New tank at last.

[admorris]

Hi all I have at last progressed to my first Sumped system

A brief history of my marine adventure so far.
Following keeping tropical fish for many years.

After starting with a small nano tank 12 months ago which was purchased from a lfs along with a couple of clowns and a tang it soon became apparent that this was not going to do.
As I became more interested and wanted to try to keep some coral and the nano was seriously going to limit this.

3 months after getting the nano tank I picked up a 48x18x18 tank with a cabinet which was an x tropical tank! now in my lack of experience in marine keeping I thought if I get some live rock an external filter some t5s and a skimmer I could make this a nice marine set up it looked very nice at first but soon started to show signs of deterioration and it soon became apparent this was still not what I was looking for as coral was hard to keep alive with many losses and Nitrates were impossible to controll.
my lfs suggested using nopox and better lighting so I picked up an arcadia t5 from a fellow reefer started using the nopox daily nitrates came down a little but still corals looked worse over time,,, just to add I also did water changes weekly cut back on feeding and installed a fluidzing filter with bio pearls but all to no avail.

After a few months all my existing coral were extinct! Then I had a massive aiptasia outbreak! By now I was starting to contemplate on giving up on it! But kept reading on the salty box and looking at fellow reefer systems and pictures as well as the display tanks in my lfs and thought one last try but let's not skimp and try this properly. So here is the story of many weeks of work.

I had been pricing tanks for a while scouring eBay, web sites. And lfs's to try and get a good price on a tank when one day I was working in London for a couple of weeks so decided I would keep an eye on ebay while away for any tanks in the area, on my very last day a tank was added now this was ideal size 48x24x18 with a 36x18x18 sump well this was meant to be as it was only a few miles away. The cabinet was in a bad way and the whole thing was filthy but that didn't matter to me if the price was right! Anyway as the day progressed it turned out that this fellow x reefer had much more than just the tank available but also a mass of live rock and other equipment but to cut the story short I picked up the lot for 200 quid! Very happy man..



So from this purchase of half a van load of marine stuff I was going to make my ultimate tank, well the best I could! And I'm very happy with the results but some input from more experienced refers out there would really be appreciated as I really want this system to work and as I said my experience is short. So here is a run down on what I ended up with and some pics of the finished product as I know you all love pics. Oh there has been a few additional items purchased and added since my first purchase and I estimate this has cost me around £1500 to date which I guess ain't bad for what I've ended up with.
Here is what we have
Sump 36x18x18
First compartment is return from tank which has 1 heater and a filter sock in
Second compartment has filter floss on top tray with a layered section of fine and course filter sponge to half way down and from bottom to half way up is ceramics
Third bay consists of 5 inches of Fiji sand 2 inches of live sand and 3 inches of miracle mud. There are some loose sponge floating over the top of this as I found water flow was stiring up the mud.
Fourth bay has a course filter sponge on top rack and bottom is full of live rock bits.
Bay 5 is the return to tank which has 3x pumps one main return at 1500 lph one feeding the skimmer and one feeding the fluidizers.
Equipment is as follows



Reef octopus skimmer returning into bay 5
Fluidzing filter number one active carbon and bio pearls output into 3ft uv returning to bay 5
Fluidzing filter 2 half active carbon cartridges and half bio balls this has a very slow trickle return to bay 4
Tmc v2 ozone into skimmer air intake this is set for power 3 at 5 hours in every 12
Atc temperature controller taking temp from tank set to 26 and controlling 2xheaters 1 200w in main return compartment 1 150w in the void between bay 2 and 3
This seems to keep tank temp around 29.8 to 26.5 which seems pretty good to me.
Ph, orp and temp combined monitor taking readings from sump pH fluctuates between 7.6 to 8 which seems to be linked to the ozone production any advice on ozone times would be appreciated.



The tank is made up of egg crate to bottom with a large quantity of live rock

ATTACH]was put 3 inches of Fiji sand 1 inch live sand and about half inch of course sand.
Circulation and flow provided by one fixed speed power head behind live rock to circulate round bottomed and one vortech mp10 positioned three quarters up tank to one end to provide wave and nutrient transport.

Lighting is now provided from a maxspect led g2 800 which provides 4 banks of programmable lighting consisting of.
White 16x3w
Violet 4x3w
Blue 15x3w
High output whites 4x30w split into 2 banks of 2
Present timing is
Main white bank 1 14.00 to 19.00
Main white bank 2 13.00 to 18.00
White and violet 08.15 to 19.30
Blue 07.45 to 20.30
Total lighting capacity of 4x30w and 35x3w
Moon lights come on permanent once all other lights go off.
Again this seems to work well as you can see from pics all seems happy with this but again any advice would be appreciated.
And finally I'm dosing with 10ml of nopox and 10ml of red Sea reef energy a and b daily.
Again any advice on this would be good.



Well that's it I hope you enjoy reading and looking. And again please offer any words of advice.
Oh finally tests are.
Salinity 0.026
Temp 25.9 to 26.4
Calium 420
Mag 1360
Ph 7.5 to 8

[chippypah]

Looking very nice there.
Cheers
Pete

[cdurkin100]

Great write up and a well thought out system.

[shelbygt]

Tanks looking great need a better pic of your lion fish its stunning what are you feeding him

[admorris]

guys I just hope it stays that way this time. Lion is getting huge. I now have to watch I don't add any fish to small or they become his lunch. He is target fed fish he will eat a whole fish each day and mussles twice a week same my anenomy small piece of fish one day piece of mussles the next. I will get some more pics the weekend and add them.

[admorris]

well a few things have been changed since original set up. carbon has been moved from the reactor and into comp 2 of the sump between 2 course filter sponges reason for this was i needed 5kg of carbon for my water quantity which will be changed monthly. no 2 reactor now just has bioballs in still on a very slow flow hoping this will act as a nitrate reactor? the second reactor now has twice the amount of bio pearls in as an attempt to lower my nitrates even more, they are now around 10. I have also added an auto topup unit for ro as my salinity was going up to 1.030 daily this has now stabalised this problem with salinity and water levels staying constant using around a litre of ro daily! who would have thought evaporation was so much? have also invested in my own reverse osmosis unit for ro and redsea salt for easier weekly 10% water changes, so all going well, time for some more stock soon! yay.

[admorris]

oh i have also removed the sponge from bay 4 as this was getting very bunged up and my theory was it was better to let this through to the skimmer to remove rather than have it sat in the sump.

[Isophonic]

Nice tank. Good luck with the nitrates! Looks like you have really thought about this

[Lolly7]

Enjoyed the write up.Nice set you you have

[admorris]

Hi everyone just a quick update nitrates have now been steady for over a month at 5ppm so I'm thinking that is the best I'm going to get it, doing 25 litre water change every weekend to keep all other levels steady. Still can't seem to keep torch corals alive though first one died off one head at a time so I tried another now nitrates are OK and now that one has lost one head and not looking good, it's such a shame as I really like torch. Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated?