Cliff’s 180 gallon reef

[Cliff]

Once i get everything set-up and running with SW, I try a take a few videos as well. I'll just have to learn how to take videos with that fancy new camera that I got.

[Gogi]

What is a camera compared to a life support sump? You can figure out that simple gadget of a camera lol.

[Cliff]

As I’m out of town for a few days, my super fantastic great wife has been making salt water for the tank. The main tank is about 20 gallons way from being full, and another 30 gallons for the sump

Looks I will be adding substrate and arranging the rock this weekend

If the parameters are still stable a day or two after that, I’ll start transferring fish

[chrisfraser05]

woop woop woop

[Cliff]

My wife did a great job making SW these past few days. The tank and sump are now filled with newly mixed SW.

I also got most of the rock stacked in the tank now, and I added the substrate. Everything is up and running now. Assuming the parameters remain stable, I might start moving fish & corals over this weekend

[chrisfraser05]

brilliant news mate!

I need to follow your lead and get mine started!

[Cliff]

I'd love to start seeing some progress in your set-up Chris

I used the below sand. It's a version of packaged "Live" sand, but it is the only black sand that I could find. I got the Hawaiian black version

http://www.caribsea.com/itempage_mar..._aragalive.htm

As I hate live sand, I washed the substrate really well to get rid of all of that crud that comes with "live" sand and usally gives you a small ammonia spike. The grain size is smaller that I wanted, but at least it is bigger than the suger sized stuff that I have in my 90 gallon.

Just tested the water this morning and so far, it's good

[Cliff]

A few pics of the recent progress

A pic with some of the rock and the black substrate. Hopefully I will have the canopy done and on this weekend so I can take a better pic with the tank lighting on. I managed to make the duriso stand pipes even more quite by adjust the height a little more as well as the air intake. The empty space to the left of the tank is for some of the remaining rock still in my 90 gallon


I also did a lot of work on the sump. I built the shelf for the RO top-off and auto dosing unit to sit on



I was planning on an algae scrubber, but the more and more I tried to make it work, I just could not figure out a way to make the size of scrubber that I wanted to work in that sump compartment. For now, I got some red lettuce leaf maro algae (Gracilaria curtissae) but I’m not convinced that is actually what I have. The description is close, but it doesn’t seem like a 100% match to me. I’ll have to wait until it grows and takes hold in the sump. As long as it grows and helpt to keep the nitrates & phosphates down I’ll be happy. The sump will be getting a lot more rock from the 90 gallon so the algae will be raised closer to the light. Right now I’m using a 43watt CFL bulb (warm white).






I’m currently planning to set-up another tank in the closet, plumb it into the set-up, and use it as a algae scrubber. I figure that would be better than up-grading to a larger sump as the closet is pretty narrow as it is. Still looking into how to do this, so stay tuned for more details

[Cliff]

I had bought my auto top-up used off a friend of mine. Tonight I finally got around to finding/downloading the instruction manual for it. Looks like it would be too risky having the water reservoir for the auto top-off water above the sump because there is a chance if the valve fails, you could create a syphon and empty all the top-up water into the sump. Whether or not an extra 10 gallons of fresh water in 220 total gallons of water would impact the parameters enough to effect the fish/corals in the tank, I am still not going to risk it.

I think it’s time to sell off all my extra light fixtures so I can have a little extra space to set-up a reservoir next to the sump beside the return pump

[Fakhouri1610]

Wow, this sounds like it's going to be amazing.
Do you have any idea what you're going to stock it with?