franx
Community Member
I started a 125 gallon soft coral reef way back in 2006. About a year and a half later, I got the job opportunity of a lifetime, and my wife and I packed up and moved from New York to California so I could go be a software engineer at Google. I sold off all the rock (a hundred pounds of Fiji LR was so much cheaper back then!) and livestock (so were yellow tangs), and put the tank and equipment into storage, always intending to get back into it when I had the opportunity.
Eventually, we found our way back to New York, but the aquarium stayed in storage for a long time. In the past few years, as I've been working from home full time, I carved out a room in my basement to turn into a home office, and one wall was just the perfect spot to reboot this tank.
I wanted this to look really nice - way back when, I built a serviceable but pretty rough homemade stand that nobody would mistake for quality furniture. Since that time, I've become a pretty solid woodworker, and decided to design a nice built-in wall for the tank and some cabinets/shelves. Naturally, building that thing took the past year as a weekend warrior, but I've finally finished it an had the tank running for the past couple months now.
Here's what the whole thing looks like as of last week:
Current livestock:
Eventually, we found our way back to New York, but the aquarium stayed in storage for a long time. In the past few years, as I've been working from home full time, I carved out a room in my basement to turn into a home office, and one wall was just the perfect spot to reboot this tank.
I wanted this to look really nice - way back when, I built a serviceable but pretty rough homemade stand that nobody would mistake for quality furniture. Since that time, I've become a pretty solid woodworker, and decided to design a nice built-in wall for the tank and some cabinets/shelves. Naturally, building that thing took the past year as a weekend warrior, but I've finally finished it an had the tank running for the past couple months now.
Here's what the whole thing looks like as of last week:
Current livestock:
- Two juvenile ocellaris clowns
- Yellow watchman goby and a tiger pistol shrimp (they haven't managed to find each other yet)
- CUC is 10 blue-legged hermits, 10 trochus snails, 10 nerite snails, 20 florida ceriths
- The display tank itself (Most of the time it's been stored climate-controlled in a wood crate, the silicone all looked very good, and I did a month-long leak test test. There's obviously some risk here, but *fingers crossed*)
- Sump tank: an acrylic 40 long with some DIY baffles creating areas for a fuge, skimmer, and return pump
- Protein skimmer: a Coralife Super Skimmer that can operate either hang on back, or in-sump. I actually had it hanging on the side of the sump until it developed a crack in the bottom, so I moved in into the sump. Might get a new one at some point, but it does the job for now.
- Return pump & heaters (they're still working fine, but I bought fresh backups because I assume these are likely to break any time)
- A Tunze Turbelle Stream powerhead - you can see this old-style pump on the left side of the tank, with a new one on the right.
- 3 Noopsyche K7 Pro III LED lights. These replace my old T5 and compact fluorescent setup, which still work fine as far as I know, but I wanted something that put out some more PAR while running a little more energy-efficient. I might try to arrange a trade if anyone still finds these old lights useful.
- Kessil H80 fuge grow light
- A couple new powerheads
- A reef-pi with DIY ATO, temperature probes, and power management. I'm working on adding a pH monitor and doser.
