Also last night we started on installing our lighting canopy.

It will house 3 lumenarc mini reflectors with 400w galaxy ballasts.

Here we are starting to cover it with aluminum flashing to seal it up.
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...asement016.jpg

Fitting the reflector
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...asement024.jpg

A quick tank shot
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...asement020.jpg

Looking great so far. Are you concerned that the lighting will generate too much heat with all that flashing trapping the hot air in?

There will be a seperate 4" fan that will be exhausting all the heat out of the canopy and outside the house. Hopefully that will capture most of the heat and keep the water temp down aswell.

How much space are you left with on either side of the lumenarcs? I have the same width of tank 30", and can't decide on if to get the regular or mini reflectors. I do want to supplement with T5's on the side. What made you go with the mini's?

Looks awesome. I want to the do the same sort of lighting canopy for my 3 LA mini's too. I'm just waiting for my buddy to get his welding table built :)

Gools, one thought, take into account your Eurobracing too. I have a 30" tank too and decided to go with the mini's because I thought I could shoehorn 4xt5's over the tank. Then I realized that one set would be directly over the Eurobracing ... so I'm still deciding about 4 versus 2 myself.

I took that into account, but was going to put the T5 slightly lower then the lumenarc, I thought it wouldn't block that much light. I thought the reg size would just be better for coverage, even with a slight blockage from the T5 reflectors. But still on the fence.

I went with the mini reflectors simply because of space and their footprint covers all that I need. Not sure on the exact space, but there is enough room to fit at least 3 2' T 5's between each reflector and on the ends. Also there is enough room to run 6' of T 5's on the front.

Hey sorry about the long delay in updates. It's hard to find lots of time to keep this updated when your also trying to set the tank up.

Lots of things have changed since the last update. I have added in the wavy seas with the tunzes and so far I am so impressed with the flow patterns that this combo creates. Also the lighting is all mounted just need to get some longer cords to put the middle T'5s in series with the others.

Also the aquascaping is mainly done with only a few pieces of LR that i need to find for certain areas.

We have in the last couple of days also added in the first of our livestock.

We got a school of chromis and 3 firefish. We also added in a ricordea that was in our nano and we got a green monti frag.

Sorry for the blurry pics, I am still trying to figure out the best way to take pics through the glass.

Here's the ric.
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...asement096.jpg

Here's the monti
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...asement098.jpg

Firefish
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...asement106.jpg
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...asement075.jpg

Full Tank Shot with Just T5's
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...asement087.jpg

With Halides
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...asement092.jpg

Just picked up a bunch of frags from Marc aka Super Fudge on the weekend. Will have pics up later today.

Here's some pics of the frags I got from SuperFudge and Oceanic in the weekend.

These are when they were first put into the tank

http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...agsFish009.jpg

http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...agsFish012.jpg

http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...agsFish017.jpg

Sunset Monti from Oceanic

http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...agsFish008.jpg

Stumpy Robusta from Super Fudge

http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...sFish028-1.jpg

Super Fudge's BubbleGum Acro

http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...sFish036-1.jpg

Some kind of Table sort of like an Eflo

http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...agsFish025.jpg

Mike Paletta's Teal Lavelli

http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...agsFish030.jpg

Rainbow Milli from Dave at Wicked Frags

http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...agsFish033.jpg

And Super Fudge's Popsicle Poci

http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...agsFish038.jpg

Wondering how the FTS is looking...

An update...finally!
 

At long last I have some time to update this thread. We have had a super busy past few months! Our tank is doing well now, we had a few algae outbreaks over the summer and it is almost gone now. We went through the hair algae phase and then cyano and we are currently going through another small outbreak or red turf algae and some other unfamiliar type.
We have also gone through some tought loses as far as fish go. A couple of months ago we got in a Sargassum trigger and lost it to some type of bacterial infection after having it only a few weeks. Also, a few weeks ago we lost our scribbled angel we had recently gotten as well due to internal parasites I believe.
On the flip side, the corals are doing great and we seem to be getting fairly good growth on most things as well.
Here are some updated pics of our aquascape and how the tank is looking. I will try to get some growth shots up in the next couple of days also.

Left side of tank
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...44/Tank010.jpg

right side
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...44/Tank011.jpg

FTS
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...44/Tank008.jpg
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...44/Tank007.jpg

side view
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...44/Tank006.jpg
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...44/Tank005.jpg

Enjoy~

Nice job on rock formations.

thanks, it was a ton of work and took forever to do but I think that it is all worth it now.

Tanks looking great. Glad to see the update!

Hey thanks a lot!! We have been so busy that we just haven't had time to post pics or update the thread. Everything seems to be coming around now witht the corals. I just picked some new frags up from Oceanic along with the new frag rack. I will post pics of those soon too. Also we just purchased a Dussumieri Tang from Ocean Aquatics. It's about 5.5" and still very shy. We just saw last night that he has had a little outrbreak in ich. Hopefully we can get him through it. He has just started to eat a little bit of mysis, but we have noticed him grazing on the rocks and picking any algea that he can find. We haven't seen him go after the nori yet but hopefully soon. He has only been in there since tuesday night, so hopefully he makes it through it.

I absolutely love the rock work! Some of the best I've seen!

Is it expoxed? Drilled? how'd you do it...

Awsome!

Todd

First off, thanks for the compliment, we are very happy with how it turned out. If you like our rock work, just check out Super Fudges tank build, because his was the inspiration to ours.

We first made a structure out of pvc. Then drilled random holes through out it so that water will never settle in it. Also, the holes work for great for putting zap straps through and attaching the rocks to it. If you are ever wanting to do it, shoot me a pm and I could go over it better with you.

hey man the tank looks great I see that you took out your sand bed, it there a reason why you did. Im in that problem that i have a 120 gal going and going to be switching out the 120 to a longer 150 tank. So with that being said I want to use the sand bed but i may get a spike from moving it over so im undecided yet. i may put some in the back and that is it,but still unsure. if i didnt have the sand bed the tank switch would be easier.

but oh well time will tell. love your fire fish. i had 6 of them 4 normals and 2 purple and they all jumped to fishy heaven good luck with yours.


mike

Very nice! That butterfly is gorgeous... such nice fish.

Hey thanks Asmodeus! The reason why we took our sandbed out was that for one, it was so fine that with the 2 tunze 6200's, it would never stay in one spot and it didn't look good with patches everywhere. Also, we were having issues with phosphates and nitrates, so we figured the sand wasn't seeded properly and because of the first reason, we just decided to take it out and go bare bottom for the time being. I personally dont like the look of it with our aquscaping, because there is so much that is open, but my wife really likes the bare bottom look. So who knows what we will do.

Yeah that butterfly has done so well in our tank. The only thing is, is that he wont eat any prepared foods. It took us awhile, but we finally got him eating live manilla clams and a little bit of nori now and then. Luckily they aren't expensive and all the other fish just love it too.

I know due to monitor colour profiles and a bazillion other factors I can almost garantee your lights don't appear exactly as I'm seeing them but...

I love their appearance!

Can you explain what type of bulbs you are running and how many? Thanks!

Brett

Sean the tank looks great by the way. In my tank I use a sand that is quite course and in the high flow areas I use small rubble that doesn't blow away andit works very well and in my opinion still looks quite natural.

The light combo that we are using is 3 400 watt 12K reeflux bulbs in lumenarc reflectors and we are also using 6 ATI VHO actinics. We are pretty happy with how the lighting looks right now with the overall blue hue and seem to be getting decent coloration and growth from them as well.

Snappy, thanks for the compliments and advice, we may end up putting another sandbed in, in the future but I think that for the next little while we will stay with the bare bottom and see how it goes. My wife likes the bare bottom look as I said before but she also really loves jawfish, so she may want to put it in again so that we can have a jawfish or two in the tank. :biggrin:

whoops...that quote didn't work out quite right. :redface:

growth and fish pics
 

here's some growth shots:

May 2008 (Mike Paletta Lovelli)
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...agsFish030.jpg

Today
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...agsFish272.jpg

May 2008 (Popsicle Poccillopora)
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...agsFish017.jpg

Today...we actually have 2 pieces of this as the frag broke when we got it home. This is of just the one frag.
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...agsFish281.jpg

May 2008 (bubble gum tri color)
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...agsFish036.jpg

Today
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...3_edited-1.jpg

May 2008 (rainbow milli)
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...agsFish033.jpg

Today
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...9_edited-1.jpg

raccoon butterfly
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...agsFish262.jpg

yellow fin flasher wrasse
http://i271.photobucket.com/albums/j...agsFish176.jpg

Enjoy!

Nice build. Any update pics? :-)