Fishroom build (240 DT)

[rininger85]

OK I got the mass email saying that it wasn't an automated message and that I hadn't posted here in a while (I'm not really on here that much because I frequent a different forum) so I thought I'd post my current plans for my fish room build and maybe get some more feedback from some different people...

So to start I'll fill in a bit of my history, but I'll summarize a lot of stuff just to give an idea where I've been and what I've done... I grew up with freshwater tanks, but then when starting out on my own I went a long time without tanks... when I bought my first house I bought a little 10 gallon tank and had a few freshwater fish in it, but never really had good luck with it because I didn't start out trying to learn the basics... tank ended up being an algae tank instead of a fish tank and my fish all ended up dying (little did I know at the time that they tank needed to cycle before adding anything to it, I just bought the tank and boughts some fish and tossed them in it). I ended up selling the tank and went several years without again, then for some reason I decided to get another tank. Went to the store and bought another 10 gallon starter kit with the intention of catching local fish to put in it instead of buying fish from the store because the house I was renting at the time had a river run through the yard.

I set the tank up and went out to the river and tossed a minnow net in. I caught a few little catfish that I decided to put one in the tank, and caught some shiners and crayfish that I tossed in the tank. They looked pretty out of place with the big castle that I put in the tank for decoration... one day I noticed the shiners were gone... figured the catfish had probably eaten them so I tossed the catfish back in the river and caught some more shiners and put them in. Then I noticed the crayfish were actually catching and eating the shiners so I ended up tossing everything out and the tank sat empty for a month or two until my dad was visiting and made a comment about paying to run an empty aquarium... so I went and bought some guppies to toss in it. Guppies did what guppies do, they overpopulated the tank in a manner of a few months, so I started looking on craigslist and picked up a 55 gal tank that I upgraded my guppy tank (along with quite a few other fish too but mostly guppies) to. Ran that for a few months and then started looking in to salt water tanks. I read about people doing nano tanks so decided to try my luck with a 10 gallon saltwater tank against everyones advice. I spent a lot of money and had a lot of failures learning along the way, but the one thing about starting the saltwater tank was I finally started reading to learn what was going on in the tank and why my previous attempts had failed, why my fish always died, etc. etc. Someplace in that time frame I also decided to convert my 55 gal in to a planted tank so I changed all my substrate without running any filter floss and ended up crashing the 55 gal and having to start it over. Finally November 2013 we had a 5 day stretch of no power, I bought a generator to keep my tanks going, but in December we had a 6 day power outage and I wasn't home to run the generator, so my saltwater tank everything died off. That's when I decided to upgrade my saltwater tank. I sold the 55 gal tank and bought two 40B's that fit in the space where the 55 gal and 10 gal tanks were previously sitting.

I ran a freshwater planted 40B and a saltwater 40B side by side for a while, but got married and started looking to buy a house and one of my goals in buying a house was to be able to go BIG. I'm an avid scuba diver so I love the colorful fish just as much as corals, and don't want to be limited on what fish I can have so one of my requirements in buying a house was that I have a room that I could turn in to my fish room and be able to do a BIG tank. After many months looking for a house we found the right one and have been in it for about a month now. I have broke down all of my tanks except for the 40B saltwater tank, a 10 gal saltwater tank that I just set back up to move some hermits to that were starting to pick at corals, and a 10 gal planted freshwater tank that sits on my desk at work. Now I'm not doing much with my saltwater tank, but preparing for the fishroom / upgrade!

My plan is to do a 240 gallon tank built in to the wall so it is visible from the downstairs family room as well as the downstairs bedroom which is becoming my fish room. The attached picture is an old one (not our stuff in the house), but it looks about the same just no stuff there now since we haven't finished unpacking yet. The wall on the left behind the couch is where my 240 gal tank will be located. Also attached a picture of what my 40B looks like as of about 10 days ago. Will go in more details in the next post.

 

[rininger85]

My plan for the tank upgrade is coming along pretty well although I don't plan on really starting the tank upgrade until November. I will be purchasing the 240 gallon tank from glasscages in December because I figured that it would work out nicely that I could pick the tank up when I am in TN in December and drive it home myself instead of paying for shipping as I spend a week at my hunting property in TN every year in December.

The 240 gallon display tank will be attached to a 75 gallon sump in which I will just house my skimmer (probably going to be reef octo SRO5000INT is my current plan) and heaters, the rest of the space in the tank will be dedicated as a frag tank area (had considered having a stand alone frag tank, but decided to just put it in the sump after I decided to move the sump up on the stand in order to lower the stand height to make it easier for maintaining the 240 gal tank. Having the sump under the stand required it to be really high for the skimmer to fit). Then from the frag section of the sump I am going to have it overflow to a 40B under the stand in which I plan to try my hand with a refugium, then from the refugium return to the DT. I also plan on having a 40B QT / observation tank that will not be plumbed in to the main system located under the DT... so far I buy everything from my LFS for the most part, and they QT everything, but I am going to have so many thousands of dollars wrapped in to this tank that I don't want to take a chance, so I decided I was going to get the QT to be safe (plus I already have the two 40B's, and the 75 gal tank on hand so might as well use them).

Here is a screenshot of my current plan for the layout. I am going to have to relocate the door from it's current location to the other end of the room because I want to have a sink in the fish room, and didn't want to have to run plumbing all the way across the room, so the easiest thing to do is move the door so the tank is on the wall closest to the utility room where I can get water from, also where my RO/DI filter is at so it is easier to just poke a hole through the wall to run a tube in to my water storage tanks. I plan on putting the sink in the existing closet, as well as two 34 gal trash cans for storing RO/DI water and mixed salt water. I'm currently working on other projects in the new house, so haven't started ripping apart the walls to move my door yet, but I think I'll probably start building the stand in November when my dad is up visiting so he can help me when I need an extra hand. The tank will be picked up the week between Christmas and New Years when I'm in TN.

 

[rininger85]

here is a closer look at the DT / sump. The DT I am planning on having (3) overflows located in a C2C style of overflow box, but I am going to have the C2C located on one end of the tank instead of the back of the tank because the tank will be visible from both rooms. Eventually my fish room will also become my office so I will have a desk in there to be able to get away and focus on work / school stuff without the interuptions of my wife constantly running around trying to clean the house while I study. The reason she agreed to the fishroom was also due to the fact that she got tired of seeing all of my fish stuff laying around the house, so with the current plan she'll be able to enjoy the tank from the family room and not have to see all of my clutter laying all over the place =)

The sump will be simple, just an over/under/over baffle between the skimmer section and the frag section. I'll have a heater or two located in the sump, as well as a backup heater located in the refugium as well. At this time I'm not planning on having a heater in the DT because I want to minimize the cords sticking in the tank as much as possible. I recently purchased the apex gold during their labor day sale in order to get the free AFS, still waiting for the AFS to arrive, so will have all of my probes and such in the sump as well, and my ATO floats will be in a sectioned off piece of the refugium.

 

[rininger85]

here is a sketch of my current ATO set up (a few months old though because I sketched this up when I was at the old house, in the new house everything is in the same area except the RO/DI is in the utility room with a hose through the wall to fill the trash can.

The RO/DI goes in to the trash can which sits on top of a stand. I have an ASOV on the RO/DI so it shuts off when the trash can float hits full. Then I gravity drain from the trash can to a 5 gallon bucket under my tank stand in which I house my ATO pump to push the water up in to my tanks. Will be the same set up just my current 40B will become the refugium under the 240 tank/stand.

 

[Daniel@R2R]

Cool! Following! Glad you decided to post up the build! :thumb:

 

[rininger85]

Currently I have two if the 165W ebay LED's. The first one I bought was the blue/white with no optics, I ran that one for a while until I decided I wanted to replace the T5HO that I had over my planted tank, so then I bought one of the full spectrum with 90 degree optics LED's and moved the blue/white over the planted tank and have been using the full spectrum on my 40B saltwater tank. I am still kind of undecided on what I'm going to do for the lights on the upgrade. I am hesitant between using the same LED's (get a couple more fixtures that way I could put the blue/white over the refugium, have one full spectrum over the frag section and three full spectrums over the DT to get full 6ft coverage of the tank. The other thought I had was possibly looking in to an MH fixture to place in the center of the DT and have two full spectrums on the outer part for coloring.

I don't really plan on having SPS or clams at this point, so the LED's should be plenty for softies / LPS / nems, but long term who knows what will happen.

I'm planning on doing a DSB, again against most people's recommendations on the other forum I'm on because most of them prefer BB to be able to do higher flow for SPS dominate tanks. Personally I want to minimize my work required on the tank, so I want to do the DSB and will just plan on changing sand when it is needed if the DSB starts getting foul. I'd rather spend several hours once every few years changing sand out than spend 30 minutes three times a week siphoning and changing water. With this plan I'll eventually have dosing pumps to dose Ca, Mg, Alk etc.

 

[rininger85]

one thing I haven't figured out yet is how big of heaters am I going to need for the tank upgrade? I'm currently just running a couple of cheap 150W (I think...) heaters that were available locally, haven't spent a lot of money getting them from the LFS because I've gone through so many heaters in the past few years that I'm kind of afraid of spending a lot of money since I kind of assume all heaters fail within a year or two... I think the heaters I have in my 40B are on their last leg right now because I had been running a single heater to keep my tank warm at the old house, in the new house the tanks are in the lower level (bi-level house) so it is a bit cooler, and the single heater wasn't keeping the tank warm enough so I added a second heater and I programmed them through the apex to try and keep the tank 77-78 degrees, but I've still seen a few times in the last week that the tank was dropping down to 75ish even with two heaters on their max setting programmed to come on at 76.8 degrees... so I had to toss an extra 50W heater that I had laying around in to the tank to help since the two 150W's seem to be on their way out...

What is a good heater that will work long term for this big of a tank set up? I think my overall water capacity will be just shy of 300 gallons total with the DT + sump + refug. What am I going to need to keep this 77-78?

 

[rininger85]

Looks like a lively bunch of people on this forum... 2 1/2 months and not a single reply... so I'll post some pictures of the progress of the tank and see if I get any followers... if not this thread will die.

Here you can see as I started to take the drywall down, looking to see what I was going to have to do to move the door from one side of the room to the other.

Starting to cut out where the new door would be located at:

new door in place:

Cut off all of the studs and placed a new beam over where the tank will sit:

Framing back in the lower wall

 

[rininger85]

Stand starting to come together... still have some final touches to put on it after I get my sump/refugium in place but this was at least enough to get the tank moved indoors.

View from the family room

Picked up the tank... ended up going with an 8ft long 240 gallon tank instead of the 6ft long 240 as originally planned, found it for about $1000 less than I had planned on spending on the tank!

Had to wait a few days until I could get enough people to come help carry the tank in to the house, so I set my 90 and 75 tanks on the stand for comparison of what size was going to be... the 75 will become my sump, the 90 is cracked but I have plans of trying to fix the crack and using it as a QT tank.

Tank is finally on the stand! It only took 4 guys to carry the tank out of the house we moved it from, but it was only about a 10ft move from where it was to get out the door and in the back of my truck... to move it in to my house was more like a 70-80ft move, so I had 6 guys and we used every one of them because we had to go through 3 doorways to get it in, so you had to have two guys on the other side of the door ready to grab it as you lost two guys on the sides that couldn't fit through the door.

 

[rininger85]

Drywall is going up! I ended up adding 4 plugs above the tank for my lights, I'll have 4 LED fixtures with two plugs each, so I have two boxes (4 plugs) for blue lights tied together with a drop out under the tank to plug in to my apex for control, and two boxes (4 plugs) for white/colored lights tied together with a drop out for the apex plug in. Then I decided I might want to add fans at some point, so I decided to add two more plugs above just in case... one plug (controlled by a switch in the same box) is live - direct wired to power, the other plug (with switch) is wired with a drop out under the stand to plug in to the apex. Before anyone says anything, yes the plugs are different colors... we had originally bought beige plugs for replacing plugs in the new house without realizing they weren't white, so I had planned on using them up in the fish room, but when I went and bought the switch/plug combo they only had it in white... so now I either have to deal with them not matching or I'll have to remove them all and put the white plugs in now. I did the same thing under the stand, I added 4 boxes that total 12 plugs (a double box on both ends of the stand) and was using up the beige plugs, then I went to buy a GFCI to protect the entire string and only had white GFCI's, so they are mismatched under the tank too! Also one plug is out of line above the tank because the header for the old door is still there so it made me move the one plug lower.

View from family room with drywall going up...

I bought my skimmer - SRO5000INT. A picture of the beast next to a 5 gallon bucket to show how huge this thing is! I've never ran a skimmer before, so having this as my first skimmer is epic!

Drywall is all up! I've mudded everything twice and sanded down the inside of the fish room walls last night, so tonight I'll probably paint the interior walls and then I'll be able to get my sump/refugium in place, and I plan to add a couple more leg supports under the stand, but don't want to do it until everything is in place - I ended up making the stand the exact size I needed for the tank, so then once I added the legs that are already under there and put drywall up (ended up using 1/4" drywall under the stand instead of 1/2" that I used everyplace else just to buy a little extra room) it's going to be a tight squeeze to get the 75 sump and 40B refugium under the stand...

Just a random shot from inside the fish room.

 

[butters417]

looking good, following along

 

[d2mini]

Looks awesome so far!

 

[Djtonton]

Looks Great I just did the same thing and it was awesome good luck its looking good so far!!

 

[143MPCo]

My favorite part of reefing "the build out"... looks great!

 

[rininger85]

hmm didn't flag me that there were responses... I haven't progressed much lately, I do have about 6.5" of water in the tank just to test out my skimmer, I added about 80lbs of sand (have a total of 200lbs to add and might get more depending on how deep it is when I get that in. I am going for DSB that will last me a few years and intend to swap it out every few years).

My main thing keeping me from having the tank up and running right now is that I need to order rock. I'm planning on getting about 200lbs of rock from reefcleaners and do a dry start (although I'm slowly rethinking it that I might just move everything from the 40B over to get it up and running sooner). With the holidays and how much money I've already spent in the last couple months I can't really afford to get the rock right now, so hopefully I'll get it in january. I want the rock before I fill the tank that way I can arrange it without getting too wet.

I managed to get my 75 gal sump drilled, was my first time drilling glass so was pleased with how easy it went. Still need to clean out my 40B that is currently a storage tank holding all my random stuff from when I moved in to the house... then I'll drill it for the refugium and get it under the tank so I can start plumbing. Hopefully I'll get my work bench built this weekend, I decided to place my sump under the work bench instead of under the tank because it was going to be a tight fit getting the 75 gal to fit under the 240, so I'll put my two 40B's under there instead which will give me a little extra room to work around / storage.

Also the inside of the room is painted, I am still thinking I will caulk around the edge of the drywall where it butts up to the tank to make it so if water splashes it stays on top of the tank instead of running down the wall. Then eventually I'll probably add trim around the inside of the tank to make it look better. I still haven't done anything with the trim outside the tank because I'm waiting for my wife to decide if she's going to be OK putting the panelling back up, or if she wants to rip down the entire room and get rid of the paneling... I'd prefer to get rid of the paneling, but it has a nasty black glue that I'm not sure if I could remove or if I'm going to have to re-drywall the entire room. I've also been working on finishing the bathroom that we're remodeling - it's almost done then I can focus more on my tank room / build.

 

[rininger85]

things are still kind of going slow since I don't want to spend any money until after the new year when I get back to work.... today is my last day of work until Jan 5th and I leave for Tennessee on the 26th until probably the 3rd so money is on hold until I see what my trip ends up costing me. But I have made a few small updates since my last post.

Here is a frozen food feeder that I built. I stole the idea from Paul_B, it works great, this will allow my wife to feed my tank for me while I'm on vacation... all she has to do is toss a chunk of frozen food in to the cup and the upside down powerhead circulates it until it thaws out then shoots the food out for the fish to eat.

I've been running my skimmer in the 240 just to figure out how it works. I didn't do a lot of rinsing of my sand before I dumped it in, so I'm using my skimmer to skim out the really fine particles of sand.

I built a work bench that I ended up putting my sump under so it is easier to access than it would be having it under the tank. The work bench is quite tall, that way if I'm working on something I don't have to bend over so it's easier on my back, plus I can get under it to work in the sump without hitting my head on anything. The left side of my sump will be a frag growout area, so I wanted to be able to hang one of my LED fixtures over it and be able to get in and reach the frags too.

I started dry-fit plumbing my tank, I got the closer drain ran to the sump and started working on running the longer drain over. I put two PVC hangers under the stand to hold the weight of the long run, but apparently it was still too much weight or I twisted when I shouldn't have or something, the water that had been sitting in the overflow on the far end of the tank for a couple weeks started leaking. There was a crack in this overflow, so that is why I had water standing in it was to see if the crack was going to leak, well apparently I made it worse and water started pouring out. So to fix it I cut a piece of acrylic and siliconed the heck out of the bottom of the overflow then shoved the acrylic in place and siliconed the heck out of the top of it too, it has been drying for over 24 hours now, so tonight I'll add water to see if it is going to hold or if I'm going to be limited to a single overflow. If I can't use the second overflow I might have to get more acrylic and make a coast to coast overflow between the two overflows that way I get more surface skimming than just the one 6x9 overflow provides, then I could always put a small powerhead in the C2C overflow to push detritus towards the functional overflow, and can use the other side as my return... but I'm hoping I'll still be able to use both.

 

[PCygni]

Nice build so far, Holmes.

 

[rininger85]

I've finally got the leak sealed in the cracked overflow. I siliconed in a new acrylic bottom to the overflow to take the pressure off of the cracked bottom of the overflow. I also discovered a leak in the 75 gal that was given to me that I'm using as my sump, so I siliconed in an angled piece on the bottom of one side of the tank because it was too slow of a leak for me to find it, everything is holding water now so I'll just keep an eye on that area and if I see any water make it to the dry side of the corner acrylic I'll shut the sump down and replace it.

I built my skimmer stand to raise the skimmer up to the right height in my sump... nothing fancy, first time I've worked with eggcrate so just ziptied it together... then last night I built a frag rack for the other half of the 75 sump, it takes up most of the space lengthwise but leaves a little room front to back so I can add some fish to the sump (possibly just mollies to help with any algae clean up in the frag section of the sump).

Haven't done anything to finish the outside viewing area of the tank yet, but it is almost full of water.

I have my main drain plumbed and the drain from my sump to refugium plumbed, my return pump (jebao dc9000) should be here tomorrow, so this weekend I'll finish plumbing everything. I've also ordered another 100lbs of sand because I'm not happy with the DSB yet, and ordered 100lbs of reefcleaners rock to get started (I'll probably have 200-250lbs total once I'm done). Also ordered a couple more of the cheap sun-sun 1300gph powerheads so I'll have 4 of those total in the DT (5200gph) plus ordered a WP-60, so I'm going to be between 7800-10500gph flow in the tank, then I might add smaller powerheads to help push detritus where I want it to go once the tank is up and running. Plus I figure I can get up to about 1600gph flow with the head on the DC9000 if I run it wide open.

I'm currently running a 300W and 150W heater in the DT and it's keeping it at about 70 degrees, so I ordered a 400W heater, hoping with the 400W and 300W it will be enough to heat the whole system, but I may put smaller heaters in different areas of the tank to help reduce the load on the main heaters.

I think the sand will probably be the last thing to arrive since I just ordered it yesterday... so once I get all of this stuff I'll have the tank up and running and as soon as the sand settles I'll be moving everything over from my existing tank for hopefully a seamless transition... should be running in the next week or two.

 

[rininger85]

tank has been up and running for about 3 1/2 days now with no problems. There are a couple modifications I am going to make to my plumbing but nothing major... I moved a couple small pieces of LR from my 40B in to the tank and was hoping it wouldn't cause a cycle, but my guess is that it's just soooo much area for the bacteria to colonize before they'll be able to work properly so it appears I have ammonia growing slightly. I added about 100lbs of dry rock from reefcleaners. Still going to order another 50-100lbs before I'm done, plus need to order my lights after payday this week. Hoping I don't have to wait a month for the cycle to pass before I can move everything over because now that the tank is running it just looks so awesome I'm really anxious for everyone to move in!

Here is the latest pic, I put the paneling back up and trimmed the tank... still need to paint the family room and stain the trim to make everything match.

 

[aprilmeyetterussell]

Watching here now too.