Azoox Tank Re-Build

[reefwars]

great advice thanks, i had been thinking the same thing that it would be best to have stuff special ordered to cut down on the amount of handling and different waters it has to stay in.

i am moving soon so my 200 and zoa tank have been taken down and sold once home ill be rebuilding the zoa tank into a cube myself but bigger and badder and will be building a decent frag tank off of that.this will take up most of my time in the near future but down the road id like to do a non photsynthetic tank.

ive been reading lots on them and watching alot of videos and bigger is def better if i had one ideally id have a fish room with another tank in the back just for water and id have all my equipment and reactors in there plus a large skimmer.also like you mention water changes are a super must and so id also have a change water plumbed in for fast and frequent water changes.

[PFoster]

Originally Posted by reefwars

great advice thanks, i had been thinking the same thing that it would be best to have stuff special ordered to cut down on the amount of handling and different waters it has to stay in.

i am moving soon so my 200 and zoa tank have been taken down and sold once home ill be rebuilding the zoa tank into a cube myself but bigger and badder and will be building a decent frag tank off of that.this will take up most of my time in the near future but down the road id like to do a non photsynthetic tank.

ive been reading lots on them and watching alot of videos and bigger is def better if i had one ideally id have a fish room with another tank in the back just for water and id have all my equipment and reactors in there plus a large skimmer.also like you mention water changes are a super must and so id also have a change water plumbed in for fast and frequent water changes.

Sweet, cant wait to see the build at the new place.

[PFoster]

Now lets get some more progress pics.

So with a game plan in mind it was time to run the plumbing.
I didnt get a pic before I started this mess and I should have but still. Currently I have 3 lines coming from my main display into the basement.
2 x 1.5" drains
1 x 1" return line

As the new tank would only have a low flow rate going to it I can easily tap into one of these overflow lines for the overflow from the tank.
And my return pump easily has enough flow to supply both system so I could tap into that as well, so thats what I did.



Adding to these lines sounded easy in theory but it proved to be a bit more difficult in reality. The lines that are curving up are the lines for the display tank. They swoop down through a vent opening that I made in the floor and travel to the left side towards my sump. The horizontal lines going to the right are the ones I just added and go to the new tank.

And here is where the come up and into the living room, through the cold air return from the furnace.

After taking this pic I replace the cardboard and sealed up the hole to the basement.


While I was at it, it didnt hurt to get a bit OCD and tack down the speaker wires and router and such to make things a bit cleaner looking.
The metal brackets worked perfectly here as you could just jam them under the base boards and they held the line down to make it nice and straight and tidy.

So now the line have been run to connect the new tank into my existing system.
Next step is to plumb in the tank.

[PFoster]

So the lines have been run and the tank is ready for installation but there was a snag.

The last tank was a half cylinder so it tucked into the couch very well and did not obstruct our stairs at all.
But this tank is square plus its a bit wider so it is going to stick out an extra few inches.
Plus now the tank will have plubing on the back so it need to be off the wall which means it stick out a bit further.

This tank was a custom order from Perfecto. The standard tank has a 1" drain in it which is a joke, its just too small. So we had a store custom order this tank with a 1.5" drain and a 3/4" return line from Perfecto. As the 1.5" drain is much larger inside the tank, it also mean that Perfecto had to make their overflow box indie the tank larger. Perfecto did a very nice job extending the overflow box into the tank and unless knew about the extention on the overflow you would nevern notice it.

Building my own tank was an option but If i did this it was going to be 36" deep so that I could have a 12" sand bed to keep garden eels but then as this tank is tieded into my display I didnt want to deal with the headache associated with a dsp attached to a primarily sps system... Plus if I was already building a tank it might as well be bigger... and next thing you know it would be a 180g or something

I had also considered ordering a custom tank but after the whole missing whole adventure on Hookups tank I decided against it.

Ok so back on track, the tank arrived and this is what we found:



So for someone doing just regular plubing this may not be an issue, but we need this tank to be as tight to the wall as possible and right now that 3/4" bulk head is way too long!



With the bulkhead that long, and with the 90 that I was going to use, if we did not mod the bulkhead, the 3/4" bulkhead + plubing would push the tank off the wall too far for where the tank sits.



So we measured twice and cut once.



We left enough material in the 3/4" bulkhead for a good bond and glued in the 90.



With the mods be got the total length of the plumbing off the back of the tank down to about 3.25"
We could have gotten the 3/4" line even closer if we wanted too by cutting the bulkhead shorter and tremeling out the bulkhead so the line could push in deeper but there really was no point as the limiting factor would now be the 1.5" plumbing below.