preview of 800 g tank in 3 rooms

Ef4life · May 8, 2020

Truely an epic build. Your finish carpenters are very talented craftsman. And your diy sumps are great. I can’t wait to see the display getting some corals in it. I’m a big fan of the orphek lights too, I have just one on my 40b

GillMeister · May 8, 2020

"Here is the house I am building for my new reef tank."

I almost fell out of my chair laughing. That's called commitment to a man's priorities.

FishTruck · May 9, 2020

24 hours later.... I had about 7 feet of visibility across the long view yesterday... now I can see 12 feet clearly. What a difference! It is now acceptably clear... but not quite crystal clear.

NautiTang · May 9, 2020

Did it clear up on its own or did you do something to help it along other than the UV?

emvanburen · May 9, 2020

FishTruck said:
24 hours later.... I had about 7 feet of visibility across the long view yesterday... now I can see 12 feet clearly. What a difference! It is now acceptably clear... but not quite crystal clear.

Looking good!

maroun.c · May 10, 2020

Great build , love how neat everything is.

TripleTruble · May 10, 2020

Wow just wow. Read all this and I must say very impressive. Definet a follow

FishTruck · May 10, 2020

NautiTang said:
Did it clear up on its own or did you do something to help it along other than the UV?

It was the UV that did it. I ran carbon three times, adjusted flow rates, pushed my skimmer - and everytime I thought it was clearing, it would get cloudy again. Two days with the UV on... it became crystal clear.

TriggerFinger · May 10, 2020

All I can say is wow...can’t wait to see more!!

FishTruck · Jun 10, 2020

Seven weeks and one day since I turned the lights on in the frag tanks.... the coralline appeared!!.

A nice surpise to see these little pink spots appearing on the bottom of my plywood frag tanks. I had to scratch it with a fingernail to make sure it wasn't dino or something lame like that.

The situation is a little unconventional. I needed to make a place for the corals from my old tank.... so I just fragged them up, and put them in a one week old tank, reduced the light intensity to create 50% of the PAR that they were used to. I have slowly turned it up to put 200 to 300 PAR on the corals - and I hit that target last week (a six week acclimation). There was an algae bloom at about week 2, which I have been controlling with vibrant.. while simultaneously running a UV sterilizer (see the BRS video on the topic of using vibrant to deal with ugly stage).

The vibrant is dosed directly to the the tanks with the lights and algae - so it has a chance to stick to something before hitting the UVS. The algae is starting to look less robust and seems to be dying off a bit. I was hoping to see this happen around week 8 of vibrant dosing (just like the brs video).... and it seems to be coming to pass. The display tank is running lights at about 20% full intensity on a very blue spectrum - no algae of any kind up there. I took an algae loaded piece of rock from the frag tank, to the display tank... and the algae was gone in 24 hours. Tangs and low light were enough to wipe it out, so I feel like I have control of the situation.

And... now that I have coralline (ahead of schedule), I just need to wait until the algae regresses in the full light tanks, while I slowly increase the light intensity in the display tank. When I can run full lights up there, without ugly stuff growing, and with continued coralline growth - I can start moving corals upstairs. Then I have to wean off the vibrant crutch.

FishTruck · Jul 4, 2020

The final light fixtures and bulbs are installed and running at target intensity... still no algae in the display!! Five orpheks... I have room for four more if needed. They are flanked and boosted by four ATI blue plus T5s. There are a couple of kessils to light up the background rocks in the dark part of the tank where all the returns and overflows are hidden.

Some PAR readings are shown.

I had a battle with cyanobacteria in the frag tanks (I think), which I cleared out with a 5 day blackout and some chemi-clean. I have not dosed vibrant in a few weeks. Right now, the system is free of any "ugly" phase organisms.

Coralline is just starting to appear in the main tank and the amount has doubled in the frag tanks.

The only bad news is that some of my corals got pretty beat up by the cyano that was in the frag tank... and some of them don't look so hot after being moved around and cleaned. The birds nest frags seem to catch every floating piece of algae or slime and I don't think they are going to make it. I'd really like to see the corals start to thrive again before I buy any new stuff.

I don't have anything planned for July - just observation and QT for a few new fish.

FishTruck · Jul 4, 2020

Here are some pictures from the frag tanks... I have been moving the corals around and scrubbing off cyano slime - but the battle is nearly won in these pictures... and you can see the coralline spotting up the bottom of the tanks.

FishTruck · Oct 11, 2020

The system is progressing nicely. The fish are great. I have a school of anthias made of two species... bimaculatus and squarebacks. The male squareback is herding both species and so far none of the bimacs have dared to transform. The tangs are all doing great as well as my goldflake angel, who has adopted the habits of eating nori and tail slapping the other tangs.

I have put some corals in the tank. About 1/3 are thriving, 1/3 are alive and growing - but lacking color or polyp extension, and another 1/3rd has browned out or expired. This is about what I expected at the 6 month mark. I still have some of my legacy corals... in my captivity now for over 10 years... but, sadly, most of the 1/3rd that died were the legacy corals did not make the transfer from the old tank to the new tank.

No major misadventures yet. The dialyseas system really seems to be working well. I have modified it by running two membranes to help keep up with evaporation and water theft.... and I have also added two cannisters (adding one carbon and one DI) to help deal with the large amount of RO/DI needed for the system. I sent my first ATI water analysis out last week.

I am most happy that the tank has been easier to maintain and doing much better at the six month mark compared to my last 300 gallon tank. That was my main goal... tripling the size and halving the work.

Here is a short video of my progress. I hope that by next year it will be filled in with quite a bit more coral.

TreyC2010 · Oct 11, 2020

Awesome!

mattgsa · Oct 12, 2020

Great build

MERKEY · Oct 12, 2020

Thank you for sharing, wonderful build!

hmmmmm · Oct 12, 2020

Just read through the whole thing, amazing stuff!

Yellow tangs seem to be doing fine together

FishTruck · Oct 13, 2020

Well... near major mishap and rookie mistake. I left the skimmer cup drain open and had a skimmer overflow into a 5 gallon bucket. This bucked should have had either a level sensor shut off, or overflow pipe back into the sump. Overnight... I dumped about 160 gallons of water into the fish room. The salinity dropped from 1.026 to 1.022 overnight. Of course... it's the day that I have five fish coming from Marine Collectors.

The good news is that I had enough water to get up and running again this a.m. by taking one of the frag tanks offline and panic making 60 gallons of salt water from my RO reservoir, (while I simultaneously attended a zoom meeting for work...) and all the livestock seems to be ok. Also... the dialyseas system will take care of the rest while I'm at work, slowly raising the salinity over the next few days and automatically making the new water. Also, the floor drain that I went to great lengths to get installed saved the basement from any damage.

PHEW!