Prelude to a Build Thread

ichthyogeek

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What ever is a recent college graduate who's actively searching for aquarium industry jobs to do while stuck at home in a job desert during a pandemic? Shamelessly plug on R2R of course! And plan out a dream system. Oh! And finally update his parent's really old tank stand that's starting to split apart at the seams! Back in high school, I put in a lot of effort to earn the money to buy a 55 gallon tank and stand from walmart, intending for it to be a planted tank. After a convict cichlid population explosion, which decimated the plant and fish population, I decided to switch from a 29 reef to a 55. It's been about 7 or so years since then, and the tank (which I maintained throughout college when I came home for breaks), is still going relatively strong, housing a pair of ocellaris or percula clowns, a flame angel, and a hippo tang. Except for a nasty saltwater ich outbreak. Since I'm going to be letting the tank lie fallow anyways during the treatment period, I'll also treat the fish for their intestinal parasites and do the tank transfer method with them. I'm calling this a prelude to a build thread, since it's more of a practice build thread rather than an actual build thread which I categorize as gaining the tank, inhabitants, and everything else and putting it together. Anyways, here's the tank in its glory:
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Right now, the bottom part of the stand is starting to bulge out, and the doors don't close anymore due to the swelling caused by salt creep and maybe a few water spills over the years...
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And one of the hardest parts of the stand is that I don't have easy access to the sump, which while I can deal with it, makes the protein skimmer and heater rather inaccessible
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I'd also like to move from hard PVC to flexible PVC as well...
 

Peace River

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It sounds like you are ready for quite the adventure! Congratulations on your new project and good luck on your job search!
 

Daniel@R2R

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sounds like fun!!
 
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ichthyogeek

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So...I'm impatient. The medication for the intestinal parasites is supposed to come in on Wednesday, but the moment I saw those dreaded white spots, I knew I had to act. So today is officially Day 0 of quarantine.

It's...really quite hard to take fish out of a large fish tank without screwing up the live rock architecture. on the other hand...I actually kind of like this redo look, what are people's thoughts on it? It's a lot more asymmetrical on the right side, which is more pleasing aesthetically to me. The left side was an unintentional DSB back when I thought I would be able to keep banggai cardinalfish and hifin barbershop pole gobies in a microbiome of macroalgae (C. prolifera). I think I'll tear down that part and do something with the larger pebbles. I'll also need to figure out what to do with that shelf rock. When I set up the tank, I spent hours slaving away at sawing that single rock into a piece that would fit snugly, a DIY rock divider. I think it's time has come to be repurposed somehow...
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The flame angelfish is my pride and joy at the moment. I really don't know what I was thinking when it came to adding other fish (sixline wrasses, redtooth trigger, etc.), but the flame angel is something I'd like to keep it alive. There's a sort of understated elegance towards keeping one in a blue bucket. Oh, and I added a little bit of macroalgae for cover/ammonia control this time around. I won't be able to do that next time since practically all of the tanks are now infected, but hopefully this will keep it calm for the first two days.
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Aaaaaaaaand the tang. The evil, evil, evil hippo tang. I'm 90% convinced that this fish has caused the deaths of so many other fish due to territorial disputes. The clownfish can hold their own I think in this 20H quarantine tank, filled to 10 gallons. But my eyes are on that blue tang...I don't trust it.
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ichthyogeek

ichthyogeek

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So...an update:

Turns out that the facebook marketplace has relatively cheap 180 gallon aquariums sometimes? And so the parents have a tax break and want to buy one. Soooo...I guess this actually is an actual build thread since we'll be getting a not-so-new-but-still-new-to-them-new tank?
 
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ichthyogeek

ichthyogeek

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So, while doing a TTM yesterday, I decided to measure the fish. I'm not sure if it's a thing, but based off of feeling yesterday, it felt like the flame angelfish had the least amount of slime coat and was more rough and scaly than it was slimy, in contrast to the clownfish which were downright slippery. It should be noted that they were out of water for less than five seconds, and lost equilibrium while undergoing a freshwater bath in ph buffered water.
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ichthyogeek

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So I may have planned a heist tonight called Aquariums 11. It involved draining the entire tank down to the sand bed while cleaning it, moving the tank stand out of the way, and implementing a cinderblock and 2x4 stand. Absolutely Everything Went Wrong. Well, aside from the parents not waking up, it's gonna be a doozy in the morning when they see what happened (it's not property damage, it's just aesthetically incorrect).
  1. Aquarium was drained. Parents suspected nothing.
  2. Lights in the room were turned off for an hour, to further emulate nighttime scenarios for sleeping occupants within the household.
  3. Aquariums are friggin heavy. I mistakenly only factored in the aquarium at 78 pounds (which I can do) in terms of what I could lift solo. I forgot to factor in the extra 1.5 gallons of water locked away in the sand bed (an extra 12 pounds), and the 50 pounds of sand in the tank. Soooo....I can lift some things, like 5 gallon buckets of water @ ~50 pounds each (which, is actually the lifting amount that a lot of public aquaria require their employees to lift when hiring). I cannot lift 140 pounds just yet.
  4. Aquariums are slippery. I almost crashed the tank on the floor because of how slippery the dang thing was. And i was using a rolly chair for support moving it. Not. Good. It happened, and the tank got moved, but there were a solid 120 seconds where I thought I was going to accidentally smash the tank.
  5. Cinderblocks and wood are heavy. and unwieldy. and sharp. I had to take 5 too many trips to bring the cinderblocks from the garage (have you noticed that I have barely enough muscle mass) while not groaning or saying anything in order to keep occupants within the household sleeping.
  6. The cinderblocks did not factor in the sump when I made the initial plan. Well, technically they do, because the sump itself is 16" tall, and there's a layer of two cinderblocks which implies that it's going to be 16" tall. but still, there's 0 space for the sump.
  7. My parent's style of decorating is...highly different from my style of decorating. I've decided to call myself a utilitarian minimalist, where the only things I'd like to have in future apartments are functional aquarium stands and maybe some plants in LECA. Maybe a fold-y desk for typing stuff on R2R. This highly conflicts with my parents' classical decoration style (rugs, paintings, hardwood, dark leather couches, etc.). I wouldn't say that I'm fashion conscious...but this was a really, really big clash.
That being said, I'm proud that I was able to move a 55 gallon aquarium onto a rolly chair and somewhere else, and then silently construct a cinderblock stand. I chose to not put the aquarium on the stand due to all the failures, but hey, maybe this'll motivate the parents to finally replace the really bad stand that they have with something much better, much quicker.

Fish update: Since I thought there would be a quick turnaround time between getting a new stand, I foolishly tore down the rockwork and put the mushroom anemones and GSP into the water mixing bucket temporarily. This means that I have 0 space for any water mixing and therefore I can't do any tank transfers. I'm going to have to redo the TTM. Luckily, it was only one transfer in, so hopefully it won't be /too/ bad while I wait to get everything in.
 
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ichthyogeek

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Welp. I am officially screwed over. I missed out on a lot of the TTM method, so now I'm going to have to redo the entire 18 day period (2 days + 14 days + 2 days). The parents did get a shiny new heater, so hopefully the tank will stay nice and toasty now. TTM restart is today, so hopefully the fish will all eventually make it into the darn tank!
 
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ichthyogeek

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I managed to get back on schedule for getting the tank back together. So far, I've done two tank transfers, and the fish seem to be taking it well. There was a bit of a fluster when the freshwater dip started really disorienting the fish, to the point where it took them all about 4-5 minutes to really wake up from the bath. I've decided to stop the freshwater baths, since it seems to be negatively affecting the fish at this point AND there are far less parasites visible on the bodies than before.

There was also an issue where the new heater didn't quite malfunction, but still brought the tank temperature up to 86 F. As if home wasn't hot enough as is haha. I turned the dial down, and now it's hovering at a toasty 82 F, which is rather reasonable. It should also help a lot in speeding up the ich lifecycle.

I...also accidentally bleached the coralline off of a bunch of the rocks. Turns out when water temperatures reach over 86 F in an outdoor tank with minimal water turnover, and the tank is in full sunlight, coralline algae undergoes a bleaching event. So that's fun.

This was the tank after I got it back under control on Tuesday (has it really only been two days?). I evacuated all of the mushroom anemone rocks from the water change bucket back to the tank, and now they're doing quite beautifully, and are quite visibly non-bleached. The aquarium stand door is on the side because the one unit I bought accidentally had the wrong hinge screw. Hopefully it will come in tomorrow so I can get the cabinet in ship-shape.
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I spent yesterday bringing rocks in to see what looked best in the grand scheme of things. I was really trying to go for a "two islands along the golden ratio split" vibe, and I think I did a pretty good job at succeeding! That monster of shelf rock that I was using as a divider made a pretty good mini-cave, and I love how it slopes down to a bare sand area, then slopes right back up. The only problem I have, is that the very top rock is the one covered with a GSP mat. Which means it will grow. Quick! Somebody help me figure out how to get a cheap sansibia/xenia frag! You also can't see it, but there's a veeery tiny piece of Caulerpa prolifera in the sand bed gap. I'm hoping that it will grow and help foster a "meadow with boulders" look in the tank.
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ichthyogeek

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Drama of the day: I've been feeding formula one pellets, and thought I accidentally overfed last night. It's been gnawing at me since I did it. So I woke up today, and went to check on the fish. The flame angelfish is lying on its side, and I can't detect any gill movement at all. The rest of the fish are fine. I immediately dose prime and get ready for a water change, while beginning the mourning process for the fish.

Once I get the water ready, I go back in, and guess which little jerk decides that now's a great time to start swimming? Yeah. My fish are complete and utter divas.
 
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