, MG and some ICP testing. i had a precipitation problem and it was due to a PH booster i was putting into the tank to normalize my PH. i have since then not dosed that formula for PH boosting. i use a CO2 scrubber.


After doing all this i decided to start dosing tropic marin all for reef. i have a small WIFI dosing pump that i use for this and i mix the powder version up and dose with that. after some time the AFR started working and my CA and ALK were adjusted by the AFR. im still having to dose Mag. because ill see it start to drop and ill have to keep up. i dose red sea MAG powder mix.

after keeping a close eye on everything i noticed my nitrates were at 0 and i could not bring them up. so i went ahead and purchased sodium nitrate food grade and i started to dose the tank. my phosphates were staying very low between 0-0.03 mostly at 0. i ended up spiking my nitrate up and had to do a water change. but its under control now and i cant seem to lower nitrates in the tank. so i went ahead and installed a bio pellet reactor from BRS. if i for some reason end up having a issue with phosphate i will most likely start to carbon dose in the future. ill be using Elimi NP formula that tropic marin has.



As time went on after one month i started to notice coral growth by maintaining numbers. i have found if you maintain numbers at first and achieve stability then you will no longer worry about those numbers and from that point on can chase stability. in my case i am doing ICP testing here and there to ensure full stability and make sure things are happy.


here are some coral growth pictures after about 2/3 weeks:


*Zoa rock from previous tank*
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*Zoa rock from previous tank*
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*Zoa rock from previous tank*
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Cyphastrea looking good!!! polyps out!! loving the T5. i didn't get much polyp extension from this coral until the t5 came out.
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Looks like the All for reef dosing is doing what its suppose to do! i also in the beginning started to dose aquaforest life source for bacteria. and that seemed to help.

so after dosing my nitrates i noticed algae was growing and i had to up my clean up crew in the tank. i went ahead and purchased some snails from saltwateraquarium.com

After receiving the snailed i noticed the dreaded Vermited snails on the shells of the Mexican turbo snails.

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I ended up scraping all the snails clean of all the vermited snails and then i found on the center rock in my tank. but not the aqua rock structure. i believe they wont attached to the aquarock structure because of the material its made of but that's just speculation. as of today my tank is clean of vermited snails. after cleaning every inch of the rock and snails and everything and cross checking overflow box and plumbing. i have been vermited snail free for the last 2 weeks.


i will post coral growth on my tank as we go along. lemme know what you guys think, im gonna post on this thread for a while! and keep up with it. i applied for the coral battles spot and will post on here as well for results. Aqua rocks.jpg
 
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Sidsreef

Sidsreef

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UPDATE:

I came home from work and took a glance at my tank and noticed a explosion of Pods.


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Big Pods. and there everywhere. so ill be getting a wrasse here soon.


I ended up fraging a coral that I had RR Pink Cadillac

This is what a colony of this coral looks like

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I also did some ain't. on my tank and found some carb calcium sand. and the only way to fix this is removing it.
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This one had purple Coraline on it lol


I also turned the intensity on my lights down from a peak of 102% to 60% on the Aqua illumination light schedule for stuart Bertram. ( I hope I didn't butcher his name)

And that's about it! i have some things in the works for my youtube channel if anyone wants to watch that.


Im getting ready to slowly purchase aqua forest products for now on so more updates on that.
 
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Sidsreef

Sidsreef

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UPDATE time


So i was dosing tropic marin all for reef and i still am but i am not switching from TM products to Aquaforest. I've noticed wayyyyy more growth and stability with aquaforest than TM products. growth is going good. I'm going to post a picture of my birdsnest coral. i haven't had time to take much more pictures because I'm balancing my wife and baby and work but ill get some pictures on here.


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Sidsreef

Sidsreef

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Hello and thank you. so i have my pumps on a custom setting and it alternates between reef crest and pulse mode. i was reading the flow patterns they did research on flow for SPS and lighting at WWC and was very interesting but i made up the schedule myself and after 2 months on fine tuning i got it were i want it and have noticed allot of growth since then in combination to other things but all my SPS have really good flow.

its reef crest mixed with pulse mode and at night time i have it on lagoon.
 
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Sidsreef

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here is my post on flow for my tank

 

nickng

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great post, I am thinking of doing the same getting a water box 90 but putting in a triton or Fiji sump. By the way I looked at the Fiji 24 sump and the refugium area seems small. Afraid that if I put chaeto it will spill into the return pump area. Any opinion?
 
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Sidsreef

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great post, I am thinking of doing the same getting a water box 90 but putting in a triton or Fiji sump. By the way I looked at the Fiji 24 sump and the refugium area seems small. Afraid that if I put chaeto it will spill into the return pump area. Any opinion?
yeah so i had chaeto going into my pump and it was chewing up all the chaeto. so id be careful. Tunze makes a macro algae reactor you can buy if thats a option for you
 

nickng

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yeah so i had chaeto going into my pump and it was chewing up all the chaeto. so id be careful. Tunze makes a macro algae reactor you can buy if thats a option for you
Thanks for sharing, the Tunze is a good option. Any more pics of your plumbing to the sump. I’m trying to get ideas
 
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Sidsreef

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Update… it’s been a while but here’s update

Removed Bio Reactor because it was causing too much maintenance. And my tank was constantly low on nitrate which I was dosing also. Had to move corals around. Added a sailfin tang. Added emerald crabs but don’t see them. Started dosing kallwasser and all for reef. I also dose trace elements cause the all for reef don’t do it.

Here are pictures of everything
As of august 2023:

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