Red Sea max 250 or custom 60 - 70 gal ??

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Lighting

So now onto the lights. Lighting comes courtesy of 6 x 39w T5 tubes, three 10,000K and three actinic, which the manual recommends are fitted alternately. Cooling is provided by two fans on the left side of the hood that draw air in, and two exhaust fans on the right. This solution appears to work effectively, and I’ve not yet seen the lighting cause any significant rise in water temperature. A year ago, and I’d probably have been crying out for a Metal Halide option, but I think Red Sea have gone for the best solution here. Yes, MH looks nice, but the cooling issues in a closed tank would have been considerable – chillers would have been a necessity. And I really, really don’t see the need. There’s a lot of light in the tank now – comparing it to my Max it was obvious how much brighter the Max 250 is. There will always be those for whom it’s MH or nothing, but with T5 technology as it stands (and the rising cost of electricity and environmental issues) then I can’t see the need or justification. Then of course there’s the other option - LED lighting that I know a lot of Max 130 owners have added to supplement the standard lighting. I think there’s a great future in LED aquarium lighting, but right now the technology isn’t mature or cheap enough. Maybe in a couple of year time if we get another generation of Maxes then we should expect it, but right now, T5 is right.
When I got my original Max 130, I was mildly disappointed that the lighting timer was mechanical, rather than digital. Indeed, the timer on the early Maxes was a pig and I had two fail on me. However, Red Sea changed the spec and fitted a very good quality German timer, which has proved to be totally reliable ever since. So much so, that when I read the original spec for the 250 and it said it had a digital timer, I was disappointed – aren’t I fickle! Anyway, it would appear that Red Sea had trouble getting an electronic timer as reliable as the mechanical one, so – for now at least – the Max 250 comes with the mechanical timer, which I’m glad to see. The timer is the sort you get on plug-in timer sockets – a large dial graduated over 24 hours with segments around the outside that you set depending on whether you want the main lights to be on or off. Perhaps it would have been nice to have the lights on two independently switchable banks, so you could have the actinics coming on before the others, but I guess this would just have added to cost.

When the main lights are switched off, eight blue LEDs automatically illuminate under the hood providing the almost obligatory night lighting, although this function can be switched off if required. The night lighting is more intense and evenly spread than on the original Max, and fluorescing corals really stand out under its rippling glow.

Inside the Tank

Before I move on to the components, it’s worth just mentioning the inside of the tank. You’ve got the main viewing area of the tank, and at the back you’ve got the sump where the behind-the-scenes stuff happens. Now with the original Max, it was all very modular at the back with everything packed into it’s own little place. You don’t get the same feeling with the Max 250, with much more room in the sump, components are just “there”, if that makes sense. There’s also a feeling of quality – even with some of the most expensive tanks you still get the feeling that it’s just a lot of acrylic and glass rectangles stuck together with generous amounts of silicon, but this Max is different – it gives you the feeling that it’s been manufactured, rather than merely made. If that doesn’t make much sense, think of the difference between the interior of a luxury car and that of a utility vehicle.

At the back right of the tank are two fans to assist with water cooling when required, which are wired into the hood and controlled from a switch housed with the lighting control. Unlike some aquarium cooling fans, the Max 250 fans blow air into the tank, rather than extract it. This is a good thing, as it means that it’s “clean” air passing through the fan, rather than humid, salty air which would corrode the fans very quickly. Nevertheless, as Red Sea point out in the manual, operating in this environment the fans are going to have a limited life and should probably be viewed as consumables, like the T5 light tubes. Luckily, they’re fitted into an easily removable module, so changing them is easy and Red Sea assure me replacements aren’t going to be expensive. There’s also a convenient cable-management system that runs across the tank to keep the wires from the components out of the way. Most pass through a channel along the stop of the tank/sump divider, accessed by a hinged flap that clips over the top of the channel.

Circulation and Filtration

Circulation and filtration is controlled by two pumps, one at each side of the sump which feed water back into the tank through two adjustable nozzles on the rear wall. The nozzles aren’t quite as adjustable as they might appear, and although they can be rotated through 360 degrees, they’re always going to be predominantly forward facing. As both outputs are quite strong, directing the flows can be a bit restrictive – too low and substrate starts getting moved; too high and surface agitation starts to cause salt creep with salt crystals forming on the hood and light glass. I think a bit more flexibility in the nozzles would have helped here, but that would have been at the cost of restricting the flow. Perhaps a wider bore might have done the trick.

Pump 1 is rated at 2400l/h and Pump 2 1200l/h, giving a total of 3,600l/h, or approximately 15x tank volume/hour. There’s always a lot of discussion over how much flow you need for certain types of corals (especially SPS and LPS), and in my original Max I added a supplementary pump to increase the 10x turnover. HOWEVER, I later removed that pump and saw no decrease in growth/health of corals with 10x flow, so I’m quite happy that the Max 250’s 15x is appropriate for virtually all requirements. The pumps hang from the nozzles on standard pump hose, so changing them for any other pump shouldn’t be a problem should the originals “die” or a different spec is required. Both of the pumps are very quiet (practically inaudible).

Water enters the sump through a large grill on the centre rear of the tank with an adjustable shutter that slides up and down. Red Sea recommend that the shutter should normally be positioned about 2cm below the surface and my own experience supports that, though you can open the shutter a good 10cm (4”) or so if need be. The grill breaks the surface of the water, so permanent surface skimming isn’t a problem – something that was an issue on the original Max. The water cascades into to central chamber in the sump, which is predominantly taken up with the protein skimmer – more on that later. Also in this compartment is the 200w heater and a foam bubble trap. After the problems some people experienced with bubbles in the original Max, it seems that Red Sea are not taking any chances with the 250 – there’s more foam in the sump than in your average bed shop.

The water can then pass to the left or the right. To the right it enters another compartment that contains Pump 2, which expels it back into the tank. However, there’s also room in this compartment to fit a secondary pump and return to feed a chiller etc, and Red Sea have provided a well designed clip-in attachment that allows you to plumb your chiller in without having to faff around trying to fit u-bends and the like. If you don’t want to use it, you can just fit the blanking plate that’s also supplied. One thing that might have been nice to see would have been a spare socket on the power strip that an extra pump could have been plugged in to – although the power strip uses European type plugs, much aquarium equipment sold in the UK comes fitted with a Euro plug screwed into a UK adapter. Still, if you’re running an additional pump it’s probably going to be feeding something that needs to plug in anyway.

Water flowing to the left through the sump goes through the traditional filter media. Entering the bottom of the chamber, it passes upwards through a bag of synthetic biological media. I know many people will choose to replace this with live rock rubble, but it’s still an appropriate media for Red Sea to provide. There’s then a plastic drop-in “shelf”, on top of which sits the carbon, with plenty of room for any other media you might want to add (such as phosphate remover). Accessing the media for maintenance is easy, although due to the height of the tank it’s likely that you’ll need to stand on something to be able to reach right down into the compartment. The water then flows to the left, and into the final compartment. Between the two compartments, there’s a plastic frame full of filter floss that can be slid into place in for “water polishing”. The floss gets clogged pretty quickly, so apart from when dealing with very dirty water (such as after major maintenance), I think most people are going to leave this out. The last compartment contains Pump 1, which pumps the water back into the main tank.

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Protein Skimmer

This was an important one for Red Sea to get right. The skimmer on the first Red Sea Max came in for quite a bit of criticism – some of it justified, some not so. It was fairly criticised due to its noise, which was down to the skimmer pump itself rather than anything to do with the functioning of the skimmer. Other criticisms came about from some people suffering microbubbles in their tanks, although once the tank and skimmer had been set up properly this normally ceased to be a problem. The final criticism came down to the efficiency of the skimmer. Due to the design of the filter grill, it wasn’t really practical to run the water level up to the optimum height for the skimmer to give its best, and therefore people were disappointed in the lack of gunk in their skimmer cups. However, running the water level at its optimum level and stopping it from dropping did allow the skimmer to work efficiently, and Red Sea have recently brought out a skimmer box add-on (which comes as standard on the new 130D) which allows the skimmer to operate at its best in a much wider range of conditions. Unfortunately, the Internet being what it is, the accepted fact started to become that the standard skimmer was not up to the job and it got to the stage on some forums where any new members awaiting or having just taken delivery of their RSMs were told that they needed to by an alternative skimmer. So people are going to want to know how the skimmer in the 250 compares with the original 130 (the new 130D also has a new design of skimmer, similar to the 250’s)

The skimmer in the 250 is of similar initial appearance to the 130 skimmer, consisting of a square-section tapered housing in which the air/water interface takes place around a series of baffles, and a large removable rectangular collection cup that fits on top of it, though that is where similarities end. The skimmer is powered by a 1200l/h pump, which runs virtually silently. The airline from the pump connects to an adjustable air valve that is affixed to the side of the cup. The air valve feeds from a small chamber inside the cup, to which is connected another airline that feeds outside the tank to bring drier air in from the room.

Within the removable cup itself is a clever design – the height of the neck up which the bubbles “climb” before passing into the cup can be easily adjusted by turning it either clockwise or anti-clockwise – the neck literally screws into the cup. It’s a great feature as once you get the skimmer set up approximately using the air valve, you can make very quick and easy fine adjustments just by turning the neck. As you’d expect, it takes a couple of weeks in a new tank before the skimmer gets working properly, and it’s probably not worth spending too much time adjusting it until the bio-load has stablised.

So is it the skimmer any good? Well, the only noise you get from it now is the sound of the bubbles rather than any loud pump noise. As for performance, it really is excellent, whether you’re after the thick, brown smelly muck or wet skim. It’s worth taking the time to tweak it to perfection once the tank has been running a few weeks, but the adjustable neck then makes keeping it fine-tuned a doddle. The skimmer is so efficient that you won’t run it with the valve right open – the cup would fill within a few hours – but even with it fully open I didn’t experience any microbubbles in the tank.

The manual recommends emptying the skimmer cup daily, but to be honest it’s so big that you could probably go several weeks before you needed to. That said, it’s worth doing at least weekly to clear any accumulation off the neck to keep it running at it’s best. Emptying the cup isn’t quite as straight forward as the original Max take-it-off-clean-it-put-it-back-on as the airlines need to be disconnected and the extra height and width means you need to draw the whole skimmer some way out of the water before you can easily remove the cup, and replacing it needs to be done without being able to see the neck to align it. At first I was ready to criticize the Max 250 for this, but to be honest after a couple of empties you soon get the hang of it and it really isn’t as onerous as it might sound.

Noise

So, how noisy/quiet is this thing? Well 24/7 you’ve got 2 pumps running and the skimmer; during lights-on you’ve got 4 hood fans (2 at each side), and optionally you’ve got the two auxiliary fans if you need a bit of additional cooling. The loudest component is the skimmer, although it’s much quieter than the original Max and it’s the sound of bubbles you hear rather than the pump. The lighting fans give you a gentle, but audible “whoosh”, which more or less doubles in volume if you turn the cooling fans on. Finally, the two pumps themselves are practically silent. There can also be some noise from water falling through the skimmer gate, depending on how you have it adjusted, but you don’t tend to hear this unless you turn the skimmer off. It’s not really possible to give a meaningful assessment of overall noise, so the best I can offer is to say that you can certainly hear the Max 250, but it’s not as invasive as the original Max and I don’t think you’re going to get quieter without an external sump stuck in a cabinet.

Summary

If you’re expecting the Max 250 to be just a stretched version of the 130, then you’ll be surprised. Whilst keeping the classic design of the original, the 250 takes things to another level, and as you assemble it you find yourself thinking “this is a serious piece of kit”. It has a real size and presence about it, and it’s hard to believe that it’s not even a metre wide. It’s a fantastic looking tank, and I can’t fault any of the components or their performance.

So how does it compare to the competition? I’m going to re-use an analogy I used when I reviewed the original Max. The Max 250 is what Apple is to a PC. It’s beautiful, it just works, and it doesn’t need to be modified. That certainly seems to be the design spec, but I do think the last part of that may put a few people off – whilst it doesn’t need to be modified, some people will want to modify none the less and Red Sea have rather limited the options, not least by making it impossible to fit a sump in the cabinet in the way they have partitioned it. Let me stress that you don’t need an extra sump – that’s what the back of the Max is all about, but for some enthusiasts a traditional large-volume under-tank sump is a personal “must-have”. Nevertheless, it’s good to see that simple additions like chillers or reactors have been well catered for.

Compared to the “entry level” market, then there’s probably a price premium over a solution involving separate components bought together with a new tank on a Sunday afternoon in the local garden centre, but I think that premium is going to be worth it for the aesthetics, the ease of use and assembly, and the peace of mind that the components were designed to work together.

At the other end of the market, people already have very established ideas and firm favourites. For some, there’s also an elitism about how many additional pieces of kit one person can add and how many dozens of power sockets you need, and this isn’t really the market this product is aimed at. However, for the hobbyist who’s primary interest lies with the livestock rather than having every piece of equipment going, I think the Red Sea Max 250 offers everything that any other premium brand set-up does, with unbeatable looks to boot.

Pros

Fantastic looking aquarium
Easy to set up and use
High quality construction and components
Truly a complete solution

Cons

Pricier than some alternative set-ups
Design limits possibilities for positioning of aquarium
Skimmer can be awkward to access for shorter people when adjusting or emptying
Powerful pump outlets need to be carefully directed

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Courtesy of "NightFox" in the UK