Diving Back In - Innovative Marine 170 EXT

[Dom_P]

Hi all,

After a very long (15 year) hiatus from this amazing hobby I've decided it's time to setup a reef tank again. This time around I'm going to be focusing mostly on SPS (though I love the look of clams, so I'm sure I'll have a few).

I've been lurking for a couple of months doing research and ended up deciding on the Innovative Marine EXT 170 (I also chose quite a bit of equipment/items based on recommendations researched on R2R that I'll document in future posts).

This week this beast arrived at the tail end of a snow storm, and with a little coaxing ($$) I convinced the delivery person to pull half a ton of crates up a slightly icy driveway and into my garage

Here's some unboxing pictures

Sump:

Tank:

Building the stand:

And the controller cabinet for the Hydros gear (X4, XP8, Wave Engine LE, and Minnow - more on this later)

Mounted the wall brackets for the lighting (3 x ReeFi Uno 2.1 Pro):

Mounted the ReeFi lights, installed the under cabinet lighting, and leak tested the sump last night:




And now I'm waiting for a local aquarium maintenance company to arrive today to move this heavy tank down some stairs and onto to that stand. Wish me luck as I think it's about 450 lbs


More to follow...

 

[X-37B]

Looking forward to this build. I have the same system. Enjoy!

 

[Dom_P]

Well the first attempt on Sunday was a fail. Navigating a tight landing at the top of my basement stairs made this quite a challenge.

But the guys came back tonight and they managed to get it down the stairs and into place.

Tank leak testing is underway. It's filled with tap water to just under the overflow so pretty much full water weight minus the salt. Of course, there's also a 100 lbs of sand and 100 lbs of dry live rock going in as well.

It's been 3 hours and so far so good. No way it's going back out of the basement in one piece... so it better be OK

I also installed all the plumbing. I'll connect the return pump tomorrow and leak test the plumbing.

If all goes well, I'll drain it in a day or two and try to push it back to the wall and check level. This version of the 170 EXT has a leveling base with feet, so it's pretty easy to adjust to level.

It will probably take a couple days to make all the RODI water needed, as I only have two Brute garbage cans. I've also got two buckets of Tropic Marin Reef Pro ready to go as well.

In the meantime, I'll see about unpacking the rock and do some basic aquascaping. I'm not planning to go too crazy on that front, but would like to have some open areas and a cave or two for the fish to use.

Then sand, rock, water and on to fishless cycling....

 

[Dom_P]

Plumbing leak testing has been running for a day or so. I did have a couple of bulkheads that needed to be tightened a bit more, but besides that no drips anywhere.

I have to say this overflow setup and DC return pump are significantly quieter than my setup from years ago (thanks @BeanAnimal)

I also installed two temperature sensors and two 500W heaters and configured the controllers. It took the better part of 10 hours to get it up to temperature, but that looks good as well now. I have the heaters setup in a primary/backup configuration using the Hydros where they are both on when temperature drops too low, but only one of the heaters is used to maintain temperature in range once max temperature is achieved.

I'm going to let it run a couple more hours then will start draining the tap water out of it and try to push this beast back up to the wall, and level it.

If all goes well then sand, rock and saltwater goes in over the weekend.

 

[Dom_P]

OK I spent the evening unpacking 100 lbs of Tropic Eden Morroca rock that the folks at Premium Aquatics so diligently wrapped individually in bubble wrap and placed in a few very large shipping boxes.

I was able to make good use of our air hockey table and took a first pass at an aquascape

The brown paper the structure is sitting on is the length/width of the tank. At it's highest point the scape stands about 17 in tall, and the water line in the tank is about 20in from the bottom glass.

While it's hard to tell from the picture there's good open space on the lower right part of the structure behind the shelf piece in the foreground

I numbered all the rocks individually and took pictures each time I removed one, so that I can jigsaw puzzle it back together and try to cement some of this to make it easier to move into the aquarium.

As it got late, I'll be emptying the tap water out sometime tomorrow.

 

[Dom_P]

The rock is now in the aquarium with some minor tweaks to the aquascape. All in all I’m pretty happy with it. It’s got some good space behind it as well. In my setup from years ago the rock was against the back glass and detritus just accumulated there all the time. Hoping I can get some good flow back there in this tank.

I also got the sand in. And started filling with salt water. As the sand is the type with live bacteria (Tropic Eden Live Mesoflakes) it started off pretty cloudy as I couldn’t rinse it. It’s been a few hours now and it’s starting to clarify.

Making RODI is going slowly. I have about 90 gallons in the tank right now and the sump is still dry. I decided to drop the small heater and power head I use for mixing salt into the tank just to keep temperature in a decent range. Not sure if the sand has some ammonia in it. If so, maybe the heat will help the bacteria to start multiplying.

I also added the Innovative Marine ATO reservoir on the left (15G capacity), added the ATO pump to the reservoir, ran the tubing to the sump, put in the sump level sensor and configured the Hydros for it.

In addition, I laid the leak detection rope on the floor behind the cabinet. I need to buy another section of rope to complete the rest of the space under the cabinet. Will get that connected to the Hydros when everything comes back online.

Hoping I’ll get all the remaining salt water in tomorrow. Then on to adding more bacteria and ammonia to get the cycling really going.

 

[Gman83]

Looks great!