Dude that light runs laps around the power module in the sexy circuit. I'm glad they've got proper distribution and marketing now. More people need to get on board.

Yeah, Tim is really great to work with. I'm lucky he lives pretty close to him. Any issues I've had he's sorted out right away, and always great to chat with.

Anyways....

Wooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...e/21fc897f.jpg

Plumbing, here I come!!

In the last few days, I've hung the fixture, got all the plumbing done, and screwed in and placed all my electrical componenets. I also levelled the stand with shims, so now all thats left is to get her wet! :D

Bulkheads in place:
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...e/d2612f8e.jpg

In tank plumbing (all grey schedule 40 PVC - for the sextra sexyness);
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...e/d9bd8910.jpg

Plumbing in the stand:
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...e/80d74d2d.jpg
Not too worried about all the elbows on the manifold - my return pump should be able to overcome it just fine.

Electrical componenets:
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...e/12081058.jpg

All together with dosing containers, sump, ATO reservoir and GFO/GAC reactors:
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...e/4d539955.jpg

Some pics with the light going on - can you see the Starphire glass? I can't :D
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...e/65f4d124.jpg

Through 3.5' of Starphire glass:
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...e/91fff3c8.jpg

I did a small test of the bulkheads - no leaks in the bulkheads, but there is a small leak through the threaded fitting of the emergency overflow pipe. No big deal though - it leaked ~5ml overnight into the sump.
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...e/b498c650.jpg

And a FTS:
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...e/f3a4f2ea.jpg

Picking up 50' of RO/DI line this weekend to start filling the tank!

I don't know if this is appropriate, but I just got a boner looking at your set up.

lol....these pics don't even show any pu...........mps. I don't have the Profilux doser (4 chan) or Profilux controller placed yet either. Then it's hardcore :lol:

The leak you have on the threaded drain.... get more teflon tape and re tape it.

It may only leak a little now but with more time it could get worse.

Nicest set up I have seen in a long time. Everything is so neat and orderly underneath. Looks awesome!

I should clarify - the threaded connection that is leaking is inside the tank - the emergency drain is plumbed to a slip x male thread fitting, which is screwed into the bulkhead. So the leak essentially is within the plumbing, which is by all means fine for now. If it does get worse, then I'll have to wrangle to pipe out, but for now I'll leave it be.

HEHE, I wouldn't say I went that far.... But I was thinking WHAT THE F---!

This is one of the cleanest, most organized setups. Great Work.

Now I am looking at mine and wondering.... do I need to clean things up?

that is really clean! great job!!!!

It's so appropriate and you know it.

Please attach the other hoses before firing up them TLF's. This thing's looking slick man! Oh and I'm going to overlook the white pvc in the stand.

Great looking tank top notch work.
Thanks so much for the Aquabee my skimmer works great again just what I needed thanks again for helping me out.

Thanks - hopefully it'll look good once I get life in the tank too.

Actually I wanted white PVC in the stand to go with the white interior of the stand - would have been just as easy to do grey, but I wanted the white. Besides, it matches the skimmer. And really, how embarrassing is it when you're sporting grey plumbing with a white skimmer?

Oh good the pump got to you! No problem - glad to hear it fixed your issues!

I've now fully realized your vision =) Carry on!

Thanks Brett. I can finally continue now that you approve :D

After a busy weekend, the tank started filling last night - I started at around 1 am, and it's now about half-way full (well, when I left for work this morning). Hopefully it'll be full by tomorrow morning.

So far no leaks :D

You lippy sumbeatch :lol: Where's our live video feed of the water going in? I envy you guys getting new tanks wet. Mine's ancient now (I'm starting to grow coraline). Not sure what to do besides live vicariously thru you guys!

Thanks to Brett's blessing, it's finally beginning. I filled it up, mixed up 130 gallons of salt water, and then tonight I plopped in my LR. Didn't take any pictures of the process, but I did anchor two of the rocks using a 3/4" masonry bit to drill through rock and 5/8" acrylic rod and just stacked things so I can remove them easily later if need be.

My inspiration was a reef bommie or island - the aquascape essentially looks like a big boulder where I'll try to arrange SPS and LPS colonies in an artful yet natural fashion.

I arranged all the rock (10 fairly big pieces, around 60 lbs), and added 2 bags (80lbs) of Caribsea Reef floor grade sand, which looks really nice. The bigger size will hopefully keep it down a bit better than oolithic sand.

http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...e/8a9e7300.jpg

Currently running a crap load of carbon (any residual chemicals in the water) and a phosban reactor stuffed with filter floss (for the dust). After it clears up, I'll keep the lights off for a while and run GFO to reduce and phosphates and keep the lights off. Waiting for the fog to clear....

Front:
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...e/6771a0ba.jpg

From the kitchen (left):
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...e/929198fc.jpg

From the couch (right):
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...e/b6806f1b.jpg

Woo Hoo!!!! Wet Water.. lol.

I really like the looks of this scape. I can't wait to see what it looks like when you trasfer your other tank over.
I see lots of room for acan and chalices, and lots of rockwork for your sps. Very nice. I am jealous. :)

awesome rock work. are you keeping it this way?

Wow what a sleek looking tank, definitely following along on this one.

Not quite boner material yet, still in the hemi stage haha:lol:.

Thanks Nebthet! I might keep a few things on the sand, but I've never been a fan of the cluttured sand look, so I'll keep it mostly on the rock. I've never had any acans (never really caught my eye), but I've seen some really crazy ones come into the local stores lately so I might get a colony or two for the edges of the rockwork. As for chalices? The only one I like is the watermelon chalice, so I might get a piece, but more likely than not. SPS all the way! :D

Yup, this is the arrangement I'll be keeping. Once I got something I liked, I just filled the sand around it.

Aaaaaaaand what everyone's been waiting for....crappy pics!

Here's the awesome ricordea colony I picked up at BA last week - there's three distinct morphs on it:
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l.../ricordea1.jpg

Frags and colonies that made the transfer are looking well.
Duncan coral:
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...de/duncan1.jpg

Montipora undata:
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...de/undata1.jpg

Montipora setosa:
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...de/Setosa1.jpg

The first pic is my ORA Red Planet frag under 2x24w T5HO:
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...e/18db5f55.jpg

Here's another in the tank (on the sandbed):
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...redplanet1.jpg
It's actually much more intense, but I'm having a hard time with the white balance on it.

I picked up two colonies at NAFB, this is one of them:
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...e/9989d06e.jpg

The other is an aqua/blue thich staghorn acro. Hopefully it grows as thick as the original branches it's growing out from.

Also, in QT right now I have three fish from Menagerie - a small sixline wrasse that I'll attempt to pair with my established sixline, a twinspot hogfish, and a beautiful purple tang.

Twinspot hogfish:
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...othogfish2.jpg

http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...othogfish1.jpg

The purple tang came with some damage to a first spine, and a cause of HLLE starting up, but after a week it cleared up completely!
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...urpletang1.jpg

Sorry for the dark fish pics - I didn't change the WB.

No FTS yet - nothing's been arranged yet, so no FTS :)

Some iPohne (overexposed) pics of the tank. Nothing is glued down, and a few frags are just scattered here and there.

Right side:
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...e/7f5c1015.jpg

Left side:
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...e/ab718012.jpg

FTS:
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...e/765de05c.jpg

Are those fury balls duncans? They look pretty sweet! Mine only have 5 heads but are growing fast.

Looking great!

Brett sure likes fuzzy orbs..

I don't think you should even be at your desk right now Tiger. Tsk Tsk!

Yeah - it started as maybe 6 or 7 heads 2 years ago. I fragged a few, but now it's one massive ball. They haven't branched at all.

Thanks! Brett knows what he likes. And I gots big ones!

Looks great Eric!

:smile:

TDF

Thanks TDF - I'll have to come by your place soon to see how your system is doing!

Your set up is coming along very nicely.

Can't wait to see more pix. Sucks you lost a lot of your sps in the switch over though.

Thanks Sarah! Yeah, it's a shame that I lost all those wonderful SPS (enough to fill a 2g bucket completely).

But I've started to rebuild - this weekend I got a frag of cali tort, Coral Master's Selago, GARF bonsai, ORA Bird of Paradise, and two other sweet frags. Next week I'll be trading some frags for an Oregon tort and green palau nepthea (I'm super excited for this one....). Hopefully a friend of mine can make a frag of ORA Hawkins that he got from me a while ago.

Things are a growing. I can't wait for the next few weeks to see the growth things will get.

I Can imagine.. I have been making frags of the PT Digi and green digi I bought off of you over a year ago, and the green bottlebrush is really growing like crazy now.

If you want frags of those in the future again, let me know and I will try to arrange something to get them to you.. (Greyhound pulled the bus stop outta belleville, so no cheap trips up to Toronto for me any more :( ....)

It’s been a bit, so a little update is due!

The three fish I had in QT are in the big tank now - purple tang, bimaculatus hogfish and another little sixline wrasse. Everyone's doing great, and everyone in the tank is used to each other now and settled in nicely.

Unfortunately the sixline I wanted to pair with this one jumped out a few weeks ago :( I now have netting over the tank to prevent further jumpers.

I finally got my act together last week and started to glue various frags and colonies I had scattered along the front of the tank to the rock. Used 4 tubes of superglue and most of a tube of epoxy getting everything onto the rock – made my skimmer go nuts for 3 days, but now the sandbed is looking a lot less cluttered, and it’s starting to look like a tank with a future :)

As for placement, I want to eventually have a nice mixture of growth forms and colours, so I’m trying not to place similar corals together too much, and keep colours and growth forms in mind when things get bigger.

Also, I was at Sea U Marine a week or so ago, and I really liked how Ken has a big A. hoeksmai in the middle of the tank, so I’ve placed my hoek in the middle of the tank – hopefully it grows into the centerpiece I’m envisioning for it!

This weekend I finally got around to hooking up my Profilux doser again. I mixed up 9 liters each of Ca, Alk and Mg (Cl and SO4), and added the trace elements from Fauna Marin. Hopefully the solutions last 3 months or more.

Parameter test after a few hours of dosing (and a lot of pump testing) was Ca 440, Alk 5. I’d like to get the Alk to about 7. Today after a day it was Ca 400 ppm, Alk 6 dKh and Mg.....750ppm!! No wonder stuff has stopped growing, and the monti caps look so pale! So now the next few days will be spent slowly bringing Mg back up to around 1200 ppm.

Also, last week I spotted tiny (~4mm) snails in the tank that didn’t look like collonista snails commonly found in reef tanks. They looked like tiny trochus sp. Snails, but I assumed that they had hitch hiked in on something, so didn’t think much of it. That was until yesterday when I spotted three of them on the opposite side of the tank. Going back, now I see them everywhere! Here’s a shot of two little guys – they’re both less than 5mm in diameter:

http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...trochus2-1.jpg

http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...trochus1-1.jpg

Next up for the tank:
- Set up Profilux again (I accidentally flashed the OS, so I have to reload it. Right now it’s just running off of timers and powerbars :p)
- Mount Monti caps and digi, move ricordea rock, clear up clutter in left side of tank.
- Stain and put on door panels
- Figure out a clear acrylic solution to hold netting in place
- Get a black acrylic cover made for my overflow
- New fish?? Dunno – QT is currently sitting empty and ready!
- Keep collecting SPS!!

Also, after talking to Ken for a while about it, I may give a go with Zeovit – I really like the colours Ken (Sea U Marine) gets, and his program which deviates from the traditional zeovit regime. Or I might not, but either way, it’ll probably be a while before I try it if I do decide to do so.

And as required with any update, here’s a FTS:

http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...11-resized.jpg

That's going to look really nice as it matures. The little overhang is a nice touch too.

Any reason your targets for alk and mg are lower than usual?

Very nice looking indeed... things are coming together very well.

Update:
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...e/DSC_4540.jpg

I can't white balance to save my life. Oh well.

Here's two more shots of corals that are doing pretty well:
http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...e/DSC_4543.jpg

http://i290.photobucket.com/albums/l...e/DSC_4545.jpg

What's awesome about those two is that the picture is waaaay duller than they are in real life :)

Not much has gone on in the last few months besides some basic maintenance here and there, and some rearranging of colonies. A few weeks ago it got real hot and my tank got up to 84F, so I lost one or two colonies, but everything is really bounching back now.

I'm hoping to pick up some awesome frags from a friend of mine this weekend, and I have a little Potter's angelfish in QT right now - hopefully I can find another one or two to pair them and then put them into the main tank all at the same time. Aside from that, when the SPS get really thick, I'd love to put in a small school of smaller anthias or cardinalfish as the last "group" of fish in there.

Hopefully more pictures to come!

Nice......that setosa is killer. Super bright.

agreed.....that setosa is killer!.....I have one the same color......hope it grows up as nice as yours:biggrin:

Thanks guys - it's definitely one of my favourite corals. Too bad it's a relatively slow grower!

Fishytime, give it low flow and it'll be gnarly - it doesn't appreciate high flow.