120g Mixed Reef Build - Newbie with lots of pics

Cycle winding down

Looks like my cycle is winding down, both in the QT tank and in the rock tub. Here are a few graphs of my test results since starting. The rock tub is still working on cleaning out the phosphates so that will still need a few more weeks.

As for the QT tank, I'll keep an eye on it over the next week and see how it's doing. If NH4 and NO2 stay at 0 for the next week I'll be ready for a big water change and a fish order!

 

As promised on your fuge thread here is a bold suggestion and something I've done on my last three tanks:

Why not have a remote sump?

In looking at your cycling set up you've got a perfect space for a remote sump in what looks like your basement. Having that kind of room makes it orders of magnitude easier to maintain your tank and gives you the opportunity to have a separate HUGE fuge and sump. This gives you much more bio capacity and water volume.

Here are all the cool things this allows:

- You can have both a large fresh water storage tank and saltwater tank for water changes right there. This allows you to basically fire and forget your ATO for weeks at a time, makes water changes 10x easier, etc.

- You have SUPER easy access to all your equipment and gives you the room to add anything you realistically need as far as equipment is concerned.

- When you are filling your RO container and you forget about it (it will happen, trust me) you can have a top level drain out of the RO storage tank to a drain in the basement so you don't cause a bunch of water damage.

- On your HUGE fuge you can run a couple plant lights on an opposite light cycle from your main to keep your PH from fluctuating during the day/night.

- Cleaning the skimmer is super easy.

- If you run a chiller, having it in a separate room is quite nice.

As I mentioned above, I've done this on my last three tanks (120g like yours, 185g and my current dual 175g) and I will NEVER go back to filtration under the tank again. I can't tell you how nice it is to have all your filtration somewhere where you can stand over it and do what you need vs. having it in the cramped space.

Want to add dosing pumps? Hammer a wooden shelf into studs in the wall and you're done. Want to add a calcium reactor? You have all the space you need.

It is far easier to do than you think - dropping a 1.5" drain and 1" return through studs in the wall is pretty straight forward. At your pump's high setting it will likely provide enough flow to go up one floor. My current setup pumps 3000 gph up two floors to my display tanks.

 

I can't tell you how much I'd like to do this. Unfortunately I just don't have the space in this house. The tank is actually in the living room and the water station is on the opposite end of the house in the garage. No basement that I can use. I even considered setting up a remote sump in the crawlspace but it's just too small to be practical.

Wish I had the room because I'd love to have a completely seperate fish room but in my house it's just not practical.

Great suggestion though!

 

Update from last weekend

Sorry guys, a little late on this update. My brother and I got quite a bit done this weekend. Here's what we worked on.

First we thought we'd tackle drilling some glass. We started with the easy ones... drilling the three holes in the bottom of the external overflow box. I've got a nice little 10" drill press which worked great for this! I just layed out the center point of each hole and added a small drill bit to the press to make sure it was aligned with center point. Then, we clamped the glass down, switched to the diamond bit, and ran a hose over the glass from behind while we drilled them out. It went pretty smooth... very little chipping. The most challenging part was knowing when we were close to breaking through the back side... that's a bit tricky. Here are a few pics of the drilling rig we set up and the finished results.







We then decided to tackle the single drain hole in the sump. The sump is a 40g breeder and the hole needed to go as low to the floor as possible and roughly in the center of the front side of the glass. In order to ensure I stayed 1 full hole diameter from the edge of the glass, the center point of the hole needed to be 4" from the bottom of the tank. Unfortunately the drill press only has 3" of space between the chuck and the frame of the press. So, we couldn't use the press for this one. My brother ended up drilling this by hand using the 45 degree entry technique. Essentially you start drilling the hole with the bit at a 45 degree angle to get the hole started. Then you slowly increase the angle until you get the drill back to 90 degrees.

This was REALLY tricky. It was really tough to get the hole started. The bit wanted to dance all over the place. Eventually we got it started but then the challenge was to be able to get the bit back to 90 degrees before the edge of the bit broke through the other side of the glass. It turned out we were able to get vertical again. Eventhough my brother wasn't putting any pressure on the drill, unfortunately he wasn't able to huld the weight of the drill up before he broke through the other side. It pushed through pretty hard and left a pretty good chip on the inside of the tank.

The good news is that the chip is only about 1/4 of the thickness of the glass and it will be on the nut end of the bulkhead. The bulkhead gasket will be on the clean side so I think we're going to give it a try.





We then moved on to installing some baffles in the sump. We layed them out then designed a wood block/clamp setup which would hold the glass steady. It seems to work really well. Unfortunatley we're short one piece of glass so I'll need to have one more cut before we can water test everything. Will try to do that this week.





We then finished up the weekend by practicing with some acrylic. The plastic supply company we got our acrylic from was nice enough to give us a bunch of scrap to play with. I decided to work on a probe holder to practice welding acrylic joints. It turned out pretty good... need to tap the holes, add nylon thumb screws, and build a magnetic backing for it to hold it to the tank. Looks pretty good to me. :2thumbsup



My brother was having so much fun he decided to keep practicing with other techniques. He grabbed my blowtorch and that was the last I saw him for 3hrs! Fire and plastic will keep him busy for quite a while! Nice results on his practice piece though!



So that's it... it was a good weekend. I'll have another update later tonight or tommorow to introduce you to some new arrivals... here's a teaser.

 

New Arrivals

Well, here they are... my first arrivals swimming happily in the QT tank!



1 male and 3 female Bartlett's Anthias! They arrived today from BlueZooAquatics.com. Originally I had planned on buying my fish from either LiveAquaria.com or VividAquariums.com. Both have great reputations but neither offered the Anthias by sex. Bluezoo did so I decided to place my first order with them and I'm certainly NOT disappointed.

The fish arrived in individual bags packed inside a styrofoam cooler with 3 heat packs taped to the lid. Everything was packed well in very heavy duty cardboard, styrofoam and plastic bags.

Bluezoo includes an acclimation kit which included the styro box, a 3' length of silicone tubing, a suction cup, a small vial of stress coat and a week's worth of food. I followed the included acclimation instructions which started with moving the fish from their bags to the styrofoam box.

One of the females was laying on her side a bit but then she up righted herself in the bag and swam around. I put the styro container on an angle and opened each bag and I tried to gently let the fish swim out of the bags into the styro box. They weren't cooperating well though. Each one got stuck on the side of the bag and it took some shaking to get them in the box.

Here they are after I got all 4 in... huddled together for comfort I suppose!


Back in my freshwater days, I stuck to my LFS for fish purchases. I use to temp acclimate by floating the bags in the water then I'd drip acclimate for an hour or so.

The Bluezoo instructions didn't ask for temperature acclimation though and since I was sticking to their instructions to ensure the warrenty applied... I decided to just drip acclimate as they instructed... 2-3 drips per second for 2-3hrs.



After about 2hrs I tested the parameters and they were still way off from my QT tank. The pH was at 7.6 and my QT is 8.3. The Salinity was at 1.020 and my QT is at 1.024.

I spead the drip up a bit and kept going. After nearly 4hrs, the pH reached 8.2 or so and the salinity reached 1.024. The temp was 76.7 after all that time and my QT tank is running at 78.5. I thought that was close enough so in they went, one at a time (with a net of course).

I left the lights out for a couple hours and they started to get more active and were exploring a bit. I thawed out some frozen Cyclops and decided to try to feed at that point. It took them a couple minutes to recognize the food flying around but once they did it was a feeding frenzy! All four were eating really, really well. Man, they really love that Cyclops stuff!

I only fed them a little, they had the water clear in about 90s. I fed them again an hour later and once more a couple hours after that. They all ate well all three times.

They all look happy and are swimming well. They look in perfect condition from what I can tell. I'm extremely excited with how the first purchase went. My photog skills are severely lacking but I'm learning. Getting in-focus shots of fish that never hold still is a bit tricky. Here are a few pics that didn't turn out horrible.

Side shot of the Male:


Male giving me attitude!


First Female


Second Female


I couldn't get the third female by herself so here's the harem together!


Thanks to everyone who has been offering advice for helping me get to this next big milestone!

 

Wow really cool.

I really like Anthias, and excellent job on the QT.

 

Lost one of the females

Sadly, one of the female Anthias died today.

Last night they all appeared to be doing fine. All 4 were eating well. When I awoke this morning, all the fish were hiding in the PVC fittings at the bottom of the tank. I turned the light on made some coffee. When I returned, they had all come out of hiding and I fed them some of the sample BlueZoo mixed food which was included with the fish. I noticed that one of the females wasn’t eating and was staying at the bottom of the tank, breathing heavy, and leaning to its side.

After a couple hours she was struggling to stay upright. At noon today she stopped moving and died I’m afraid. The gills on one side were pretty red which leads me to believe she just had too much ammonia in her bag during shipping.

I tested the tank’s water parameters both before introducing the fish and again today when I noticed this one wasn’t doing well. Both tests were the same:
NH4: 0
NO2: 0
NO3: 5 ppm
pH: 8.3
Salinity: 1.024
Temp: 78.2 – 78.5

I took a few pictures to send to BlueZoo along with an explanation of how I acclimated. Within 10 minutes of sending them the e-mail, they responded and approved my credit. It will take 4-5days to show up on my account but they were very sympathetic and provided excellent customer service.

So here's the question now. Should I immediately order another single female Anthias to complete the harem or should I wait? I'd prefer an odd number of females and wanted at least 4 total Anthias so they would school a bit. I assume it's best to introduce them all at the same time which is why I was thinking about immediately ordering a new female now and then I'd use the credit later for a future purchase.

Any thoughts?

 

Congrats on the progress!

 

Long overdue updates

Hey guys, sorry for the long delay in updates. Work has been a bit hectic lately and I haven’t had the time to keep up. But, I have been working on the tank and taking pictures as I went so I finally had time tonight to catch everyone up… I’m very excited about the progress! So here’s what’s been happening.

So first, let’s cover the 4 Anthias in QT. I did have one death immediately after putting them in. I had that one replaced and after about 2 weeks I noticed they started to exhibit flashing and rubbing behavior. I decided to order some Cuprimine as I suspected Ich. By the time the Cuprimine got here I noticed the first white spots on their fins started showing up. Well, I guess that’s what QT is for right… to catch these things now before they go into the display tank.

I went ahead and dosed the Cuprimine per instructions and it’s been in the QT tank for nearly the 2 week waiting period. The fish all showed immediate improvement and seem to be fat and happy right now. That stuff worked fast! I still have a couple days to go, but then I’ll start running carbon in my filter to clear out the copper and then watch them again for another 4 weeks. Kind of a bummer, with that extra delay, but at least I caught it early and they seem to be doing much better!

Continued…

 

Building the overflows and sump

So the next thing we worked on was building both the internal and external overflow boxes. As a reminder, the tank will have a 1.5” X 5” X 48” internal Coast to Coast overflow and a 5”X7”X20” external overflow to house the BeanAnimal drain system.

So to build the external box, we used 1/4” glass and placed it into a wooden jig we made to help make sure all the pieces were nice and square. The two sides were clamped to the jig so they were at 90 degree angles to the face that would be attached to the tank. Then, we laid the bottom down flat on the table, and had the back ready on standby to set on the top once we raised the bottom up to meet the sides. After everything was taped off, we laid down a continuous bead of black silicone on all the connecting edges. Then it was just a matter of pivoting the bottom up to meet the sides, and lightly clamping it in place. Then we laid the back down on top of the sides and bottom finish the 3 sided box.

It was really tricky getting it all laid out properly and we did a lot of “dry runs” to be sure we could get it all clamped up in the 7min or so we had before the silicone started to skin over. This was one of the more challenging parts of the entire build thus far but it went pretty well. Here are a few pics of the process.







We then moved on to the internal overflow. The internal overflow is a 5” x 1.5” box that will cover the entire top back edge of the tank. Now I’ve seen lots of pics of both internal and external overflows and I always find the illusion of a waterline that you see when looking at the tank from the front distracting. I also had an issue since I was going to silicone an external box to the back of the tank with the silicone seams from that box showing through when seen from the front of the tank. So, to avoid both of these problems, my design has the internal overflow box actually build onto the top edge of a 48”X24” piece of 1/8” black acrylic. This acrylic wall, with the overflow actually bonded to the top edge, will be silicone right to the back interior wall of the tank for a nice clean look.

Here are a few pics of the overflow box attached to that 1/8” acrylic wall.





We then moved on to finishing up the baffles in the sump and water testing it for leaks. That went great! No leaks at all and I think it turned out relatively clean.


We even had a good omen show up in the garage! The brightest rainbow I’ve ever seen from the sun shining down on our water test!


Oh, and we also tested out another little DIY project we started when we were practicing with the acrylic. Here’s the magnetic probe holder we made. I still need to drill and tap the edge to accept some nylon screws I got to hold the probes in place but it turned out great! The magnets are actually imbedded between the layers of acrylic so they never touch the water.





Continued…