I would have LOVED there to be a full fish room in the basement. But the room I originally had my eye on in the plans to be my fishroom ended up needing to be the furnace, hot water, and boiler room. The only other place we could have put a fish room was on the other side of a concrete foundation wall and that was a fight I knew I was going to lose with the spouse. Having them plumb water and drainage to right to the tank was a must however.

I don't know how long you have been in the hobby but it is great fore sight to make the system easy to maintain. One of the tricks of being in the hobby for a LONG time is to make maintenance easier on yourself so you don't get tired of it. A lot of new(ish) reefers will forget this part and get tired of skimmer cleaning, top offs and lugging water around for water changes.

Yah, on my 90 it was taking me forever to do a full clean of the tank. By the time I would lug out all the hoses, drain the tank, scrape the glass, mix the salt in a big rubber-maid, hand ball it back in with buckets and put my equipment away two hours would have gone by. Plus I'd make a giant mess on the floor no matter what I did (thank god for concrete floors). With this tank I pretty much decided that if I couldn't make water changes be a 20 minute event, I wasn't going to bother, and it's really easy to set yourself up for it if you're building the house from scratch :)

With this tank, a water change will consist of me turning one valve to isolate most of the sump from the system, plugging in one pump to drain the biggest chamber of the sump, dumping in the right amount of salt, plugging in a second pump to fill the big chamber back up with r/o water, turning on a koralia that will live in that chamber for 10 minutes to mix it, then closing the valve to return the tank to it's normal flow through the sump. The only equipment I'll need to move will be the bucket of salt and the scraper that I use to clean the glass. The whole thing should take no more than 15-20 minutes.

Really like following along. I'm guessing it's a smaller builder? In my experience the bigger ones don't like to mess with the spec plans as much as you have. Lucky guy!

That high sump will drive you nuts but sounds like it's a necessary evil here. I did water changes in my 225 exactly as you intend to. Easy as pie and only took me maybe 10 min.

Skimmer cleaning? What's that :mrgreen: I've only cleaned my skimmer 3 times in almost 2 years since my aquarium has been running :redface:

All joking aside, yes - easy maintenance is KEY. I've got my 40 plus gallon water changes down to 5-6 minutes now after I upgraded my water change pump to a bigger pump. Most of the water change time is waiting for the water to be pumped/drained.

40 dez? Tell me that's not weekly for your system volume lol. I was hoping to only do 40s on my 400 ;)

Yep, every week like clockwork. I've been doing a bit more than 40 since adding the 5' frag tank since I figured I have more water volume now. A bucket of salt per month :(.

Our builder is Citicore, we bought a house in a 60 year old neighborhood and knocked it down, so the house is 100% custom. It gives you tons of freedom, but we're finding that infinite choices can actually start to be a bad thing. It's easy to blow budgets, and of course, I can walk in to a plumbing show room and pick the most expensive things without even looking at a price tag.

I knew the sump was tall, but on paper it didn't seem like it was THAT tall. All that matters is that the skimmer and all the equip will fit and I can put the stuff I need to access the most right up front.

The house was insulated this week, so drywall should start next week (finally!). Once the drywall is up I'll be ordering the actual aquarium, I'm thinking starphire glass on the two exposed panels.

I'm super torn on the best nutrient export system. I can't decide between the Zeovit method or biopellets. I tried biopellets on my 90 gallon and had a crazy cyano outbreak, but I know others have awesome success with them. I love the look of zeo tanks, but man, daily supplementation just doesn't sound like something I will reliably do.

What do you all think?

Prodibio???.......same principal as Zeo......no rocks to tumble and a more forgiving dosing schedule

Met with Kevin, the project manager, and the interior designer yesterday to discuss the finishes around the aquarium. The dining room side is going to be a clean white wall with a tank hovering in the middle. They'll put a wooden panel in front of the stand and build the entire wall around the aquarium out of mdf that's been treated with a marine level of water-proofing. The tank will be rimmed with a thin strip of stainless steel to hide the returns of the wall panels. Should look hot. The access panels will be as low profile as possible with the goal of making it look like they don't exist.

The office side is where most of the business of maintenance will occur, so the access needs to be equally scaled up. They will be building a frame for a large set of vented/louvered cabinet doors for access to the sump area, with solid panels acting as doors above. Originally the doors above were supposed to be louvered/vented to help deal with heat from the MH, but with the fan running at all times, we wanted to create a bottom up vacuum of air that would also evacuate humidity from the sump cabinet. The fan's a 90 CFM, so it will hopefully be able to evacuate enough heat from the canopy to prevent things from getting dangerous.