My Tank Build 55 Gal

FishNFrags · Sep 1, 2013

Tank & Stand in Place. Won't work on it tomorrow with Holiday. (family cook out) Stand doors not done yet. Won't get those until next week. Sump panels are drying. I re-silicone corners of tank. Looks like I'll be getting it wet on Monday! No later then Tuesday for sure. Plumbing won't take long at all. Maybe 1 hour & let dry over night. I still have to build my canopy or what ever decide to do with Lights.

schooleyosis · Sep 1, 2013

Lookin good.

FishNFrags · Sep 4, 2013

Well I changed my mind on a few things.. or should I say decided to spend more money..lol So now I have to wait until Friday UPS before I'll have everything I need to fire it up. So maybe I might get it wet by this week end. I have been taking pictures as I do things. I'll post them when I get more done. I did do some of the scaping tonight. I think the whole set up is coming along well. Should be pretty sweet when I'm done with it. When it's completely done I will post a Video Tour link for those interested in it. :smile:

FishNFrags · Sep 6, 2013

Canopy built today and painted. Also started washing some of the sand. Still have to mount all the electronic's & dosing pumps ATO pump.

FishNFrags · Sep 10, 2013

Well It's not near done, but it's wet! :bigsmile: Still have to get all things going controller wise. Still have to put doors on cabinet and just some over all tweaking..Here's a couple pictures I haven't posted yet. Tank still cloudy just started it about 1 hr ago. A couple of the canopy as built it also.

FishNFrags · Oct 7, 2013

Ok thought I would give an update. I had to change a few things. I went to a 30L for a sump, because I needed the extra water volume because the pumps I'm using were heating up the water a little bit. Ah Mag pumps got to love it .....lol So about 1 week after I started this tank I began to see an unusual amount of algae growth for a new tank. Ten days into it I knew I had a problem because I had Hair algae growing at an alarming rate. Didn't make sense, I knew I had not added enough food to the tank for this to be happening. I thought maybe it was because I had started the Bio pellets and sometimes you will get algae bloom from this in new tanks. Test were showing 0.0 ammonia PH 8.1 Nitrites .0 Nitrates .05 and I was only running lights for 8 hours a day. So where was this algae coming from? Checked levels a week later and results were .0 ammonia ph 8.0 nitrites .o nitrates .05 alk 13 cal 480 mag 1280 salinity 1.024 All levels great! Because the tank was so new and I knew what I had put into it as far as nutriuents I didn't even check phosphates thinking this would not be a problem yet. WRONG! Algae kept coming and growing fast, to the point I knew if I didn't figure it out soon I would have a real problem getting rid of it as it was quickly taking over the tank. I began to suspect that my test results were bad so I took some of my water a few days later and had it tested at Emerald Bay. Ammonia .0 Nitrites .0 ph 8.0 Nitrates .05 Alk 18 Cal 390 is what they tested. So now I'm getting desperate because although Alk had risen and cal dropped a bit levels were pretty close to what I was getting with my test kits. So I go home and decide to check phosphates and BAMM! Level was .2 on Hana Checker. I was like shocked. First off where did all this come from? Second how could I fix it quickly? So next day I get my hands on some GFO (Thanks Scott) and start a reactor. 24 hours later I checked Phos again it was down to .08, I just checked it again after running GFO for 3 days and levels are down to .03 So where did it come from, well I used 5 pieces of rock ( about 30 lbs)that were used before then dried for 7 months. Apparently I didn't get it clean enough because that's where the phosphates came from. Any way back on track now. Saturday my turbo aquatics L3 (ATS) arrived finally. I had to build a acrylic rack to hold it. So it is now done and I will be adding it today. Cleaner crew are catching up with algae and growth has slowed way down. Still a few spot I'm going to take off by hand. But over all tank is starting to look good again. :bigsmile: All Corals & fish look good and happy. I will post some pictures soon.

bknapp · Oct 7, 2013

I'm interested in seeing how much algae the the L3 grows, wonder how it will stack up against old school CFL bulbs.

FishNFrags · Oct 7, 2013

bknapp said:
I'm interested in seeing how much algae the the L3 grows, wonder how it will stack up against old school CFL bulbs.

I'll give it some time and post a picture of the screen before I clean it for you to look at. Won't be for at least a month take about that for scrubber to have full growth.

JOKER · Oct 8, 2013

Looking good. Hope you get the algae problem worked out. I just added a algae scrubber to my 40. Phosphate is out the roof for some reason. Running eko-bak and nitrate is like 1-2 but the phosphate is like .6

FishNFrags · Oct 19, 2013

bknapp said:
I'm interested in seeing how much algae the the L3 grows, wonder how it will stack up against old school CFL bulbs.

Brandon here a few pictures of screen after first 10 days of running L3 scrubber

bknapp · Oct 19, 2013

That's some nasty looking algae.

pickupman66 · Oct 19, 2013

Yum! Hope mine looks like that in a few days. Are you running it 18 on and 6 off?

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I747 using Tapatalk

FishNFrags · Oct 19, 2013

Nope. I only ran it for 10 hours a day because it was new. Mine has LED lighting.. I kicked it up to 12hours a day now since I have growth. I run the lights opposite from the tank lights. So my scrubber lights come on when tank lights go off. That help with PH swings.