http://www.nano-reef.com/forums/index.php?...128756&st=0

its down in the middle of my post. Reefgeek.com is the only place that has them. The Grim Reeper at RC tested them against the TX5 and Tek fixtures and they blew them out of the water, twice the PAR. 719 without bulbs or 799 with bulbs for the 6 x 54 fixture. There is a slight wait for the fxiture and right now its hanging only unless you make your own brackets. I couldn't decide between that and the Aquactinics 7 x 54 fixture, which has a bit more par but thats result of the extra bulb, I was leaning to the Aquactinics fixture because i like fixtures that can be mounted but I'm still waiting and that ATI fixture is looking sexier and sexier. Then again Reefgeek is also have clearance sale on the Tek fixtures, including the limited edition 6 x 54 for 439 with bulbs. I don't know if the near 400 dollar difference is worth it

oh ok, it's a T5 only fixture. very cool! But I think I'm going to stick with MH + T5. I'm a fan of the MH look for some odd reason. But I'll definitely consider it. thanks a ton eddie!!

definitely some sort of MH T5 Combo. tank from Italy huh, how much was shipping

hey ez, glad you're on this thread too =) glad to have your company lol

Shipping is actually free, or probably part of the cost of the tank. I'm picking up from the the U.S. distributor here in norcal, so there's no extra delivery fee. I'm not even sure how much it'd be to deliver it to my house, but it's not too far away anyway.

Damn. Shipping from italy.....
I wonder what the price of the tank is without shipping....

thanks for the offer, but I'm going to go with a pendant rather than a retro, and 3x175 is too much light for my tank =(

good price though

Yeah, I should see how much it'd be if I picked up from the warehouse in Italy =) Now I just need a house in Italy... maybe Cinque Terre... that's a nice place.

SoCal Stand Update - [ 9/05/07 ]

My stand is making huge progress, in fact it should be done tomorrow! SoCal is getting faster and faster at their builds. I'm thoroughly impressed =)

Images:

Stand Base with no trim:




Pocket Screws for the center brace in case I want to put something really long into the cabinet:




Beautiful trim added




It will get a dark cherry color stain soon

very awesome looking stand, i hope to do the same with the stand for my AO 180 and even the same stain, cherry has such a nice professional look to it, im either going to do cherry or...working in heating and cooling im thinking about wrapping the stand in aluminum and doing the same for the doors

You're going with AO? Should be sweet. When will you order it?

Aluminum? THAT'S MANLY =) Haha. Brushed aluminum would be really fancy.

Your insane.

And im super jealous.

as soon as i get the quote and all of my old stuff old im going be ordering, hopefully my store will be up and running too (cant go wrong with wholesale pricing)

yeah i want to go with AO because i cant seem to pay the price of a 180G elos when i could get two 180G AO tanks, plus the only reason elos are so expensive is because shipping from italy and the prices of glass over there are crazy

you can see the start of my thread in the big tank section in here

I will definitely be following your thread too =)

I don't think that shipping from italy and glass prices are the only things accountable for the higher prices. But I may be wrong. I've never seen an AO tank before in person.

well im not saying thats the only reason, but if you forget about both of those i guarantee they are similarly priced to AO tanks

Very true. How are you getting the AO tank? I remember for their 90 gallon it was going to cost me $700 to ship just the tank to California =(

well its only about a 5 hour drive from my house so shipping shouldnt be too bad, i will most likley pick it up with a buddy and drive it back to ensure its safe

SoCal Custom Stand Build Finished - [ 9/11/07 ]

Randy finished my custom stand today. Stained in the same dark cherry as my last, quality looks equally up to par! I'm asking him to take some pictures of the top, back and with the stand open. I'm also hoping to get a closer picture of the pocket screws.






The down side is he may be shipping the stand without a crate!? He did mention this would cut the costs of shipping, but he still charged me the same price. Perhaps he anticipated it, but I was assuming, them having the reputation of lots of redundancy, would actually ship it with a crate. I emailed him back to see if he could still ship with a crate, otherwise cut my cost down and put a guarantee on any shipping damage.

Randy's a good guy, I'm sure he'll come through.

But the best way to ship is with SoCal crates. They're incredibly strong and durable.

So I'll finish off the remaining balance to Randy and wait for it to be shipped. Should be here within a few days.

Daaaamn this is going to be a hell of a tank! That stand looks amazing!

SoCal Custom Stand More Pictures and Shipping Update - [ 9/11/07 ]

Well, Randy at SoCal did it again. He's crating it up for me. Usually to crate it it would cost $270 to ship, but he's only doing it for $130. Let me just say, Randy is out there to make customer's happy. His priorities are great, giving great end products, and not out there to scam and rip people off. This is just a plug for him again, but Randy over at SoCalCreations does amazing work (like you see in this thread), gives very fair and honest prices, and works with customers to make them happy. I would never hesitate to go with them again.

A lot of people say that I should just go with a local cabinet maker to save money, but I think shipping is worth it, given the amazing quality of the cabinet you get. Randy also knows fish tanks very well, unlike some local cabinet maker, so he knows what is needed and how to support heavy tanks. He always adds redundancy for extra safety. In this case center braces to ensure stability in the center, even making them removable with pocket screws. Thanks a ton SoCalCreations!

More pictures just took:

Doors open:



From the back (I believe the sides weren't stained yet in this pic:)



The top cutout piece for the ELOS corner overflow (look at how amazing the quality is of this cut):

sexy....uber sexy

did I mention Randy's going to throw in the styrafoam padding between tank and stand? I don't think it's needed for an ELOS, but it's always a good idea. Randy always says their guarantee is held given you place the foam padding between tank and stand.

Plus, being white, it will make my BB look better.


Now I have to figure out what to do with the back of my tank... leave it clear or paint it black?

i would say leave it clear until you know for sure because it will be a ##### to try and get black paint off if you dont like it lol

paint it a deep blue. I've had two black backgrounds and I'm not that huge of a fan. You could always do some sort of vinyl and change it around till you found the color you liked and then use some sort of spray adhesive and if you get sick of it just change it

Ah that's a very good idea. I wonder where I can get the vinyl... a decal shop might have a big roll of it, though that might already be sticky. Sticky glue is a pain =)

i would definitely try vinyl hmm if not what i would try is get some posterboard in dark blue and in black and see how they look (that only costs you like $2 then and you can go from there on what you want to do with it

The stand will be picked up tomorrow from SoCalCreations! I'm totally excited.

Strange news though... I will be buying a house and moving basically across the street in April 2008. Should I hold off setting this up until then? I'm afraid this will turn into another one of my dry systems if so =(

i would say set it up and just keep it a little on the less involved side for now, dont stock it all crazy and such, and just keep it like that until you move where there you can go crazy

well I wasn't going to add any livestock in for 6 months anyways to let everything cycle. I guess I'll just let it cycle and then wait for the move to add my livestock. I have tons of colonies in my frag tank ready to be fragged and added, so it's not a problem.

I wouldnt put sand in it.. thats IMO the hardest part of moving a tank is the stupid, smelly, dirty sand.
I would just do water and rock, let you rock grow and get some nice corraline algea going. Then after you empty the tank and move it put in the sand, refill, put rock in and let settle for a week or two.
JMO though

thats a very good idea i think, i hate sand which is why imgoing extremely fine on the sand i am going to have in my next tank

oh, this is going to be totally bare bottom. I'm running 80x turnover in this puppy

seeim doing about 60 with a little bit of sand in it, i think 4 vortechs and 2000 GPH on the return pump through an OM 4 way will be enough

oh sweet, 4 vortech's on a controllers would be really nice =)

yeah it should be, im waiting to get responses back from a few acrylic tank manufacturers

You are also thinking of acrylic tanks other than the AO?

The stand made it to the terminal about 30 minutes from my house. But I wasn't able to pick it up today. My truck is too small for me to drive. It's a '86 toyota truck, and I'm 6'3", so I can't get my foot from the break to the gas and vice versa without doing some gymnastics... not safe for a highway drive.

So I'm trying to get a friend to drive my truck for me to pick up the tank. Why not get a new truck? Well this one only has like 30,000 miles on it, works amazingly well... and heck, I don't ever have to drive it, someone else does =)

It's also almost impossible to stall, the freeplay on the clutch is ridiculous.

if your truck is too small for you to drive maybe look at a newer truck lol

ooo and i ended up going with Envision Acrylic, AO wanted 2538 for a 60x30x24 tank (Also shipping is a killer with thos tanks just like you said ~$600 for me and im only 5 hours away), drilled peninsula style with the 3 viewale sides in starphire, i go my Envision Acrylic 48x48x24 shipped to my house from 2350

good choice on the envision tank - James does flawless work

I'm finally going to pickup the SoCal stand today from the terminal in San Leandro!

Not sure if I'm going to work on anything stand related yet. I will probably install a new GFCI into the wall plug, and mount the controller and dc8's. Get the AC III all hooked up to the internet with it's on static IP and see how it goes.

I'm also selling the AquaLogic 1/6hp chiller I was going to use. I'm going to go for a Teco SeaChill TR10 instead. The specs say it can bring down temperature by 18*F on 90 gallon tanks, so it should be plenty for mine. Plus 30% more efficient, quiet running, sounds good to me =) I might not even need to plumb into my basement.

I'm moving in April anyways, so it wouldn't be smart to drill through the floor now =X

hmm good idea on not drilling through the floor, and what do you think so far of the aquacontroller III ive pretty much settled on that so what do you think so far? I'm looking to do temp probe, two pH probes (one in the reactor and one in the sump), and then to control everything else and hook it up to the internet like you are going to do

what made you go with the aquacontroller III over the other controllers?

I've actually hooked it up to the internet, but that's about it. The programming is fairly simple (though too simple for my tastes, as I'm a software engineer) and works well without any bugs as far as I can see.

I hear a few complaints about a few DC8's failing, but of course customer service is top notch. I'd recommend testing it out for awhile before hooking it up to a system that has livestock. My long cycle period will be the tester for the DC8's.

I like how you can control everything via a webpage, it's a million times easier than on the controller itself. There are problems if you use a dynamically allocated IP, firewalls, routers, and such. I'm lucky that I have a bunch of static IP's I can use.

There are ways around it, but it's a little messy. Those kinds of problems aren't really Neptune's product's fault, it's just how you have your network setup at home.

It's nice to see the data of your ph and temperature change throughout the day though.

well it sounds like a winner, my tank will also have quite a large cycle at about 1-2 months, actually all of my rock is cycled already but im going to scrub down the rock with rock prep and then recycle everything

I will talk to Dan at Salty Critter about it, the more and more i hear about the AC III it seems to be just as good, if not better then the Profilux i was going to go with, the only thing it doesnt do is have wireless internet which i dont need as i can bring the ethernet cable up the same wall space from my basement up to my second floor where i will hook it up to the internet

you could also just get a wireless bridge to a wireless router in the future if you wanted =)

well i have a wireless router so i will just go with the wireless bridge

I'm excited to see this bad boy in action

got the stand today, but the spot I picked out for it is too cramped =( I might have to find a new place for it.

lets get some pictures of it up on the stand

I'll take pictures tonight. I'm having trouble finding a place to put the damned thing now. The spot I picked out is too cramped =(

My house isn't THAT small either, oi.

I might have to wait until April or May when I move into the new house.

at least put some water in it so it doesnt sit around lol and turn into a really expensive tank just sitting around

Dude, I hope you finally found your tank to keep

Looks like an awesome plan so far. Let's get it filled and stocked.

oh no here we go again...LOL