Asylumdown's 275 Tank build

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by reefermadness

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.

[lastlight]

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.