My First Attempt At The Salty Side! 55Cm Cube

[seffieuk]

A) For a few months it will be FOWLR, which I hear you can get away with no RO
B) I would have to buy 200 litres of RO water which is £40 and bloody heavy to trasport.

Buy the water or better still, get an ro unit you will regret not getting one - it really is not worth putting in tap water for the amount of crud you will add to the system

 

[Ryandsimmons]

Well... I've had a 3 week break to let my wallet recover slightly. Just placed my order online for the following which will be delivered tomorrow morning.



1 x Hydor THEO 200w Heater () = £17.95
1 x Aquascape construction Putty (Rock Grey) () = £4.25
1 x API Liquid Reef Master Test Kit () = £22.95
1 x API Melafix 240ml (240ml) = £8.45
1 x Hydor Koralia Evolution 2800 Circulation Pump () = £34.95
1 x Algarde Fish Net 4" x 3" () = £3.25
1 x Classica Strip Thermometer () = £2.55


(Melafix is for my tropical tank.)



So tomorrow night I am going to get it all up and running. I will use dechlorinated tap water to start with. As much as I would like to get RO water I can't afford £70 (£3.99 per 25 litres, plus £3 per 25 litres for water vessel hire.)



After that however all top offs will be with RO water. Since it will probably be a month before I get my live rock, then several months at least before I look at corals I figure I should be able to get away with the tap water to start with. I am also just using the one powerhead to start with (it will provide 17x turnover) but when corals come along I will be adding an 1800to go with it. (To provide 28x flow.)



So now the moment I see a live rock bargain I can throw straight into my waiting tank. I will also be mixing the salt in the tank, as the tank will be empty to start with anyway.

 

[Ryandsimmons]

Anyway, tonight I was very busy, but very productive.

Got all my kit delivered today and started some serious work.

First I made sure the tank was in final place and started to fill with tap water treated with dechlorinator.


Photo008 by Ryan Simmons, on Flickr

Once filled I installed my powerhead (a Koralia 2800) inside the tank and my heater in the sump. (Is it okay to have the heater in the sump, or should I keep in in the much larger volume tank?) Hooked up the pump, set my outflow and turned on. Making sure that flows were similar.

Anyway... then I made my HUGE mistake. I turned off the pump to do a bit of tidying up with the boxes I had just unpacked... when I noticed water on the floor. Turning off the pump meant it suddenly reversed flow and became a siphon... I nearly had a heart attack, I live in a block of flats and I could just see water gushing out of my sump all over the floor. I think I lost about 25 litres.

So cue frantic emptying of all my towels and dirty clothes on the lounge, scattered around trying to soak up water. Lesson learned very well. PUMPS WORK BOTH WAYS AND CREATE SIPHONS. At least I hadn't added salt or anything, otheriwse it would have been a major issue, as it was it was just a case of drying everything.

Anyway, after calming down, I cut the pipe from the return pump, so now it is level with the overflow holes. I then glued the pipe to the side of the tank with the rock epoxy I bought... it is not very neat, but is hidden from normal view.

(It can be seen just above the waterline here


Photo012 by Ryan Simmons, on Flickr

Anyway, a few more minutes of work and salt is added to the water, everything is turned on and the tank is running nicely. Salt is around 0.18 by my refractometer, so I can slowly add more. The flow is very noisy, I need to play around with flow reduction on one of the overflow pipes, but all in all I am very happy with a job well done.

It may not be the prettiest work, but all drilling, pipework, hardware selection, siliconing has been done by myself, with help from a couple of great websites. (Thanks everyone here and at one other forum.)

I have a 25kg bag of sand, 10 kgs of live sand waiting to go in when I find some live rock. So I am now at the point where the first bargain live rock I see will result in a living tank! (I have too much coral sand I think, I bought extra to make a deep sand bed in my sump, but now I have found out that you need silt or mud for that.

Anyway, here are a few pics of it all set up, with the Metal Halide running...


Photo011 by Ryan Simmons, on Flickr


Photo010 by Ryan Simmons, on Flickr

Oh, I forgot one other thing. There is a plastic brace (tranparent) on the tank that can be seen in one of the above pics. Now my halide sits right on top of this, around 3 inches up. Will this obscure the light enough to affect future corals etc?

 

[seffieuk]

Nice work - tank is going to look brilliant with live stock in, I love cubes

Bet now your only problem is that every towel in the flat is soaking wet

 

[Ryandsimmons]

\o/

Just placed order for:

Bubble Magus NAC6 skimmer
Hydor Powerhead 2800
RoPhos (or something, anyway it was £15 for 250mil, which is a cheaper way of getting rid of my current Phosphate problem than replacing all the water!)
Legs for my Arcadia Classica metal Halide lighting.

All next day delivery apart from the powerhead.

Bring on saturday when I will be buying 15kg of live rock,.

 

[MrLiam]

How much did that all cost you if you don't mind saying.

 

[Ryandsimmons]

No worries:

Tank + stand (2nd hand)- £30
Sump (2nd hand) - £40
Metal Halide (2nd hand) - £70
Skimmer - £169
Powerheads - 2 x £36 = £72
Return pump Eheim 1000 - £25?
Sand: - £30
Drill bit / pipes / bulkheads etc - £50
Metal Halide Legs - £40
Salt: £50 for the bucket, 25kgs
Heater: £18

 

[MrLiam]

Not too bad and you also got a few bargains aswell

 

[lljdma06]

Are you going to buy an RO unit?

I really admire how all of you just put these tanks together. Honestly, I wouldn't be doing my system if it wasn't already practically feasible. I've no gift for DIY. I'll assemble tanks stands and stuff if given directions, but as for me making something from scratch, and I'm like... no... LOLOL

Assembling my RO unit will take at least a 12 pack of beer...

 

[Ryandsimmons]

I can't get an RO unit. I live in a block of flats and between the water pressure and my complete and utter lack of any plumbing skills I can't see where I could plumb in an RO unit. My dishwasher / Washing machine are also built in so I am not sure how to get access to pipes.

lljdma06, if I can put a tank together anyone can. My holes I drilled are not straight (hence I had to use a smaller bulkhead that I was expecting, my pipework is shaky and sticks out everywhere and you don't even want to see my version of silicon seals around the bulkheads! Silicon is dripping everywhere and spiky and generally a bit rubbish.

Nevertheless I am quite proud of myself, it all works, and hopefully you won't notice all the little screw ups here and there when the tank is running.

On the downside the Bubble Magus is out of stock, so I need to wait a few more days for delivery.

 

[Ryandsimmons]

\o/

Light stand arrived today.


Photo001_001 by Ryan Simmons, on Flickr

Also got some RowaPhos which I will throw in the sump now.

Just agreed to by some livestock on saturday:

Livestock list and prices:
7 - 10kg mature live rock heaving with pods, brittle stars, fanworms and algae of various sorts. Includes several mushrooms, zoas, euphyllia, hammer,3 redleg hermit crabs, peppermint shrimp, a fat green mandarin and a tailspot blenny. These last 2 fish have grown and thrived on this rock and the ts blenny has a home in one of the rocks.

I will probably take a quick drive to my LFS on friday and pick up some extra live rock in preparation. Just praying my Protein Skimmer arrives saturday morning, otherwise it will only arrive monday. Which is worrying.

 

[seffieuk]

that is looking one very neat set-up but must advice against using irons in tanks

Glad to see TFF up on youy laptop too and cricky oReily, how many remotes do you need.................

Oh I love photos

Seffie x

 

[Ryandsimmons]

Oh boy! Busy day today.

Anyway, starting on thursday I picked up 3kgs of live rock from my LFS, along with some water containers. Put the rock in my tank, glued it to the base and added my sand. Plan was to let the sand settle, and have some nice rock sticking out of it that I can add to.

Sand was 20kgs of live sand, and maybe 10kg of crushed argonite. For 36 hours my tank was a nightmare, just a cloudy mess that looked like milk. However to my luck this morning it was mostly clear. So jumped in my car at 9, and 90 minutes later I was meeting with an incredibly lovely lady and buying most of her tank.

Drove home, stopping at the LFS to pick up some 25l spare RO, 25l spare saltwater (£10!!! for salt water. I have salt at home, but I decided to get some from the LFS just in case of emergencies.) I decided to get all the rock etc iin as soon as possible, and I can aquascape later, more important was getting everything wet. I did transport everything in big buckets, so hopefully there will be no die off. I acclimatized the fish, crabs etc, however I inadvertantly did not acclimatize 2 corals and 2 hermits which I didn't see on the rock until too late. Just hope they will be okay.

Anyway, putting the rock in stirred up the water again, so the following pics are limited. In the morning when the tank settles I will take better ones.

Tank now has - 10 or 13 kilos of the reddest, most lovely algae encrusted rock you have ever seen, absolutely teeming with critters, worms, feather duster, bristle things, tiny starfish, and a million other forms of life.

25 kilos of sand (around 1 -1.5 inches deep.)

One stunning green mandarin.

One very shy tailspot blenny

One peppermint shrimp

5 red hermit crabs

2 black hermit crabs

Lots of small, but lovely corals.

Anyway, enough blabbering, here are some pics...

Black hermit...

Photo011_001 by Ryan Simmons, on Flickr

Ermmm.. coral?

Photo010_001 by Ryan Simmons, on Flickr


Red hermit

Photo009_001 by Ryan Simmons, on Flickr

More coral?

Photo008_001 by Ryan Simmons, on Flickr

Some lovely colour on this:

Photo007_001 by Ryan Simmons, on Flickr

And best of all, this almost glows!

Photo006_001 by Ryan Simmons, on Flickr

 

[seffieuk]

Sounds like you are making real progress now

But, you have a mandy in a nano with no copepod culture set up, what are you going to do?

Seffie x

 

[Ryandsimmons]

Sounds like you are making real progress now

But, you have a mandy in a nano with no copepod culture set up, what are you going to do?

Seffie x

The lady I bought everything from had him in her nano (94 litres) for a year, she says she didn't feed him anything special. (Everthing here is just that ladies nano dropped into my tank with just some sand added. Also she had a few more fish which she kept.) She said between the copods on the rocks, every 3 days or so some frozen lobster eggs he thrives.

I am aware though of the dangers and he is on my watch list.

Tank this morning is crystal clear and everything is alive and doing well. I willdo some more water tests etc in a bit, then do my proper aquascaping this afternoon.

Things I looks out for are:
That the mandy is eating
That my shrimp and all hermits are moving (I understand that they can die very easily with tank moves.)
That the feather duster is out and waving. (I've heard sulking feathers are a good indicator of problems.)