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#2
02-11-2011, 03:15 PM
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I think if you check the links I posted, you will see that the first picture posted on this thread is of a cardiff and not a solana...
semantics though and I suppose irrelevant in the light of a great build. 
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#3
02-11-2011, 03:44 PM
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LOL, sorry.
Yes I meant the cardiff. And thank you once again The cardiff is actually still setup and sitting in my living room room as we speak. I wanted to take my time with the setup and equipment detail so instead of rushing things I actually just shifted cardiff over and setup this tank in its place. The number of times I have had to move our sectional counch though so that I can work on the tank... Lets just says its been a few  Details to follow this weekend: MP10 Install Individually switched powerbar and livestock transfer! I think I will be doing some mods to the fridge door too to make it easier to open, but not sure if I will have a chance to get the acrylic today.
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#4
02-11-2011, 03:55 PM
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Quote:
I can imagine how relieved you will be to have a build in place you are personally satisfied with that will not require moving anymore furniture and enables you to keep your food mashing to a minimum. I don't know that Ive seen any other non photosythetic tanks on here before...I must admit, I like the concept, especially for an upstairs tank in my 40 year old house that pretty much necessitates a reverse light cycle which being a 6 am to 2pm and in bed by 8 kind of guy, leaves me little time to actually enjoy the upstairs display. I'm looking forward to some close up full tank shots, I would love to see some of the original cardiff if you have any...
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#5
02-11-2011, 04:36 PM
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I will see if I can find some decent macro shots of the cardiff for you.
The cardiff is an amazing show piece from a few feet away but up close the distortion from the glass makes it almost impossible to get a decent pic. The camera has to be dead level to the ground and taking a pic at 90 degrees to the glass. Any angle at all and the pic comes out fuzzy every time. As for the light, the cardiff had a single 24" Reefbrite and the new tank will have 2-3 Reefbrites LED fixtures. These do not contribute any heat whatsoever. With 3 ReefBrites on the tank you can easily keep some photosynthetic corals in the tank as well and you dont have any heat trasfer to the tank.
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#7
02-12-2011, 01:09 AM
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Now its time to move the sectional for the last time!!
One more moving of our giant couch and the fridge is installed under the tank and we are ready to transfer the livestock! I am sooo happy I don't have to re-arrange the living room anymore to move this tank and stand again... Now with the fridge in place and the tank back against the wall, we removed most of the corals from the rock work and were ready to transfer the rock. When we put the Cardiff together we used a combination of the artificial rock that we make and live rock from Australia as the structure and diversity are like nothing I have seen before of since. The artificial rock was great as it raised the live rock well out of the sand bed. And the Aussie rock was great as we could create some real cliff hanger structures. This of course did require the assistance of epoxy and for this we used the Two Little Fishies Pink epoxy. In hind sight the pink probably was not the best choice. As this is a NPS tank there just isn't enough light to get coraline growth so the pink is still clearly visible... But as there is only one piece of live rock and 2 pieces of artificial rock at least there are only a few joints. K.. back on track.. Trina and I went to move this rock and after all this time the epoxy is still rock solid! The entire structure lifted up in just one piece which was just awsome as it made the transfer crazy easy and crazy fast. One of the biggest issues with the last tank was that we really did not have the space for the azoox gorgonia as they grew out. So for the new tank with a much larger foot print we decided to keep the exact same rock structure and just enjoy the extra space that I am soon would soon be filled in with corals You can see in this picture the piece of Diodogorgia nodulifera growing on the side of our rock structure. This piece has been in our tank for over a year now and growing quite well. Hopefully it doesn't mind the transfer as it is one of my (and Trina's) favorite pieces. Time for some gravel! We picked up some of the Carrib Sea, special grade reef sand locally and I left Trina to rinse the gravel She added 2-3" of gravel in a bucket at a time and rinsed it as best as she could but it never goes perfectly clear... After washing about 30 lbs we added it to the tank. And now for a part we can all truly appreciate. To add the water to the tank I just opened the ball valve on the 3/4" line and let the water start to flow! You can see the ball valve that controlls the flow to the tank in the first pic in this post, just above the fridge. All the splash on the front glass was because I had the water pouring onto the rock and it made a bit of a mess which doesn't really matter anyways since its inside the tank... but still..
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#8
02-12-2011, 04:10 PM
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Quote:
I had a pair of pom pom anemone crabs in the tank for a long time but could not find them on the transfer... Hope they made it.... These guys are craz cool to watch but as anybody knows that has one, they are quite reclusive. They can disappera for weeks on end then one day you see them walking arounf like this. The second pic is of the Blue Spotted Jawfish. The sandbed in this tank was not deep enough for him, plus with the minimal points of contact on the sandbed he eally could not build a proper burrow. So he never really settled in and kept jumping. On the Cardiff we first tried the glass lid that came with the tank to keep him in. I have never had a glass lid on a tank before so although I have read about the negative side effect I never really personally experienced them until this tank. We noticed that the redox was steadily decreasing so we stared doing more water changes, changing the food mash dailey and put on a bigger ozone generator. After a few weeks though, even with a 350mg ozone generator on a 24g tank we could only maintain the redox around 250. Then the glass lid issue occured to me, we removed the glass top and over the next few days the redox went back up the 375. So then we made a window screening top for the tank to stop him from jumping. But once a week he would end up in the back section of the tank and eventually one of the pumps got him... We were able to keep him for about a year, but I wouldnt try again withough first building an area for him to build his burrow.
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#9
03-01-2011, 02:06 AM
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Sorry, things have been a bit busy recently.
Just as un update, the tank has been running smoothly for a bit now. We have added some of the corals from the 24g back in as well as a few new pieces. I will see if we can snap a few pics and update the thread.
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