Martin's 180g Reef Build

[Skimmerking]

Holy heck man look at your tank come to life excellent

[MMAX]

Looks good so far Martin. Can't wait to see that bad boy up and running.

[fishytime]

so um......whatcha gonna do for lighting???.....metal halide???

[The Grizz]

I would go with PC lighting

Tank looks great on the stand Martin, can't wait to see how the flow accelerators work for you.

If your doing a herbie you want one pipe ( with the gate valve ) to be about 1/3 up from the bulkhead & the other one ( emergency drain ) to be just above the water level when running. No caps on either.

[lockrookie]

looking good martin welcome to the year of the 180 build club lol ive lost count but there are a few of us

[wmcinnes]

looks awesome! I'm currently doing a 90 gallon build and the tank isnt even wet yet and I want to upgrade...

[claymax]

now i know where all the profits are headed

[martinmcnally]

Originally Posted by The Grizz

I would go with PC lighting

Tank looks great on the stand Martin, can't wait to see how the flow accelerators work for you.

If your doing a herbie you want one pipe ( with the gate valve ) to be about 1/3 up from the bulkhead & the other one ( emergency drain ) to be just above the water level when running. No caps on either.

I wanna try it out having the primary drain a little higher to see how it goes first. Only reason is the overflow box is pretty big and a lot of water heading to the sump from the overflow alone during a power cut if the pipe is only 1/3 up from the bulk head. That's not even thinking about the siphon from the return until it hits some air to break it. Gonna have to be careful with that, trying to avoid a check valve in the return. Hence the threaded bulkhead, I can yank (sorry Americans) it out and cut another inch off until I get silence

Probably gonna try some old incandescent bulbs haha. About all I can afford right now.... oh wait I just found 5000 LEDs sitting here, hmmmm that's a coincidence

I'm actually most excited about the inline water change tank. Picked it up yesterday 29g so I can change 16% of the water pretty much automatically by just turning some valves, dumps the water down the drain, RO/DI kicks in, fills it back up, mix with salt and reverse valves to get it back in circulation. I hate doing water changes so this is going to make the process easy I think.

[martinmcnally]

Got the sump and much of the plumbing done today. The sump is not 100% finished yet but I am pushing ahead anyways. I will drain and add baffles and such at a later stage as I need this thing going and my other tank shutdown.

The sump:


This is the return plumbing all completed. Knife shutoff valve from the sump to the pump and a gate valve on the discharge side. It then splits using a Y junction into some 3/4 flex pipe and back to the tank.




Below is how the overflow is going to work. Its not completed as you can see. I ran out of pipe

To the right eventually will be an inline water change tank that will flow back to the sump.

To the left will eventually go to the left side of the sump where the fuge will be

Black arrow shows the normal over flow and blue the secondary overflow or emergency



When its all completed the Normal overflow route will actually be closed most of the time. Water will flow to the fuge and to the inline water changer (and back to the sump)

When I want to do a water change I would open the normal in this picture, shut off the water changer value and empty and refill the water change tank.

The pump is a reeflow barracuda and it is currently so noisy I decided to switch it off for the night. I installed it using some spacers and rubber washers (a lot of them). I thought that would be enough however tomorrow I will try a rubber pad. I just read I have to let it run for 48 hours non stop before I am allowed to complain about noise haha :/

[gregzz4]

Hiya Martin. Nice build so far.
If you don't mind some constructive criticism ...
Black ABS is for Waste water and may leach some undesired stuff into your system. I'd suggest you do your best to replace it all with 200, sch 40 or sch 80 PVC. You don't want any crap causing surprises that you won't be able to figure out.

And about your Herbie, I have my main 1" pipe about 2/3 up and the Emerg 3/4" pipe just below the DT level. Same as you, I don't want too much overflow box water draining into the sump. Plus it makes for a quieter box with the level higher. And when the emerg kicks in during testing, I hear sucking in the tank long before I hear drainage noise in the sump.