Yes Yes Yes! New 450G is here and in one piece!!!

Well I got everything in and transferred. Finshed all the plumbing (except the chiller). Got the waveboxes going so all in all a successful weekend.

Nathan showed upi but I had already done all the rock so we mostly BS'd. We did go to a new LFS fairly close to my house. Pretty Nice. I bought a copperband and put him on qt. He's not eating yet but it's only been a day. LFS guy said he ate that morning and I can get a full refund if I can't get him to eat. If he doesn't touch the PE MYsis tomorrow I'll have to hatch some brine shrimp.

Ok so here are some pics.

Tank just before I started (only the 20k lights are on here) Only one huge rock in the middle and my pVC racks.

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I've got a maxijet emptying into a filter sock to trap some of the detritus as I go along.

That big rock in the right center is an awesome piece. It weighs 35 lbs by itself and has some really nice corraline coverage. Here's a closeup.

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After about 2 hours I was roughly halfway done so I decided to take a break and snap a pic of the progress. I started at the bottoms of the PVC rack and drilled multiple holes in each rock then used black zipties (at least 2 per rock) to secure them to the rack.

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I only had the 20ks on that it why it looks so blue. Anyway. Long story short after about 5 hours here is what I came up with.

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I turned on all the lights a bit later so this shot looks a little better

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Continued
 
Here is a profile of the tank. I'm going to love having it 3 foot wide. It is really cool the back to front effect.

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Some closeups of the rock formations:

Left Side:

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Center:

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Right:

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These next two are just for Marc (melev) for those of you who don't know he has been topless (his tank has no lid to cover the light that is) for 2 years now so Nathan and I decided to have some fun with it.

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Then I took a break to go to the fish store. When I came back I decided to hook up the waveboxes. I have 2. They reccommend 2 on anything over about 300G.

I followed the instructions and mounted them with the way overpriced magnet and fired them up. I adjusted like they said and it took me abut an hour to find the sweet spot. But ooh my gosh when I did here was the result!

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It's hard to see but that is a full 2.5" wave. I have to say this thing is the most incredible thing I've seen for reefs. The back and forth action is amazing. It reminds me of what you see when diving more then I have ever seen before!

I have a cool video but for whatever reason it is taking forever to upload (It's only 5 megs) showing the waveboxes in action. I'll post that when it finally does load.

That was all yesterday.

Today was plumbing and cleaning day. I emptied all the sumps and cleaned them throughly. Completely cleaned the skimmer. The I reset the room a little different and completed all the plumbing. I decided to only use 2 of the vats for now. After all that I started making water to fill the vats tonight so tomorrow I should have the entire system up and going. Tomorrow night I'll siphon the starboard and scrub the bottom because it's pretty nasty as you can imagine. Fun stuff!
 
It looks great! I can't even see the PVC. great job! I think you should stick with the Marc look. Like a great masterpiece, it is never finished.
-Chuck
 
Ryan we stained the concrete in there and when we taped the walls a small amount got in between the plastic and the tape (you spray the stain) so thats what that is. Just need to paint over it.
 
Looks great Keith. Waveboxes rock!

I like your rockwork. Very open and minimal. Your fish will appreciate all the swimming room and the rocks will look great covered in corals.
 
Made some huge strides last few days. Electric is about 75% done but I'll save those pics for a little later.

I setup all the Tunze's in the tank so I have 4 6100s with magnets and 2 waveboxes. Nice flow for sure. I have to get the penductors hooked up to the returns then we'll be rockin.

Anyway onto the pics. I left some of them really big this time as it's hard to see any detail when you shrink it down!

Here is a front tank shot

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A little different here, from the back you can really see the PVC supports. I was cleaning the back glass.

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A side shot

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Some closeups

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More to come later, ontp more electric, programming the aquacontroler, etc.

Oh I almost forgot I did get a cleanup crew in today. 100 astreas, 100 ceriths, 12 mexican turbos.
 
Colby (the copperband butterfly) is now in the main tank. I kept him in hypo for 3.5 weeks then raised the salinity up over 3 days and put him in the display yesterday. He's doing well. Still a little hesitent about eating but definitly eating mysis when I blend it with mussel or when I trick him and put it in a mussel shell. If it's floating though he doesn't look at it. I'll continue to work with him as I'm at least seeing progress.

I did have 3 real small mejano's found on the giant rock and he took them out yesterday :D At least he's eating the bad stuff!

I put a couple tester acro frags in there also over the weekend. They seem to be doing well. Nice polyp extension, etc. The water is rock solid. I also did my first water change yesterday. ~60G or 10%. All went smooth and the system with plumbing worked great. It really is a peice of cake that took about 15 minutes with no worries of spilling, etc.

Speaking of I guess I'll start there.

Here is a pic of my water setup. The top container is for RODI. It has float valves connected to the RODI unit. I created a setup where it doesn't cycle often at all! (More on that in a minute)


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OK so how does the water get to the sump? Here is a pic of the bottom of the top container.




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The left is just a half inch bulkhead with a short length of pipe and a ball valve. It's how I fill the bottom container. On the right is a 1/4" tubing that leads to a solenoid (more in a sec) that is activated when the float switch in the sump is on.

Here is the solinoids. I have 2 for redundancy. If both failed open that would be major disaster! I've never heard of one failing open (only closed) but I'm not taking the chance!



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From there it goes to the sump.



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You can see my media reactors and then the calcium reactor in and out also. All the reactors (including the calcium) are fed by a single maxi 900.

The float valves are simply double for redundancy. One is ~1" higher then the other in case the first fails. I simply built a PVC support rather then worry about dtilling the sump of coming up with some over the side thing.

Ok so how does the water get to the top container in the first place. Well I have 2 solinoids on the input of the RODI then the output of the RODI goes here.
(Sorry for the crappy pic)


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If you read back on page 2 I mention copying a design from TOTM to minimize the on/off cycles with your RODI. This does exactly that. The water enters the PVC through the blue ball valve. When the water level in the rubbermaid is low the water dissipates out through the holes near the bottom. When the water level is rising the air is forced out of the 2 check valves in the PVC. When the water level falls however no air can get in so while outside the water level goes down, inside the PVC the water level stays constent. Eventually when the outside water level falls below the holes the air enters (or more appropraitly the water falls out) and the float switch kick on and it fills back up to the level of the float switch. Works awesome! Now It only kicks on every couple days for about 3 hours rather then several times daily!
 
Also completed the electrical setup. Here is the full view with the cabinet closed.

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Here is a closeup of the bottom part with the DJ stations.



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And here is a view inside the cabinet. It's organized chaos!

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I mounted all the TUNZE controllers and transformers under the stand.



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On the upper right of that photo you can barely see the wavebox controller and the stream multicontoller is right beside it.


A couple pics of the cords going around! Spend a couple hundred just on extension cords!

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That free cord hanging down is for the chiller which is the one major thing I still have to do!
 
So the aquacontroller is up and going and controlling everything now! I still have to mount it. That stupid 6ft temp probe is causing me issues. Why isn't it 10 like the others. Anyway only other major thing I did was run the air intakes for the becketts on the skimmer outside. What really drove this was noise! An Iwaki 100 sucking through 2 becketts sounds like a freight train! This quieted it greatly. It of course has great side benefits of bringing in fresh air which raises pH etc. but I did it for the noise!

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Well that's about it for now. I'm headed to MACNA today. I can't wait to see my old buddies from DFWMAS! I haven't seen them in over a year. It will be great to see all my once a year pals also. It's funny how after you go to several you see the same people. I love it!
 
So the aquacontroller is up and going and controlling everything now! I still have to mount it. That stupid 6ft temp probe is causing me issues. Why isn't it 10 like the others. Anyway only other major thing I did was run the air intakes for the becketts on the skimmer outside. What really drove this was noise! An Iwaki 100 sucking through 2 becketts sounds like a freight train! This quieted it greatly. It of course has great side benefits of bringing in fresh air which raises pH etc. but I did it for the noise!

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Well that's about it for now. I'm headed to MACNA today. I can't wait to see my old buddies from DFWMAS! I haven't seen them in over a year. It will be great to see all my once a year pals also. It's funny how after you go to several you see the same people. I love it!
 
Keith, Looks fantastic! Can not wait for the pics of it full of frags and colonies and watch the growth progression. Great job.
 
Ok so a relatively big update. Today I got 2 major deliveries. One was a whole box of tonga corals (more to follow) and the second was a regal angel from the marine center.

First the fish. I can't say enough about The Marine Center. Service was outstanding, packing was best I've ever seen. It came in a huge bag with almost 3 gallons of water! The specimen is beautiful also here are some pics.

Bag in the sump

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The qtank he's going into. it's an oceanic 30 hex which makes an absolutly awesome qtank. I have used it for 3 years now.


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Here the fish is as he was drip acclimating. The surface was moving so the pic is bad.

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Once he was in there a couple hours I gave him a mussell to munch on which he did willingly!

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Wish me luck with this guy. They are reall tough but my how beautiful!

Continued
 
Onto the corals. I ordered a whole box from Tonga. I was very impressed to say the least you'll see why. I put them mostly along the bottom of the tank to give them a few days to acclimate then I'll reposition.

I'll let the pictures talk from here on out!

Here is the goodie box. All 70 lbs of it!

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Continued
 
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