WB marine x 90.3 build

F&S reef · May 4, 2022

Howdy! I am returning to reefing with my son after about a 15 year hiatus. Me and my son popped into a LFS earlier this year just to look and he caught the bug the same way I did when I was about his age. He wasn't born yet when I got out of reefing and its exciting to see how cool he thinks it is. I'm going to use this space to record and share our build. I have purchased most of the equipment we will need that I know of and we are in the process of trying to get to the point of adding water. We have....

1) Waterbox marine x 90.3 aquarium with stand and sump
2) a trio of kessil a360x tuna blue lights with mounts
3) a pair of Ecotech MP40w pumps
4) Ecotech M2 return pump
5) bubble magus curve 5 elite skimmer
6) pentair 40w UV sterilizer
7) coralvue hydros setup

I have various other odds and ends that I can document later but this is the meat of it.

There will be plenty of photos as I go along but the first thing I did was install a dedicated circuit for the aquarium. It is on its own 20a GFCI / ARC breaker now. There is nothing fancy to look at there so I didn't take pics of that process. I then mounted the hydros XP8 power strip above the outlets that I installed. When the aquarium is in its place the opening in the back of the stand will be centered on the control XP8. I'm trying to cram a lot of stuff into a small area and the UV requires a large amount of space and has specific mounting orientation that must be respected. I decided to mount it to the back side of the stand on some mounts that allow it to be removed for servicing. One thing I did to both the XP8 and the UV was to shorten the cords. On the XP8 it was super easy, on the UV I had to order a new plug because I ruined it ($10), cut the cord, tin the wires, and reinstall new the plug. The instructions actually outline this process. I did this because combined between the 2 items I had about 50' of excess cord. The UV literally has about a 30' cord going from the ballast to the lamp.

blaxsun · May 4, 2022

That's a great place for the UV - good luck with the rest of the setup!

F&S reef · May 7, 2022

Im working on the return line plumbing and realized that the unions that come with the waterbox aquariums are metric. I thought that just ordering another union in the size that I need would allow me to just pick and piece the parts that I need and assemble the union like legos with a new inner piece in a standard NPT size. I am not wanting to switch up my return line size as I try to get all of the various things working together. Our return pump has an outlet for a 1" hose that will flow into the UV which also has 1" hose barbs on it. It will then feed the return that goes into the tank which I need to accept a 1" hose as well. I found out that I was wrong and the new union I wanted to rob parts from are not even close to the right size. The only thing that is right on the new union is the threads to accept the hose barb. So I put the part on the lathe, went to work on it, and now have what we need.