Mat's 255 Gallon Rimless Aquarium Build

Well after taking my poll on which glass to use on my new tank build, I decided to go with the starfire glass since there were no picks for the regular glass. Bellow is my diagram for my new 255 gallon Rimless aquarium. This aquarium is 72” long, 27” wide and 29” tall with an external flow so I will have all the room in the aquarium for aquascaping.

I decided to have this aquarium built European style so that the front pane of glass and sides go all the way down to the bottom of the tank. This makes the look of the tank very contemporary and that is the design that I’m going for. The stand will be powder coated steel frame with a 3” drip pan in the bottom and I will skin the outside with Maple wood. The stand will make a seamless transition from tank to stand. The outer skin of the tank will not be permanently mounted onto the steal frame. I will countersink magnets onto the inside of the panels so that the walls can be removed to perform maintenance on all the plumbing and etc. I will post pictures as soon as the steel frame stand is finished and I start making the skin.

I will use pretty much all of my existing equipment from my 175 bow, and I’m hoping that I can make a smooth transition of removing the corals and fish to their new home once it is finished. I currently plan on taking the corals and fish and placing them into Rubbermaid plastic bins for temporary storage while I make the transition. I’m hoping I can complete this project within the next 6 weeks.
 
sounds nice, gonna have to google this european style business ;)

where are you ordering from?
 
a very nice aquairum manufacturer

http://www.acrylicandglassexhibits.com/

also, for reference...in the New to the Hobby forum there is a sticky with acronyms
 
No A.G.E does not sell directly to the public. You will have to go through one of the LFS. I did allot of comparisons from vendor to vendor and I really like'd what I saw from A.G.E. I also PM'd some of the DFWMAS members here whom have A.G.E aquariums and they all really like them. I'm exited to get this project complete. My main worries is loosing live stock.
 
Well fabrication should be complete on the rimless by the end of this week. I think after completion the tank will have to dry for like ten days to ensure the silicon is cured. My plans are to take the inhabitants of the aquarium you see below, which is my 175 bow and place them into two square rubber maid containers. I will place my rock and top sand in one and coral in the other. I'm thinking to put the protein skimmer in the side with the rock. I'm thinking I will plumb the two together.
 
Well I have been working allot on setting up the new aquarium for the last week. My aquarium showed up on last Thursday and it has been a race to get things out of the old aquarium and into the rimless. I was successful in moving all the corals and sand out of the 175bow. I went and purchased a few rubber tubs from Lowes and plumbed them quickly together with some flex spa tubbing that I had laying around the garage that I had on a previous setup.

I used a dart pump on the tub in the bottom and put valves on the entry to each tub. The back tub flows downward toward the front of the picture. Once plumbed up I moved the water and corals over one by one as the water level decreased in the aquarium. In the back tub I skimmed the first one inch of sand off the top of the old aquarium and placed that live sand in the bottom bucket. I think placed corals and rock in that tub that could not be seperated. You can see the setup in the pic below. Not very nice and neat but efective. I also put my Chaeto from my refugium in the last containter as well as a light to keep it alive. I did not put any light over any of the corals in the other two containers.
 
Here is a closer look at the tubs in which I placed my corals in. In the closest container, I made two stacks of coras seperated by a light diffuser from home depot that I fitted in the tub. As you can see in the pic, I have the corals far enought from each other to ensure they dont sting each other. I made sure to keep the stinging corals away from the none stinging corals.
 
This is the second tub back. I placed some nice big size rocks with corals and allot of my lps in this tub. AS you can see this tub pretty much was at the max for water capacity. This one had me worried.
 
This is the last container in the line up which contains my sand and rock with corals as well as chaeto. Oh and I cant forget my Tunze pump with the corals on it. This one really had allot of internal flow thanks to the tunze rock [smilie=lol.gif]. you can see my nice montipora confusa in here too along with my mother colony of sunset monti in the top left hand corner.
 
Well with most of the corals out of the way. I placed the live rock in another tub with no heater and a tunze rock so that it would not cycle on me. The water temp stayed around 73 or so. This pretty much was all my live rock except for the ones I placed in the 20gallon long for my fish and the ones I took to the LFS.
 
With everything out of the way. My old aquarium was removed from the house and the new one delivered. Maybe I should have went bigger [smilie=smile.gif] . WEll the frame was brought in and we schimed it up to make the stand level and then we placed the aquarium on the stand. With the external overflow the stand sits about 6 inches from the wall. This gives about 3/8" clearance between the wall and the external overflow.

With the tank in place I went right to work making water. I previously purchased a 125GPD membrane from bulk reef supply so I could make water a little faster for this aquarium. I placed a long return hose on the RO/DI unit and started to fill the tank. I then filled the sand from this tub into 5gallon buckets about 1/3 full to the back yard and rinsed the deep sand bed sand until it was clear. This was allot of work and I think I took off about 2 layers of skin.

Once I was done rinsing the sand I immediately returned it to the aquarium while it was filling with fresh RO/DI water. This process took about a half a day for the several hundred pounds of sand I had. Here is the tub that had the sand in it.
 
On day three and four I had a couple people from the DFWMAS stop by and lend me a hand on hanging my light. Thanks Ron. Once I hung the light from ceiling, I began to plumb the tank. On day 5 I had the aquarium about 3/4 full and plumbed. I was thinking I needed to hurry up since the coral hadn't seen light for so long. Upon completion of plumbing this is what the tank looked like.
 
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