fewskillz Posted October 18, 2011 Author Share Posted October 18, 2011 With replacement lamp on the right: Looks much better, especially in pictures. Link to comment
HecticDialectics Posted October 18, 2011 Share Posted October 18, 2011 def. looks less yellow now :thumbsup: Link to comment
fewskillz Posted October 19, 2011 Author Share Posted October 19, 2011 Had an idea today. I'm scrapping the two returns and going to a spray bar/manifold routed up behind the tank and over the rim. This frees up the 4 holes inside the tank to be two herbie drains. They'll be tough to tune, since there's two, but they'll be quieter and handle the flow of my Mag 18 better than the old pair of Durso drains did. I bought all of the new fittings I need tonight along with some Krylon Fusion for the spray bar. I will start over tomorrow night, I should still be running by the weekend. Link to comment
fewskillz Posted October 24, 2011 Author Share Posted October 24, 2011 So, work got in the way and I couldn't touch my new plumbing plan for the rest of last week. I was ready to see some life in the tank so I went ahead and aquascaped since the water was in the tank and ready. I'm going to get my man cave all cleaned up now that the extra tanks can go away. I'm out of town this weekend so I don't know if I'll get to re-designing the plumbing or not. Hopefully I can. I'm particularly proud of the column in the middle. 4 rocks, no rods, no glue, all gravity. Ignore the 3 or 4 random rocks on the bottom in the front, those will go away. Notice the light on the right is back to being whiter than the other 2. Since this is the second lamp I think the ballast is over-driving it. When I take the lights out of the hood to paint it I'm going to swap that to my other ballast and see if it will fall back in line with others. Link to comment
Deleted User 6 Posted October 24, 2011 Share Posted October 24, 2011 hot damn! stain that canopy though, noobcake. Link to comment
fewskillz Posted October 24, 2011 Author Share Posted October 24, 2011 hot damn! stain that canopy though, noobcake. Black paint to match the cabinet. Ebony stain would be way too much work, and money, when the goal is to just make it look painted! Link to comment
Deleted User 6 Posted October 24, 2011 Share Posted October 24, 2011 plebian. when do you add tangs? Link to comment
fewskillz Posted October 24, 2011 Author Share Posted October 24, 2011 plebian. when do you add tangs? Last night. I'll start adding a little sand tonight. Probably some frags from the SimpleTen as well. Link to comment
hooligan_78 Posted October 24, 2011 Share Posted October 24, 2011 Rockwork is bomb!!! Don't stain/paint the canopy. Just keep it that way to piss people off... Link to comment
Deleted User 6 Posted October 24, 2011 Share Posted October 24, 2011 lol, this^ i for one will be pissed off. Link to comment
HecticDialectics Posted October 24, 2011 Share Posted October 24, 2011 sweet aquascape Link to comment
fewskillz Posted October 24, 2011 Author Share Posted October 24, 2011 Just keep it that way to piss people off... but that would piss ME off too. It looks horrible, plus its unprotected. The wood will rot away if I don't paint it. Thanks guys, I'm pretty happy with the 'scape. Link to comment
fewskillz Posted October 26, 2011 Author Share Posted October 26, 2011 Added a long finned fairy wrasse to the tank Monday night. She (I think a she anyways, not very long-finned) came out and ate and was quite active last night. Of course not for this picture, but she looks good so far. Link to comment
disaster999 Posted October 27, 2011 Share Posted October 27, 2011 just skimmed through the whole thing, 2 moves and a tank change in the span of 4 years...and i though a tank change and moving the tank 20 ft was bad enough. hopefully you dont have to move the tank for a while. cant wait to see it all stocked up Link to comment
fewskillz Posted October 27, 2011 Author Share Posted October 27, 2011 3 moves! I moved the old 125 twice, upgraded to the 180 at the last house, and then moved the 180. This should be it for awhile. If we move again I'm upgrading at the same time. The smallest the next tank will be is an 8' 240 gallon. We should be here for awhile though, we like this house, and more importantly, this location. We loved the last house but decided we hated the location, but that's why we've been moving around. We've lived in each part of town that we can afford and are really happy with this place. Got a lot of work done last night in the room where the 180 is. It doesn't look like a storage room anymore. The furniture is all set, the stuff hung on the walls, and the largemouth bass hung over the fireplace! Once its all done I'll post a picture. Link to comment
Deleted User 6 Posted October 27, 2011 Share Posted October 27, 2011 looking good man. i wish you had added sand though, lol. now fill it up with SPS, like 10 schooling anthias, and some other awesome stuff. Link to comment
fewskillz Posted October 27, 2011 Author Share Posted October 27, 2011 Sand is next. My 4 little SPS frags will be moved from the 10 gallon to this tank early next week. I'll be slowly adding more along with a frag of every softy I've got. I need more LPS too. This is a mixed reef after all. With only having the 175 watters I can probably only support SPS at the top, so it should be perfect to support a little bit of everything and cover the tank. The anthias will come as well, and chromis, a few more wrasses, a dwarf angel or 3, a pair of shrimp gobies, at least one more tang, and maybe a blenny of some sort. I figure I'll wind up with 25 or so fish again. Link to comment
Aquanist Posted October 27, 2011 Share Posted October 27, 2011 Nice build. Love your hollow yellow tang BTW (post 329 if I remember correctly! Link to comment
fewskillz Posted November 8, 2011 Author Share Posted November 8, 2011 Found a latch to hold the removable front panel tight to the rest of the canopy. Finished painting. Spray bar and Herbie drains are all glued and installed. Leak test tonight! I swapped out the white light on the right with my spare ballast and it looks exactly the same. So I guess the outlier is actually the blue light on the left. I'm going to swap that one out for the lamp I previously removed. If that doesn't work then I'll swap it for the ballast that just came off the other end of the tank. That blue light is very pretty, but I'd rather the lights all match a little better, even if they are closer to a 10 or 12,000k. Link to comment
fewskillz Posted November 9, 2011 Author Share Posted November 9, 2011 It lives!!! Closeup of the piping on the left left to right that's: Primary drain, return piping, backup drain. The trash can has holes cut around the bottom, it acts as a strainer for the return pump. The eggcrate to the left holds the chaeto in place. We'll follow the water on its journey, so through the pump out the back of the stand, up behind the tank to: Up and over the rim of the tank down into the left overflow. The 1" reduces down to 3/4" and then rests on the knockout where the return nozzle would normally protrude from the overflow. It runs all the way across the back of the tank and rests on the opposite overflow's knockout. It's capped on that other end. There are three 3/4" loc-line nozzles on the spray bar. The center one is tee'd for a total of 4 nozzles. You can see most of it from this picture: I have a can of black Krylon Fusion. I'll probably remove the spray bar and paint it, I wanted to make sure it worked first. So onto the drains. The plan was two herbie's. Problem is the tank isn't exactly level. We tried, but the slab slants pretty hard toward the center of the wall, it's an old house. Turns out, because the right overflow sees a little more water than the left my 2 herbie's will function exactly like a bean overflow with two open-channel drains. So one full siphon, two very low flow open standpipes, one emergency backup. It's dead silent and was very easy to tune. Even better than two herbie's! Right overflow with the full siphon handling most of the flow and the backup taking just enough water to cover the lip of the elbow. I took a coupler and some scrap pipe to extend this backup drain to below the water line in the sump. The left overflow actually settled out to even lower than this, I had to all but shut the valve to get it to rise this much. So the open standpipe is actually just taking a trickle like the right side's "backup" drain. If I cover the primary drain on the other side the water will rise enough to hit this backup drain, but it takes pretty much a full blockage. I am not worried about a flood at all unless more than 2 drains are 100% blocked. The Mag18 isn't flowing much at all so I have 0 concerns of any flooding. I'm very happy with my new drain setup. It just needs some little tweaking but the hard stuff is all done! Link to comment
fewskillz Posted November 10, 2011 Author Share Posted November 10, 2011 I decided to use a real camera last night since the water had cleared up quite a bit. My tangs. New monti cap frags from last weekend's frag swap! The clowns have taken a liking to the center rock tower. Neon GSP You can really see the difference in color of the 3 lamps in this shot. It's starting to bug me. If I have time I'm going to swap out that ballast tonight. Link to comment
Ezsharkman Posted November 10, 2011 Share Posted November 10, 2011 Wow... looks great. Use a real camera from now on great colors Link to comment
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