Waterbox 105.4 Build

[pudge]

Hello.
Starting my build thread here.

First about me; I've been out of the hobby for about 10 years. I've been reading other threads and researching gear for about a year. I'm really drawn back into the hobby by the new technology which would have been unthinkable when I last was at this.

So Why this tank?
I looked at tanks as small as 30 gallons and as large as 180 gallons. I settled on this one because I love the rimless look and I like the size and proportions. I previously had a 210 gallon tank which I loved but what held me back was maintenance. Too hard to mix 20-30 gallons of water for water changes. Equipment was always to expensive. Approximately 100 gallon system in this tank makes the math easy on 10 or 20% water changes and easier to handle.

Intitial impressions:
To start I had the tank delivered and plumbed by my LFS. I should give them a shout out. Blue Line Coral in Naperville Illinois; they did a great job. The tank is beautiful. Stand is very sleek and well constructed. Proportions of the tank (approximately 4 ft long by 2 ft wide by 16 inches deep) makes aquascaping and maintenance easier, but is large enough to give the inhabitants room to move. I will miss the larger fish I had in my old aquarium but I will not miss the 30 gallon weekly water changes. The only thing I am not crazy about is the small (4 gallon) size of the ATO chamber. Obviously this is built to be integrated into the sump and fit in the stand. As I have th space I'll probably upgrade to at least a 10 gallon food grade bucket.

Setup:
The tank is in the basement. I have a room behind the tank which was an unused storage room. There is a utility sink back there and plenty of room for the gear. So I plumbed it through the wall behind the tank.

Gear:
Lights: 2 Eco Tech radion G5 xr15 blues
Flow: 2 Eco Tech MP40s (this is probably overkill but I hope to throttle them back and get them working in some antisync mode)
Return Pump: Simplicity 2100 DC pump
Skimmer: Vast ocean 130. I was going to go with a reef octopus but settled on this as a cost saver. We'll see how that one go's.
Controller: Neptune Apex
Heater: Inkbird Controller with 2 200 watt titanium heating elements
RO/DI: Spectrapure Max cap 180 GPD RO/DI unit. I've had this since the last tank. It has been maintained as this is used in my other hobby, brewing beer.

Aquascape/Substrate:
1. I had approximately 40 lbs of rock left over from my last tank. It has been sitting dry in the basement for 10 years. I "rehabbed" it and cycled it outside of the tank which is a story in and of itself which hopefully I'll deal with in a separate post.
2. I bought 40 lbs of caribsea life rock "shapes" which comes in 20 lb kits containing arches, caves and donuts. Of the 4 arches I got 2 were broken, which is not a great percentage, but I glued one back together and used the other one to create a larger arch by gluing the pieces to one of the other arches. The caves and donuts were in great shape.
3. 80 lbs of Carib sea live sand Fiji pink.
I had to aquascape with water in the tank. I had nowhere else to mix 100 gallons of live sand and as I had precycled half of the rock (sea one above) so I needed to get it in the water.

Plan: We'll see where this go's. For now I am planning this to be a LPS/Soft coral tank. Once I complete the cycle I will add a pair of clownfish and go from there.

So as of this post; there is water in the tank. It is aquascaped. Pumps and powerheads are running. Heater is heating. Apex is apexing. Skimmer and lights are off. I am cycling again using the Dr. Tims method. Added the bacteria and ammonia and now I will be out of town for a week keeping an eye on my apex. I'll post pictures below.

Thanks for looking.

 

[Mrtakeoff53]

Looks like you’re off to a good start! Been thinking of getting a Waterbox for my next one. Do you like their build quality? I look forward to seeing how this turns out!

 

[pudge]

Looks like you’re off to a good start! Been thinking of getting a Waterbox for my next one. Do you like their build quality? I look forward to seeing how this turns out!

So far the build quality is great. I bought the stand assembled by my LFS and they did a great job putting it together, so as of yet I have had no issues. The overflow is glass which looks really nice. Overflow is completely silent. The sump is adequate and built to fit well into the stand. In my case, since I've plumbed it external to the stand, I find the 4 gallon ATO chamber to be a bit undersized. I suppose it depends on evaporation where you are and how long you like to (or I should have to; no one likes to) leave your tank unattended.

 

[pudge]

Looks like you’re off to a good start! Been thinking of getting a Waterbox for my next one. Do you like their build quality? I look forward to seeing how this turns out!

The other thing that is a slight inconvenience if plumbing this tank and sump outside of the stand is that all of the plumbing is metric (in fact all of the measurements are metric). You just need to buy adapters for metric to US conversion. Not a big deal.

 

[One Reefing Boi]

Looks like you’re off to a good start! Been thinking of getting a Waterbox for my next one. Do you like their build quality? I look forward to seeing how this turns out!

I have the 50.3 AIO form Waterbox and love it. Will deff be going with them again when I upgrade down the road.

 

[jeepreefer1]

Love your tank! I am about to pickup the same tank 105.4 from a guy on here Reef 2 Reef. He ran it less than a year. I have a Waterbox Marine 65 and I plan to tie them together for a total of 170 gallons. The frag will become a reef sps tank and the Marine 65 will hold an Angel and a Butterfly fish. Nyos 160 skimmer and Ice Cap algae scrubber should help me keep nutrients down. I like your tank though man!

 

[pudge]

Been away for a while. Thought I would update the thread with some pictures at the 7 month mark.

Current live stock:
Fish:
2 tank raised ocellaris clowns: 1 Standard color "Nemo" one picasso color is "Cheetoh"
1 biota captive bred yellow tang: "Bubbles"
1 ORA captive bred Electric indigo dottyback: "Spanky"
Corals:
1 Softball size pulsing xenia
1 baseball size 2 head frogspawn
1 small but growing green star polyp colony
1 small rainbow Acan (micromusa) frag
1 small sinularia coral

Inverts:
5-6 Astrea snails
5-6 blue leg hermits
5-6 Cerith Snails (pretty sure these just provided new houses for the crabs)
3 Skunk cleaner shrimp

Whole Tank picture

 

[pudge]

Fish Pictures:

Spanky

Bubbles

Cheetoh and Nemo

 

[pudge]

Anemone:
Forgot to mention my Chicago Sunburst Anemone. He been in for a bout 1 month. Almost lost him with acclimation. Thought he was attached, turned on the power to the MP40s at lowest level, went in back to the filtration room for 1 minute, came back and he was sucked up against the powerhead. I though he was chopped to bits but somehow deflated himself without getting pulled completely in.

Hard to get the picture to accurately portray the true of this guy. Very brilliant orange and purple.
Blue lights

Flitered

With Fish for scale:

 

[Sgchick]

Your tank looks great!!! I recently received a biota yellow tang and she has done awesome!!

 

[pudge]

Corals:

Blue light Frogspawn

Filtered Fragspawn

Green Star polyps

Rainbow Acan. This is the newest addition. Hasn't really open up yet.

 

[pudge]

About my fish:

I started with 2 Standard ocellaris clowns (Taco and Nemo) right after the cycle 6-7 months ago. About 2 months ago Taco (which was the larger one at the time) jumped out of the tank while I lifted the lid to put food in. Very sad. Didn't see it happen, just found her on the floor a couple of hours later. Was replaced with the "picasso" ocellaris clown who is now the smaller of the two and is named Cheetoh. I have small kids and the thought of having a reef tank without Nemo was promptly voted down.

Next fish I added was Spanky the captive bred electric indigo dottyback. I always had dottybacks in my old tanks 10 years ago. Upsides are: hardy fish, very cool personality, captive bred options. Downsides are well documented and primarily have to do with aggression. These fish are jerks. This one lives up to that billing. He initially was bullying the clown fish but has given that up. There is a wonderful love hate relationship with the tang, but it is mostly a balanced aggression. They occasionally tussle but neither seems very bothered by this.

Your tank looks great!!! I recently received a biota yellow tang and she has done awesome!!

The yellow tang has acclimated well to the tank. I feed her Julian Sprung's sea veggies every day alternating the green and the purple and she picks at algae on the rocks all day. This tank is probably a little small for her, but I really wanted a tang for algae control. Thought about one of the bristletooth tangs which I guess stay smaller, but with the option of a captive bred yellow tang, I thought this was a better route. If you look carefully at the pictures you will see a small defect in the dorsal fin. I have read or heard that HLLE can look like this in yellow tangs. She was like that on arrival. I use BRS Rox 0.8 carbon in a BRS cannister and I am pretty good about rinsing it well, so I am hoping it is just a small defect that gives her character. But otherwise a wonderful fish. Eats voraciously. Always swimming. My wife's favorite fish.

I feed the fish with the Neptune AFS twice per day PE mysis pellets. The Tang gets alternating green and purple algae every day on a clip. I feed LRS reef frenzy nano everyday as well. I've been putting more of this in recently that I would like. I am trying to get to a point where I can detect Nitrates and/phosphates, before I level off how much I feed. The tang was the last fish I added and that was almost 3 months ago. The tank has been up over 7 months.

As far as future additions to the tank go I am not sure. I am afraid my dottyback will make himself a pest with any new additions. I would love to eventually get an orange spot goby to help the sand bed out but I would wait for the tank to be at least 1 year for that and I have not found a suitable tank bred goby. I really love angel fish, so something like a tank bred coral beauty or a flame back angel I have considered but I'm afraid of them nipping my corals. For now I'll stay with 4 fish.

Thanks for reading. I'll try to do some equipment updates and reviews of the stuff I've been using.

 

[pudge]

Vastocean 130 skimmer 7 month review.

When I went with this skimmer it was a bit of a leap of faith. There wasn't much info available. So I thought I would describe my experience with it.

As I stated above; my original plan was a reef octopus 150 sss 6 inch skimmer which retails for about $880 pn brs. This skimmer has a similiar shape and size, similar rating and a controllable DC pump and retails for $260. This savings in my cases was "reinvested", as this money was put into purchasing an APEX. I cannot do a direct head to head comparison, but I think it was a reasonable decision with some caveats.

1st there was a fairly long break in period with this thing. It really just bubbled with no foam for the first 3 months. The controller shows 8 levels. Initially I had this set at 3 of 8 but have since increased this to 4.

There is a dial that opens and closes an opening on the bottom of the skimmer chamber. Closing this forces the water level higher in the skimmer chamber allowing foam to collect in the neck and collection cup. This dial is very touchy in that small tweaks make the water level change a lot.

It took me quite a bit of tweaking before I got this thing to produce and collect skimmate without overflowing the collection cup (more on this problem below). But once dialed in it really does a good job of predictable producing skimmate.

The water level in the skimmer chamber of the Waterbox sump is 9 inches. The optimal water height for this skimmer is about 6 and 1/2 inches. I built a small platform to account for this difference. Not sure if I could have compensated for this water height differential by just using the open close dial described above but it's not hard to raise the skimmer so I didn't want to fight that battle.

One obvious difference between this skimmer and the reef octopus is that the higher end skimmer comes with a float valve on the lid which keeps the collection cup from overflowing when the skimmer goes crazy. In my experience all skimmers will go crazy and overflow the collection cup at some point which usually isn't a fatal event but isn't great and tends to make me run the skimmer less efficiently.

I used the APEX breakout box with some instruction from BRS "how to" videos to install a float valve on the lid of the skimmer. This was not a perfect solution. The lid has a vertical plastic circular baffle. Most float valves I could find that were the right length were too wide to fit between this baffle and the edge of the collection cup. So I have the lid sitting on the top a little off center. I also had to install a quick disconnect waterproof 2 pin electrical wire connector so this could be removed for cleaning without disconnecting the wires from the breakout box. This has been tested both with deliberate and not intended collection cup overflows and succeeded in turning of the skimmer. One small point that really helped was turning the float valve so that it is "closed" when the float valve is down or not floating. If the water level gets to the float valve even a little lift will "open" the circuit and shut off the skimmer. When I did this with the opposite orientation, even when the water level lifted the float valve it sometimes would not lift all the way up to "close" the circuit and it would tend to overflow before shutting off the skimmer. This could probably be solved by installing a longer float valve but this was difficult to achieve.

So all in, I am happy with this skimmer. I don't really mind trouble shooting these little issues although I suppose you should consider the parts (breakout box, float switch and waterproof 2 pin connector) and labor costs against the cost savings of going with the cheaper skimmer. Also I would expect a skimmer to last a lot longer than 7 months so if this stops working in the next few months then all cost savings will have been lost.

Hopefully someone finds this helpful. Thanks for reading.