Peters new reef (170 + 50 gallon)

[peterj66]

Hi everybody, I have been active on this forum on and off for a while now and thought I might share my tank. Its my second tank, and was built at Akwarium Szczecin in Poland by a very good aquarium builder (I live just across the water in southern Sweden). The tank has been up and running for a about a year and a half. Its built with optiwhite glass and painted black on the back.
Some technical info:
Main tank is a 170 gallon (72x24x24 inches) and built with optiwhite glass.
The sump is 50 gallon ( 52x20x16) and a very simple design since I intially just had a return compartment and small space for the skimmer. The rest was one big refugium. I'm planning on rebuilding this sometime this year. I started using an DIY ATS a few weeks back and scaled down the refugium heavily then.
Light is a DIY fixture consisting of 12 spots of 30W each with an arduino to control lighting schedules.
Skimmer is a Bubble Magus Curve 5.
Return pump is a Jebao DCT4000 and cirkulation is handled by one Jebao CP-150 and a Tunze Stream 5.
I dose balling to keep parameters steady. (DIY doser)
This is what it looked like when It was just installed in september 2018.

This is when all fish rock and coral from my old tank moved in. As seen in the reflection of the small Christmas tree this was in December the same year

And this is what it looks like today. Not many corals survived a recent problem I had with the tank earlier this year. Fish and inverts where Ok though.

 

[peterj66]

This is my light fixture. Its based on 12 spots at 30w each. No lenses and hanging about 3 inches above the surface.
Each spot has four programmable channels :
ch1: Luxeon-M Royal blue 12W
ch2: 420nm+400nm (semileds)
ch3: blue 470nm+ cyan 490nm (cree + noname)
ch4: 2x cold white (cree)
The light schedule is handled by an arduino controller I built myself.

Housing is made with plywood ( I'm not a carpenter , I know )

 

[peterj66]

As I mentioned earlier I had some problems with my tank earlier this year due to not keeping up with my water measurements. As far as I can tell it all strated with phosfates rising wich stopped coral growth. This in turn caused alkalinity to spike. A few weeks later about two thirds of my coral where dead or dying and algae had taken the opportunity to invade my tank. Of course the refugium crashed as well so no help there. This is the second time I've had that happen so I decided to build an algae scrubber with what I had lying around. The scrubber performed beyond expectations and rocks that a few weeks where covered in hair algae are now almost completely algae free. I still keep a small refugium but I threw away most of the chaeto when I started up the scrubber to give it a chance.
The corals that are left are starting to grow again so at the moment everything is looking like it will be Ok.

The scrubber is very much a work in progress. My first addition where splash guards. To keep it quiet i attached one strip of course filter mat (1x1 inch) along the bottom to break the fall of the water and silence the trickling sound.
It could be built smaller and I have vague plans on building a new more compact version in the future, but for now it serves its purpose. The current format is perfect for experimenting

Testing the scrubber:

The lights 2x12x3W grow lights

And finally mounted in the sump

 

[Doctorgori]

Seal the h3ll outta that wood ..... 2-3 coats of whatever

 

[peterj66]

You mean the lights? The main lights are warmed from within and ventilated so they should be fine, the ATS lights on the other hand will have to be mounted on something more waterproof than the current assembly

 

[peterj66]

Thought I might share my latest DIY as well. Its a bluetooth controlled dosing pump. I'm working on a NodeJS based web client for it. The pumps are Kamoer peristaltic DC pumps. I used the same kind on my old dosing pump and they have been running like clockwork. More items are in the works