290g tank tear down - seam failure on 8/13/09 1:00am

[psteeleb]

Okay - it's been almost a year so I decided I better get started with my build log. I'll attempt to capture what I have done and learned to date and use this post to capture things that I hope to accomplish in the future.

Some background:

After moving to the DFW area, with hopes that we would be in one place for more then a couple years, my wife and I agreed we would both enjoy getting back into the salt water aquarium hobby. Being away from it for over 20 years, I had allot of catching up to do so started hitting some pet stores and searching the internet. After browsing several sites, there was one I felt did the best job describing the hobby so I locked in on it and must have read every page a couple times. Only after checking some links did I find out that the owner of the site was also the president of a marine aquarium society. As luck would have it, the site was Marc’s and the society just happened to be DFWMAS.

After a bunch of drooling research (aka dreaming), looking at available space in our new pre-owned home and considering cost, I decided I wanted to go with something in the 180g range. What I found was a used 290g rr system, with essentially the same footprint as a 180 but ½ again as tall. I loved the height and the visibility it offered, and without much consideration to extra maintenance effort I decided to buy it along with stand, hood, skimmer, pumps and chiller.

Due to delays in selling our previous home, the tank sat idle other then some plumbing work for about 8 months. When we finished our move in the summer of ‘06’, plans where to go through the entire live rock curing process. Again, luck would have it that just about the time I was going to order several hundred pounds of uncured live rock, a DFWMAS member decided to get out of the hobby and had 270 pounds of six year established live rock for sale. What a fantastic and timely find, thanks to Kevin (aka chevytks), I saved a year in the process and ended up with a very stable platform to start my journey.

Here is a picture of day one September 24, 2006.

nice tank!! keep the pictures coming!

[psteeleb]

Day zero:

After finding the live rock I realize to make this happen I needed to get the tank up and running in one day. I had already bought some lace lava rock, pulverized limestone (pavestone brand) and made some DIY Portland cement rock for establishing a foundation for live rock. The DIY rock had been curing for about 5 weeks and appeared to be PH neutral, problem was I had no saltwater made up or RO/DI water and had not even prepared the sand.

Saturday 9/23 started with rinsing 300lbs of pavestone pulverized limestone and placing it in the empty aquarium. The afternoon consisted of buying around 200g of RO/DI and mixing up the salt water in the tank and attempting to match the temperature and salinity of Kevin’s system, to minimize acclimation time and potential die off. Later that evening I drove to Kevin house in Rowlett about 40 miles away to pick up the bulk of the live rock. I carried the rock in a couple of 40gal brutes (large heavy duty trashcans) along with several more gallons of water. I acclimated the live rock for about an hour by draining water from my aquarium into the brutes essentially filling them up. Once filled I transferred the live rock the aquarium with hopes that die off would be minimum.

As part of the deal I made with Kevin I also bought most of his remaining coral frags and other livestock. On Sunday 9/24, allowing some time for the salt to fully dissolve I returned to Kevin’s to pick up the balance of live rock and several small coral colonies, frags, a couple of brittle stars, some hermit crabs, snails, a purple lobster a green chromis. At the time I did not think I would have much success or luck with the SPS but in the end everything but the large brittle stars made the transference and have been doing great. The brittle stars died due to not providing enough acclimation time, I later learned that these creatures need several hours of slow acclimation.

Here is a terrible picture of a couple of corals on day two 9/25.

[psteeleb]

here is a scan of my original piping sketch - I'll add some pics and discuss the system later

[psteeleb]

tank shot almost one year later

man. awesome@!!! nice set up. U did a heck of the job there. Thumbs up

Fantastic job - I can only hope that my 90 will look that good after just a year. Wow . Got any more pics of the corals and such?

You know what I find amazing about this hobby is the addiction component and the way it goes..I started out with just seahorses...bought a few softies...wanted swimmy fish...got another tank...bought some LPS...now I'm liking those SPS...Initially I had no desire for coral let alone SPS -I couldn't understand why everyone was going GAGA over some colored stick like coral.....and now just a couple of years later...I want some! I need some!

[psteeleb]

thanks for the feedback
one of the ways I determine total evironment health is looking for pods.

I use to feed 2 dosings of DT's and Marine snow weekly and had a heathy population. I started working out of town and was only home on weekends so the dosings went to DT's only once a week. My large red sponge that was doing great died off and I noticed my pods droping so I went back to two dosings on DT's about a month ago. The pods are back and a couple fragments of the sponge seem to be growing

here are a couple vid clips I took this morning of pods in my overflows

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpZL3tX431o
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BZWPt93tNI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0eVHCoKJFw

I don't clean my overflow glass so I had to shoot around the coraline etc
it also looks like youtube downsizes the video making it hard to make out the pods in the 2nd and 3rd clips, but if you look close in the background there is movement and you can tell that they are there in mass.

I'll post some one year growth pics later today

[psteeleb]

blue tip stag day one and now

[psteeleb]

blue tort then and now

Very nice, you did a fantastic job.

[washingtond]

Peter you have a beautiful tank that I had the privilege to see in person on one of the tank tours. Keep up the good work that you are doing.

[psteeleb]

Water Flow

Water flow in the main display is made up of 3 systems; main return, closed loop and wavemakers

The main return uses a 3600gph Sequence Dart. Actual flow due to plumbing and height is probably around 3000. Of this about 2000 is returned to the tank in two return pipes, the right one running through a 1/2 hp chiller. The remainng 1000gph is used mainly by the skimmer with some minimal flow going to 3 reactors (1 carbon & 2 phosphate)

The closed loop system starts with a center drain with strainer hiden under a large piece of Lace Lava Rock with DIY portland cement legs. Ther is a 850gph pressure pump that returns the water through a SCWD wave maker device that occilates about every 5 seconds. The return lines are routed inside the tank using sectional flex pipe and end with Penductors to increase tank flow 5 fold

here is a clip showing the penductors and surface flow created by the closed loop system that is about 30 inches deep. The clip shows surface movement created only byt the closed loop - all other pumps are off.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsyNPONRVyA

the wavemakers are 4 Koralias #4s controled by a reefkkeper 2 on a 4 minute interval. here is the left side running - you can see they are pointed downward but still provide some decent surface aggitation.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vFwPMQ8p0s
here is the right side, clip is a bit choppy but with the korilias a little higher and pointed slightly upward you can really see it kicking around the surface
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHUlg7rDTYA

the main returns, koralias and closed loop all crash into each other at different frequencies creating all kinds of random turbity.

there is also a small wave device on the one of the right returns over my frag rack (clip pending)

[psteeleb]

If I was starting a house from scratch, I'd probably dedicate a small bedroom sized room to a fish room. What I had was an empty open hallway with no electrical and the main A/C return duct located in it.
This space is 3 ft wide by about 11 ft long. The people that delivered the tank recommended against placing the tank here due to the small space and difficulty it would create for maintenance. The first pic below shows the space before we placed the tank.

After considering several options, we decided to place the tank in this spot anyway. We wanted to make it visible from both the living room and dinning room sides. The second post below shows what we decided to do. I was able to build a couple of bi-fold doors on the dinning room side that can open up for access to 3/4 of the tank. The ability to open this space up by using the bi-fold doors was a huge improvement when it comes to cleaning, feeding or any other maintenance on the tank.

I relocated the main A/C return and added a temperature controlled attic fan to the existing duct above the tank. This fan removes the heat generated in the small space by the MH lighting. I still need to run some dedicated electrical. Right now I' have several extension cords supplying power from the adjacent rooms

[psteeleb]

I’m at a point where I'm ready to do my electrical and I'm looking for some input. I'm thinking 2 - 20amp dedicated circuits. One circuit would be wired in up high in the room for lighting and one wired low for pumps and everything else.

What circuits should I put on GFCI’s?

Does anyone know any good electricians in the north FW area?

Do any of you that had to run extra electrical, have other thoughts or ideas on electrical upgrades?

I’m also looking for thoughts and ideas on wiring for the sump area.


Another area I want some feedback on is for water top off and possible supply for water changes. I don’t have a basement but do have a huge attic (but it gets hot in the attic). Right now I just have my RO/DI outside and would like to set up something a little more user friendly. One thought is to hook it up under a sink and run about 30ft of tubing to my top off reservoir controlled by a couple float switches and timer. So if you have any thoughts on this please let me know. Another though is putting a holding tank in the attic that I could manually gravity drain or pump to a water change tank or the top off container. What I’m not sure of is will the heat in the attic create problems for RO/DI storage. I’m thinking a plastic or fiberglass tank located on top of a drain pan.

Thanks for any feedback

[psteeleb]

Removing the heat

Although I have a chiller I use evaporation for the primary cooling, and the fact that until I run my electrical I can't run the lights and chiller at the same time. For information, I replace about 3 gallons a day top off due to evaporation.

I run a couple clamp on fans I picked up from wall mart. these clamp on's come on with the MH's. I was also running a box fan to move the heat out of the small hallway into the house where the main house AC unit would in turn remove the heat from the house. Not a very efficient system.

After I had some AC work done, including relocating the main return duct I installed a small temperature controlled attic fan to the space above the main tank. (I'll post pictures later). The attic fan built into a wood framed box with a normal AC return vent and filter built into it. The fan is controlled by a temperature control switch that I have dialed in at 85 degrees. The attic fan and controller cost under $60,and works great. It's also quieter then the box fan. Changing this out has stabilized the temperature swings from about 1.5 degrees a day to around 0.5. Now the tank runs between 80.5 and 81.

The other day I was killing Mojanos. To help on the water clarity I had all of the pumps and fans off. When done, I forgot to plug back in the two clamp on fans, and the next day the temperature soared to 83.5. The main lights were only on for a few hours. Fortunately, my wife called, she plugged the fans back in and got the heating under control.

I would never have thought that just a few hours without the smaller clamp on fans would make a 1 1/2 to 2 degree change.

The temperature will run up a bit when I have the sump area closed off so I intend to install another small fan in the sump area. With this new setup, I think I’ll lower the temperature settings on my heaters to around 79.0. to see if I can run between 79 and 80 without the chiller kicking in.

I run over 1600 watts of lighting and I'm very pleased with the results the fans provide. It will be interesting to see how much, if any, change there will be when I replace my current reflector with Luminarcs.

[DaveJ]

Removing the heat

Although I have a chiller I use evaporation for the primary cooling, and the fact that until I run my electrical I can't run the lights and chiller at the same time. For information, I replace about 3 gallons a day top off due to evaporation.

I run a couple clamp on fans I picked up from wall mart. these clamp on's come on with the MH's. I was also running a box fan to move the heat out of the small hallway into the house where the main house AC unit would in turn remove the heat from the house. Not a very efficient system.

After I had some AC work done, including relocating the main return duct I installed a small temperature controlled attic fan to the space above the main tank. (I'll post pictures later). The attic fan built into a wood framed box with a normal AC return vent and filter built into it. The fan is controlled by a temperature control switch that I have dialed in at 85 degrees. The attic fan and controller cost under $60,and works great. It's also quieter then the box fan. Changing this out has stabilized the temperature swings from about 1.5 degrees a day to around 0.5. Now the tank runs between 80.5 and 81.

The other day I was killing Mojanos. To help on the water clarity I had all of the pumps and fans off. When done, I forgot to plug back in the two clamp on fans, and the next day the temperature soared to 83.5. The main lights were only on for a few hours. Fortunately, my wife called, she plugged the fans back in and got the heating under control.

I would never have thought that just a few hours without the smaller clamp on fans would make a 1 1/2 to 2 degree change.

The temperature will run up a bit when I have the sump area closed off so I intend to install another small fan in the sump area. With this new setup, I think I’ll lower the temperature settings on my heaters to around 79.0. to see if I can run between 79 and 80 without the chiller kicking in.

I run over 1600 watts of lighting and I'm very pleased with the results the fans provide. It will be interesting to see how much, if any, change there
will be when I replace my current reflector with Luminarcs.

Pete, if you need someone to run that electrical for you, let me know. The guy who has done all mine did a really nice job and he is reasonably priced. I had him run a new circuit to the equipment room and has installed all those extra 4-plexes etc with GFI's and such. Also, if you need covers for the plugs (splash guards) let me know as I have a bunch of those left over as well.

[Marc]

Nice thread so far. Those pictures I linked you to can be shared in this thread if you like, and you can simply use the IMG tags to display them instead of attachments. I don't mind hosting them. That will allow you to post up to 10 pictures per post.

I'm not surprised the temperature rose with the fans off. There needs to be a way to extract that heat and with you cabinets around the tank, it really doesn't have anywhere to go. Fans make a huge difference, and my IceCap fans have been running 24/7 for the past 4 months.

Regarding your question about electrical, I would put two or three circuits in that area. The chiller probably pulls the most power all by itself, and your lights each pull quite a bit, but combined (like after a brief power outage) they will pull a significant amount.

I have all my pumps for circulation on a regular breaker, and my lighting and heaters on a GFCI breaker. The window a/c (or your chiller) could be on either, but I'd probably have it on a regular breaker as well. Anything that is in the water, or could fall in the water should be on GFCI.

[psteeleb]

Dave - yes, if you know of an electrition please let me know how to contact him

Marc, thanks for the advice on the electrial and for the pics you have on your site. I'll have to try to post them that way.

I am an electrician and to be honest running an extra circuit for the tank wouldnt be hard at all. I would say that you could do it on your own if you took a little time and effort. Unfortunately i live quite a way from you other wise i would do it for a small coral contribution. If you want i could walk you thru it though. I did all my own work on my tank and added a gfci breaker to run my tank alone seperate from my other outlets in the room. BTW a 15 amp circuit will allow more than you think.

[ss95003]

do you have any pictures of the equipment and plumbing? I always like to see how othres did theirs.

[psteeleb]

here is the main pump, the top of the reactors and valving, and the closed loop pump --- as you can see I need to straighten out my electrical

[psteeleb]

I am an electrician and to be honest running an extra circuit for the tank wouldnt be hard at all. I would say that you could do it on your own if you took a little time and effort. Unfortunately i live quite a way from you other wise i would do it for a small coral contribution. If you want i could walk you thru it though. I did all my own work on my tank and added a gfci breaker to run my tank alone seperate from my other outlets in the room. BTW a 15 amp circuit will allow more than you think.

I could do the electrical, it's just that I work out of town durring the week. By the time the weekend comes around I'm usually just trying to catch up on things around the house or spending time with the family.

I am an electrician and to be honest running an extra circuit for the tank wouldnt be hard at all. I would say that you could do it on your own if you took a little time and effort. Unfortunately i live quite a way from you other wise i would do it for a small coral contribution. If you want i could walk you thru it though. I did all my own work on my tank and added a gfci breaker to run my tank alone seperate from my other outlets in the room. BTW a 15 amp circuit will allow more than you think.

I could do the electrical, it's just that I work out of town durring the week. By the time the weekend comes around I'm usually just trying to catch up on things around the house or spending time with the family.

I wonder how much it would cost to hire someone to do it?
I guess part of the cost would be determined by how far the original breakers are right (to run the line)?

[psteeleb]

here are some pics of the exhaust fan

1) from the attic - you can see the plywood box - it stills needs to be taped &insulated

2) from below

3 the temp control

[psteeleb]

here are some pics of the tank cooling fans and the exhaust fan closed with the air filter

[washingtond]

Peter you have a wonderful tank and we got to see it in person on one of the tank tours and I can say that all your hard work paid off.

You done a supper job and it shows in the overall results.

I am an electrician and to be honest running an extra circuit for the tank wouldnt be hard at all. I would say that you could do it on your own if you took a little time and effort. Unfortunately i live quite a way from you other wise i would do it for a small coral contribution. If you want i could walk you thru it though. I did all my own work on my tank and added a gfci breaker to run my tank alone seperate from my other outlets in the room. BTW a 15 amp circuit will allow more than you think.

I could do the electrical, it's just that I work out of town durring the week. By the time the weekend comes around I'm usually just trying to catch up on things around the house or spending time with the family.

I wonder how much it would cost to hire someone to do it?
I guess part of the cost would be determined by how far the original breakers are right (to run the line)?

It doesnt matter so much how far from the breaker box if you have an attic since it will run across you attic pretty strait but if you have a peir and beam house with the electrical underneath you couldnt pay me enough to do that job.

[Marc]

How loud is that fan you added to the attic? I like it.

[psteeleb]

the electrical should be straight forward and easy to run. I have a huge attic so there's no problem getting around. The hardest part will be cutting the holes for the boxes and fishing the wire down the wall space, but even that is no big deal. I may try to take it on next weekend.

Marc, the fan is pretty quiet, I can not hear it run unless I'm right up on the thing and the cover is open. If I shut down everything else on the tank I'm sure it would be heard. It is definitly quieter then the box fan I had sitting on the floor.

[DeMarcusR]

Niiiiiice build.. Keep the pics and details coming

with how your tank is set up you could actually put a hole in the ceiling and run it that way but unless you plan to stay in the house forever i wouldnt do that. but you could use that hole for alight fixture when you leave just a thought.

[psteeleb]

thanks for the thoughts - repairing the hole by replacing some drywall, texturing and some paint isn't that hard - done it more times then I like to think about. Don't forget the tank is in a small hallway so the ceiling isnt that big. I would have to agree if it was in an open room, you would have to consider matching texture and painting a large ceiling. probably not worth it. maybe you could use a smaller opening, and, like you suggest, be able to utilize the opening for something else.

[psteeleb]

was doing some maintenance today, and decided to clean my durso's. Boy do they get a bunch of buildup inside them. Took some pics so you can see my low tech answer to an adjustable air vent

basically I made 3 slots in the pipe and cap. I can rotate the cap to open one, two or three vents. I can even open half a vent if needed. here are some pics

over all durso, top with cap off and close up showing a air vent. It works great.

[psteeleb]

some pics Marc took in June at the tank tour









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[psteeleb]

some more from Marc including the back side

[psteeleb]

I was using a filter sock to knock down micro bubbles. I've wanted to get rid of this thing since day one and decided to make the change today along with adding a dedicated skimmer pump. While I have everything apart I'm going to siphon out the sediment in the sump that has accumulated over the past year The sediment is made up mostly of carbon and de-phosphate media from the reactors.

I did a rough test of the new de-bubbler and from what I can tell it works better then the filter sock, but it kicked up a bunch of sediment from the sump and clouded the main so it’s hard to tell for sure. The de-bubbler is made from 4” and 6” soil pipe. It’s cheap and I figure the corrugations will add surface tension to help pull out the bubbles as the water channels through.

Here’s are a couple a pictures as it’s going in, and one of the bottom of the sump. The water enters the de-bubbler in the center throught hte 1 1/2" main tank drain, the water will channel up and over the 4" into the 6" and exit the 6" pipe through the slots in the bottom.

[psteeleb]

With the first installation I had to shorten the 6" tube to fit under the existing filter sock bracket. If this works I may cut it off later. I did not shorten the 4" and ended up with more spill over then desired, as shown in the first picture below. I decided to cut the 4" to be shorter then the 6" by about 2" and added two more slots to the bottom of the 6" (now 4 slots). You can see from picture 2 that there is a dramatic difference. I may add some rubble to knock down some more of the micro bubbles that are getting through, but it appears that most of them are being removed by the bubble trap that is in the main pump chamber. I hope this inexpensive de-bubbler gives other people some ideas and is utilized on other systems, as so far it seems to be working pretty good.

[psteeleb]

By the way - that's a 3600gph pump running all out. It's probably pushing closer to 3000gph with pressure loss in the piping and vertical lift, but still there's allot of water moving through this thing.

[psteeleb]

I finally got started on the electrical
I decided to run 2 dedicated 20amp circuits. One of them will be up high for just lights, I will be installing a GFCI and 2 set of outlets (total 4), all plugs will be on the GFCI

The lower circuit will have one set of outlets on a GFCI and the other will be normal and used for the main pumps

I got the wires pulled from the power panel through the attic and into the walls. I completed the outlets and will tackle the power panel next week. I could have probably finished it but was getting late and I had to still pack to take off for another week

The new wires can be seen in the picture below, they are the yellow ones pulled into the power panel from the top right. I hope to have this wrapped up next week so I can get rid of the extension cords I have running through the dinning room.