Asylumdown's 275 Tank build

[soaptray]

100GPD - Thats a good wait! Can't wait to see that tank all setup. Would love to see it in person some day if you are ever doing tours.

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by soaptray

100GPD - Thats a good wait! Can't wait to see that tank all setup. Would love to see it in person some day if you are ever doing tours.

I will happily give tours! Hopefully it's worth looking at sooner than later. Right now it's sitting there, running with fresh R/O water as though it were a real tank. It's teasing me, but it's end of term and I haven't had 3 minutes to breath, let alone go and get salt and get the salinity where it needs to be to start the cycle. grrrrrr!

As I age I'm turning more and more in to a weekend reefer.

[Madmak]

8! Yikers, that's the price of a small car! I bet it looks spectacular though.

[fishmanty]

Pics! I want to see what 6-8 Radions look like! and how much you have to turn them down! :P

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by fishmanty

Pics! I want to see what 6-8 Radions look like! and how much you have to turn them down! :P

Well I just picked them up yesterday and haven't sorted out how I'm going to hang them yet (Kevin is helping me come up with something that will allow me to raise and lower them), so at the moment this is the closest I've got to a pic...



I did however take one of those MP60's and put it in the tank yesterday and holy freaking crap. I'm going to have to do some playing around with rock scaping and power head placement. With the powerhead about half way between the sand and the top of the water, it can cause full blown sand tornados on the second lowest setting! The power of it gives me tingles.

[soaptray]

Jebus! There is $7500 of goods right there. Amazing.

[lastlight]

all i see is sexy tiles contrasting a nice white stand. #JealousAsFrag

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by lastlight

all i see is sexy tiles contrasting a nice white stand. #JealousAsFrag

These floor tiles are freaking awesome. Best design choice we made I think lol.

[ashr]

Originally Posted by asylumdown

Well I just picked them up yesterday and haven't sorted out how I'm going to hang them yet (Kevin is helping me come up with something that will allow me to raise and lower them), so at the moment this is the closest I've got to a pic...



I did however take one of those MP60's and put it in the tank yesterday and holy freaking crap. I'm going to have to do some playing around with rock scaping and power head placement. With the powerhead about half way between the sand and the top of the water, it can cause full blown sand tornados on the second lowest setting! The power of it gives me tingles.

This picture just blows my mind haha. So much money spent right here.. wow.

Great looking tank and setup!!

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by mseepman

Hey any updates on this? Anxiously awaiting to see how it moves forward from here. What does your rock look like now?

It has been a while hasn't it?

Well, I'm not gonna post any pics just yet as I was a little over zealous with the cycling process and caused a nasty algae problem before I even had any fish. Thankfully it's getting better now, but I'm still working on getting my nutrient export system dialled in. NO3 and PO4 keep testing at zero, so I'm having to go visually at how fast the algae that's left is growing.

As for the rocks - I got a 66 pound box of Walt Smith live rock shipped directly from Fiji (thanks Kevin!) and picked it up at the end of April (I think). I put it in the sump to cure it, then left town for most of May. When I got home, the tank looked like garbage, which I was expecting, so right now I'm bringing the tank down to a low nutrient system using BP and GFO, which I expect to take a bit of time and fiddling around

The tank looked WAY too full with all the marco rock plus the live rock in the display, so I took out about 50 pounds of Marco rock. Some went in the frag chamber, some is in my garage. The rock structure looks pretty close to the earlier pics I posted, only now the visible stuff is made up of mostly live rock. I'm going to rescape again in the not too distant future so that there are more hiding places in both rock structures, I don't want there being any aggression over sleeping sites.

I put all the corals I had in my 5 gallon pico in to the tank to test the lights, and at 100% for 6 hours a day, almost every single thing bleached. I lost a scoly (on the sand bed), and am worried that a big chalice (2 inches off the sand bed) and a small elegance (on the sand bed) might not pull through. In all fairness, those 'tester' corals were in the tank before I put 66 pounds of completely uncured live rock in the sump then left for weeks, so they likely had compounding issues, but the chalice coral was about 1/3 in the shade, and only the surface exposed to the light bleached. The clam I had in the pico is about half way up in the tank, and it was barely even opening until I dialled the lights way back. They now come on with a simulated sunrise at 7:30, slowly ramp up through 20K to 12K at 60% at noon, then gradually gain another 5% intensity over the course of 6 hours, and at 6 start dimming down through 20K to a simulated sunset at 9. I added a medium sized open brain coral to the sand bed and one small tester frag of SPS about half way up the rock work this week and am going to use them as my indicators for light levels going forward. The two corals that seemed to have no problem with the lights at 100% were my two Acans frags. If anything they got more colourful under the radions.

As soon as I get the algae issue a little more under control I'll post pics. I'm sort of working against myself a little at the moment as I have started buying fish and I'm having a hard time getting them to eat anything except mysis shrimp. I bought a blue-eyed bristle tooth tang when I got home from hawaii to help with algae clean up, and he won't even acknowledge nori sheets. I've also got a couple other fish that I'm trying to get started on pellets, krill, and chopped seafood, but so far all I'm doing is adding a whole bunch of extra, uneaten nutrients to the water.