EternityBC's 450g 12 feet of floating fun

[eternitybc]

Well, small set back...
I put a level on the beams after the construction and everything looked pretty good. Not perfect, but totally passable for standard construction. It was kind of nagging me in the back my mind for a couple months though and it occurred to me I had a laser level. So I shot a line 5 inches above the beams and measured down. Well I'm glad I did. It turns out over the span of 16 feet a tiny bit out of level translates into almost 1/2 of an inch, with more than 1/4" racking corner to corner. So that sucked.

Not wanting to try and bandaid it with foam I decided to bite the bullet and redo the top.

Before I leveled it, I wanted to put as much weight on it as I could to ensure I didn't get much settling.
9 bins of water and 1500 pounds later; I'm pretty sure my neighbors thought I was nuts as I filled these with my garden hose.


A week later, off with the plywood, and of course it had to be glued


Tip: if you ever have to remove PL glue, a heatgun turns it soft enough to easily scrape it right off but use a chemical respirator, I did half of it without one and paid dearly that night.

Now to shim it, I have a planner so I made a jig to plane 1x6s down into long wedges. I ended up making eight 4 foot wedges which where about 1/8" shorter on one side. It was tedious as hell but worked well. Here they're installed:


Grabbed a nice finished birch 3/4 plywood from Windsor and proceed to glue it down only to realize I only had about half the amount of glue I need. That was proceeded by a frantic trip to the hardware store and a ton of clamps to get the curing glue flat. In the end it turned out perfect, less than 1/64 from end to end.


Putting me right back to waiting for the tank

[Piscez]

Wow already a roller coaster and the tank hasn't arrived!! Good for you man perusing your passion and an understanding wife LOL. I see you used PoCo building supplies! We must be near neighbours I"m in Citadel heights, best of luck going forward.

[mseepman]

Awesome build thread. I'm hooked. So glad you put the effort in to fix the slope, it would have driven you crazy.

[eternitybc]

Originally Posted by Piscez

Wow already a roller coaster and the tank hasn't arrived!! Good for you man perusing your passion and an understanding wife LOL. I see you used PoCo building supplies! We must be near neighbours I"m in Citadel heights, best of luck going forward.

Thanks! I'm over in Port Moody so not too far away.

Time to start thinking about the fish room, I have been putting it off for a while. Here is the basic layout I have so far:


So the idea is the Frag tank and Refugium will overflow into the main sump. If I have enough flow I will tee off the return line otherwise it will be a separate pump. Sadly I'm dealing with 16' of head pressure back to the display.

I will run the RODI unit into the top of the Salt container and the RO Tank, each having there own solenoids and float valves. I may even plumb a drain at the top of each tank too in case they fail.

The RO Tank will be used for top off to the sump and quarantine tanks.

I liked the idea of having lots of quarantine tanks, but I haven't decided yet how I'm going to plumb them. Part of me wants to add drain holes to the sewer on each and a filling pipe from the sump so I can easily empty the quarantine and refill it with tank water.

I have all the tanks except the four 20G quarantines. Here is the beast for salt water:


Any ideas are welcome as I haven't fully committed to this yet.

[eternitybc]

Oh and this just arrived:

[hillegom]

A heat exchange unit?

[eternitybc]

Originally Posted by hillegom

A heat exchange unit?

Yup! The plan is to run a re-circulation pump from my gas hot-water heater through it and use it to heat the sump. I did some rough math and it should save me about 40% on my heating.

[mseepman]

Wow, interesting idea on the pump. Would that be in the water out would it just be Pex lines coiled inside?

[eternitybc]

Originally Posted by mseepman

Wow, interesting idea on the pump. Would that be in the water out would it just be Pex lines coiled inside?

I was originally just going to coil some Pex into the sump but I read that having all that water in the coil sitting at 25 degrees isn't ideal (legionnaires) especially since it's returning back into the water supply. That's why I went the heat exchanger route.

Originally Posted by WarDog

Very interested to see this in practice. Please provide details and pics of the installation and final product. I'm guessing your home has an instant hot water boiler and is already plumbed with a re-circ system?

The fish room is an unfinished bathroom in the basement so it has the hot and cold lines already there. The plan is to use those as the loop back to the hot water tank using one of these:
Watts Recirculating Pump

So here is the design I'm thinking:

Originally Posted by hillegom

Is the heat exchanger made from 316 stainless?
That"s one of the best corrosion resistance ss. However, it will corrode as well in saltwater, albeit very slowly.

Since I'm going to put saltwater through it I had to go with Titanium for exactly those reasons.

[WarDog]

Originally Posted by eternitybc

Yup! The plan is to run a re-circulation pump from my gas hot-water heater through it and use it to heat the sump. I did some rough math and it should save me about 40% on my heating.

Very interested to see this in practice. Please provide details and pics of the installation and final product. I'm guessing your home has an instant hot water boiler and is already plumbed with a re-circ system?