72 Bow, journal? More like a short story with a dose of Murphy's Law!

[Piscez]

Hi everyone, Well after a 30 year hiatus from fw and always wanting sw I finally decided to take the plunge in October last year. My wife and kids we're happy as it was a hobby that kept me home! After 8 years of renting our basement we were finally at the stage of needing the space which in turn gave me some tank space! Started with a 33gal and quickly discovered this wasn't going to cut it. So in February I went on the search for something in the 4ft range as that was the space I had available. I really liked the look of the bowfront tanks, so when a used one came up here on Canreef I had to have it. With the help of one of my soccer team buddies we got it in the house in one piece:



The lighting it came with was a non working Coralife PC so during the wait for the tank to be available I picked up a used (1 week only) Current USA Nova Extreme Pro T5HO 6x54w from another forum member.

Here's a pic of the relatively small sump, but this is because the shape of the stand, sump size espcially width is very limited. It came with bio balls which I decided not to use to free up more sump space:




Starting the fill:



Later that evening:



Next day, some more LR added, let the cycle begin:




I must say none of this could have happened with out this forum as I'm a complete newb in the sw world. Even though my post count is very low mainly because I didn't have anything to offer I spent countless hours reading and more reading. I'm not one to post an obvious question that couldn't be answered with a decent search. Again thanks to all, I've already made what I would consider a friend or two from this forum.

Also thanks to the helpful staff at J&L and Aquatic addictions!


Knowing I was going for a fairly heavy bioload I thought it best to upgrade my skimmer from a Coralife 125 to this monster Marinetek 250 comes with the Sedra 9000 pump, the build quality on this unit is "A1":





So far so good by early March I had reached this stage.........:




That's when all broke loose!........






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