I found that a hole saw bit fits perfectly inside some fittings
Thanks for the encouragement. It's been an eyesore in my home for awhile now, and it's bothered me alot. Honestly, I just kept thinking, "I'll go buy some plywood, and glass, and this and that and make giant sumps to fix it." But I never did. Just kept putting it off because it was too much work. And the funny thing is, my logic is "well, sumps are expensive, I can DIY that, make it perfect, and save a few hundred $$$, it will just take me X years and I'll never actually do it." This kind of savings is not a thing.
My intention for this thread is not really to show off the tank. It's more to document that mistakes are made, and I can do things differently to avoid said mistakes in the next iteration. (one assumes I will make additional mistakes, but lets hope they are less awful) Every single thing I'm doing on this rebuild has a "how will this fail?" thought process that goes into it first. For example, the Apex was great at managing the RO/DI ATO, but what the Apex couldn't manage was "what if the connector snaps in half, at 3am, on the high pressure side?" The *really* scary part of that story, is I was leaving for a 11 day road trip that morning. So if it had broken 8 hours later, my house would be in a lake bottom. Apex's are great, amazing. Put a leak detector sensor on there, have it tell you that you have a leak. But lets say I was 800 miles away and it told me "you have issues". What would I have done exactly?
This was compounded by the fact that the sumps were awful. So I got used to a little stupid on the floor every now and again. It's concrete, who cares? Never, ever, ever get used to that. Fix it.
- Don't use an Apex to control an infinite source of water. If you have an infinite source, it will absolutely, eventually dump into your home. It's not the Apex's fault here. The Apex didn't shatter the fitting, but the Apex couldn't do anything once it broke. If the Apex can't solve it, the Apex shouldn't operate it.
- If you get used to spills and water mishaps, you will eventually miss a big one.
- On something of this size, hell, anything really, never place electrical powerstrips or mains interfaces underneath and inside the perimeter of the tank. Lets say you are feeding, and you splash a tiny bit of water on the edge. That water slowly creeps down the side, into the side of the stand, and then inevitably finds it's way to the cord or plug. Sure, you have a drip loop, but what if the water comes down the side of the stand and just goes right into the strip? Go look at your powerstrip, is there salt on it?
- Ideally, electrical connections should be made where the surface that holds the connection, does not physically contact the aquarium itself. For example, a small tank on a stand. The wall behind the stand isn't touching the tank, nor the stand. So this means salt and water can never drip down it. This is where the drip loop saves you. Not inside the stand. Mind you, if you splash on the wall you still lose, but we have to have an outlet somewhere..
- Sumps splash. That means salt sprays everywhere. USB cables on Apex's are steel. Steel rusts. Rust bridges connections inside the Apex or the EB8's. Those connections aren't waterproof, don't treat them like they are. Humidity + salt == rust.
- Salt creep down the side of the tank is unattractive. This might not matter to you much if it's on the back and you can't see it. However, the hidden danger of salt creep is that it is like a little river for saltwater. Every drop that adds to the creep, adds it at the bottom, and more water slowly follows the path all the way down, until, like some sort of bizzare gravity, it locates an expensive thing and feeds water into it.
- Computer fans suck. Well, maybe not, but they hate humidity and they hate salt.
- A humid room, with a lot of saltwater in it, produces this bizarre salty dust that gets on everything. It's kinda brown and gunky and like a form of dust that forms clumps. This horrid substance likes to attach itself to things like fan blades, or heatsink fins. With fan blades, it eventually ruins the fan, usually because the weight builds up until the fan begins to wobble on the motor and grinds a bearing to dust. With heatsink fins though, the problem is worse. If you have a computer heatsink, they are amazingly well designed to transfer heat, but they are not designed with the idea that dust is sticky goop. On your computer you aim a dust thing at it and the dust goes away, and the flow is unclogged. In a reef room, that dust just clogs up and you cannot get it out easily. This means you should never use a heatsink that has thin blades. The goop gets down into those blades and clogs them in ways you cannot fix easily. All heatsinks should be large finned so you can the the goop off.
- DIY LED's are amazing. I will be resurrecting mine absolutely. However, if an LED relies on a fan to keep the heatsink cold, you need to assume right up front that it will fail and the LED will turn that lovely black color they like to do. All heatsinks should be passive. I have another tank with some DIY 20W SMD's on it, all on passive heatsinks. They work wonderfully. No active cooling for LED's. Always passive.
@JumboShrimp - Oh, the pun was intended.
@Scott Jeffries - The plan has always been for SPS. I will stick to that plan.
Thank you to everyone for the words of encouragement. I can make this work again, it's just going to take effort and $$$. Back to the plumbing mines for now. I do have to say, the nice thing about keeping reef aquariums for 20+ years, is you build up this amazing supply of PVC fittings, and can just pull the 3 20g totes out and find what you need immediately.
