Now its time to move the sectional for the last time!!
One more moving of our giant couch and the fridge is installed under the tank and we are ready to transfer the livestock!
I am sooo happy I don't have to re-arrange the living room anymore to move this tank and stand again...
Now with the fridge in place and the tank back against the wall, we removed most of the corals from the rock work and were ready to transfer the rock. When we put the Cardiff together we used a combination of the artificial rock that we make and live rock from Australia as the structure and diversity are like nothing I have seen before of since. The artificial rock was great as it raised the live rock well out of the sand bed. And the Aussie rock was great as we could create some real cliff hanger structures. This of course did require the assistance of epoxy and for this we used the Two Little Fishies Pink epoxy. In hind sight the pink probably was not the best choice. As this is a NPS tank there just isn't enough light to get coraline growth so the pink is still clearly visible... But as there is only one piece of live rock and 2 pieces of artificial rock at least there are only a few joints.
K.. back on track..
Trina and I went to move this rock and after all this time the epoxy is still rock solid!
The entire structure lifted up in just one piece which was just awsome as it made the transfer crazy easy and crazy fast.
One of the biggest issues with the last tank was that we really did not have the space for the azoox gorgonia as they grew out. So for the new tank with a much larger foot print we decided to keep the exact same rock structure and just enjoy the extra space that I am soon would soon be filled in with corals
You can see in this picture the piece of Diodogorgia nodulifera growing on the side of our rock structure. This piece has been in our tank for over a year now and growing quite well. Hopefully it doesn't mind the transfer as it is one of my (and Trina's) favorite pieces.
Time for some gravel!
We picked up some of the Carrib Sea, special grade reef sand locally and I left Trina to rinse the gravel
She added 2-3" of gravel in a bucket at a time and rinsed it as best as she could but it never goes perfectly clear...
After washing about 30 lbs we added it to the tank.
And now for a part we can all truly appreciate.
To add the water to the tank I just opened the ball valve on the 3/4" line and let the water start to flow!
You can see the ball valve that controlls the flow to the tank in the first pic in this post, just above the fridge.
All the splash on the front glass was because I had the water pouring onto the rock and it made a bit of a mess which doesn't really matter anyways since its inside the tank... but still..