[rdnicolas]

Originally Posted by untamed

One of the things that I did right was to build a system for raising and lowering the lights. It provides a nice solution to being able to move the lights out of the way so that you can work on the tank. By moving them straight up (9' ceiling helps you), they still light up the tank while you are working.

If you slide the lights out of the way to work, then you can't see what you are doing because it is dark. I know that some people mount permanent "work lights" on the ceiling specifically to light the tank when the main lights have been moved out of the way.

I started with a simple rope/pulley idea, which eventually became slightly more complex....(understatement)

Bottom line.....think VERY hard about every maintenance task required. Ask yourself how to design your system to enable those taskes to be done as easily as possible. Water change, glass cleaning, sand cleaning, skimmer cleaning, sump access, pump replacement/cleaning, overflow grate cleaning, light bulb replacement, Water purification...

ThanksFor the advice Untamed... BTW I'm Big fan of your system. Its what inspired my wife and I to go big... That being said, I just noticed that the tank Zylumn linked is even taller than the 36" I was originally aiming for. Regarding Cleaning the sand. My wife an I currently own a python cleaning system (pic): with a 24" suction tube. The tube is sometimes too wide to get around rocks so I'm planning rigging a smaller diameter tube to get into the tighter spaces. I was hopeing I'd be able to get by using that with a kagillion cleaner crews. Regarding water changes I was planning to use a small 20 gallon tank and make 5% changes every week. (However I like Pansy-PAws contingency system with his 50 gallon containers.)