15 gal frag tank build

Well I'm officially way too bored on my days off from work....I had a 15 gallon laying around that I picked up on sale and decided to make a small frag tank out of it...My whole idea behind this was to make something compact and somewhat clean looking where all I will have that takes up space is the tank. I had a sheet of plexiglass, MJ1200, egg crate and little odds and ends laying around the apartment. So I decided to make a little internal sump overflow kinda like the Nuvo line up of tanks. Here's some pics of the progress. I know the silicone beads aren't the best but I don't know where my caulk gun went and was using the back of a pool stick to push the tube because I was too lazy to drive today lol.

You can see my improvised filter basket that I made. Hopefully it works...tomorrow is the leaks and ops test. I'm planning on running the tank skimmer less and using carbon, purigen, phosguard, and matrix as the chemical filtration. On top of all that some filter floss initially after the overflow for mechanical/particle filtration. This isn't going to be anything fancy and I don't plan on painting the wall black either. For lighting I have about 20 3w LEDs that I will just throw together with one driver and simple timer.

 

Here's the latest....I finally filled up the tank and make the LED unit from 17 3w LEDs I had laying around on a simple timer. I threw seachem matrix in bags instead of putting base rock and I seeded it with some from my tank. Using API QuickStart also (product test) to speed things up. So far I just threw in a acan, green polyps, and what seems to be a trumpet coral to test out. The pictures taken are about 30 min after the addition, now about 2 hours later they opened up. Hopefully my little side project isn't an epic fail lol.

 

what is in the plastic cone thingie? It looks like marbles I think the frag tank looks awesome!

 

thanks!! you mean in the media bags over the pump and on top of the egg crate? lol that's the matrix stones. they feel a lot like pumice. I wanted to keep this thing pretty clean without adding sand or base rock.