You two have done an excellent job. Love the pics.
We have a couple of fish in the store that we can pet but none we can kiss. LOL.

I have never known a Oriental Sweetlips to be reef safe but it's interest will be LESS likely on your corals than on all your invertebrates. Good Luck as you never know with each individual fishes characteristics.

Cheers
Kevin

WOW!! What a beautiful build! Spectacular!

The build looks great.

Nice tank, and nice thread. good work guys.

looks great. i was wondering where josh's colonies disappeared to.

Hey guys the tank looks saweeeeet. Glad everything is working out for yous two.

thats what i thought when i seen your return line, makes me a bit scared for you,
other than that tank looks great

Unfortunately the tank was drilled with the hole in bottom for the return when we got it. Is there anything else a guy can do other than a check valve? Also a quick question about return pumps.... our quietone 6000 constantly hums pretty loudly. Its more like a resonant frequency hum but after a while it really grates on your nerves. Is this normal? Can this be avoided with say an external type pump... ie reeflo snapper gold or one similar?

Hi Clay,

I can see a few simple solutions. One thing you can do is replumb your return line. Valve off that hole in the bottom. Plumb your return line to the wall, up beside your emergency drain and back into the tank near the water surface, if you really wanted to go back into your tank in the opposite side of the overflow, then run the pipe beside your light (still hidden in your canopy and back into the tank. You will have more head loss this way.

Another solution is to run your pvc pipe from the bottom of the tank to the water surface - down side is esthetics. You'll have to do rock magic to cover the pipe. Or you can make an aragocrete pipe/rock to hide it all. This is kind of a lot of work, but worth it. I made a fake rock intake for my closed loop and am so glad I did.

The other option is to rely on a check valve (I wouldn't personally) If your power goes out and the check valve fails - hopefully it won't fail fully open, if it leaks it will hopefully be small. This option is scary in my opinion.

Another option is to make the tank 2 side viewable and have your return pipe running up the end viewing panel and then cover it up with cabinetry/canopy. This too is a lot of work and you have one less viewing panel. This is what I ended up doing with my tank and I struggled with it for a long time because I wanted 3 sides viewable but I didn't want piping above my tank and I didn't want to rely on a check valve.

I personally like the external pumps. If you are redoing plumbing now is the time to change out your pump. I hear the Dart golds are awesome. I run a regular old Dart and am happy with it. It's the second loudest part of my system (my wavebox is the loudest), but I don't even have my cabinetry on yet. If you can bear with the noise of the wavebox, then a Dart Gold should do you well - the only thing is like this whole hobby is - it's pricey. One thing your can try is lining the inside of your cabinetry with foam to dampen the noise. Also put a chunk of rubber under the pump, that might help.

I hope that this helps. Looking forward to seeing your progress.

Des

One thing you could do is buy another check valve and swap them out every six months or so to give the original a good soak in vinegar. The biggest cause of leaks is due to a build up of crud on the seal.