Climbingspider's 250DD build

[cmbspd]

Well, six months into my reef keeping journey my 110g tank’s bottom seal decided to leak. Luckily it was a slow leak (a couple of gallons per hour) on a Sunday and I was able to spend the rest of the day catching everyone, moving them to temporary quarters, and draining the tank. RIP to the old reef:
http://i856.photobucket.com/albums/ab125/climbingspider/110gbeforeleak.jpg

With everyone crammed into two 20g tanks, an impromptu 40g frag tank, and my basement, I frantically began a search for a replacement. Then I found this:
http://i856.photobucket.com/albums/ab125/climbingspider/250gonfloor.jpg

A 250g Marineland DD tank, with stand and hood! It was two years old, but in great shape. I drove my Subaru Forester almost two hours to pick it up (yeah, a Forester can hold a 250g tank!) and got some help to schlep this beast up a flight of stairs – way easier than I expected, especially when using 1” pieces of PVC as rollers. This tank is definitely a dream come true – but one that I had hoped to take my time with rather than setup ASAP as a replacement. Now it was time for some serious cleaning and to paint the stand and canopy brown. The tank is in a position where it will be viewed from the front but also from the side from a dining area that is about 18” higher than the main floor. So I made a 12” platform to boost the short Marineland stand to a better viewing height.

About this time I lost my first fish. I pulled the remains of my foxface out of the drain line for my sump (which was still recirculating water through the refugium. I have no idea why it died - I assume just the stress of transfer to the poorly lit sump. I also lost a blood red cleaner shrimp that got sucked into a powerhead. Motivation to get this new tank running fast.

Now it was time to rework plumbing. I only had one drain line on the old 110g so I took this opportunity to setup a Herbie style drain by tying together 1 bulkhead from each overflow for the main drain and the others for the emergency – awesome and simple! Of course, I had to run a new return line to my basement sump. I made it 1 1/2 “ even though my pump is only a blueline hd40 because my first major equipment upgrade will be a pump capable of ~1100gph flow from the basement.

Starting the freshwater leak test:
http://i856.photobucket.com/albums/ab125/climbingspider/freshwatertesting.jpg
I filled it slowly over several hours in the evening and began making RODI water, lots of RODI water…you can see the olive barrel that I was using ( it will eventually be a rain barrel outside). Of course, I had fish and liverock in my sump so I had a small problem for the leak test so I installed a bulkhead on a 20g rubbermaid that I could tie into my return pump to run freshwater for 24 hours. You can see the main sump behind it.
http://i856.photobucket.com/albums/ab125/climbingspider/temporarysump.jpg

Sorry guys…no fancy fish room here. I just have a corner of the laundry room and you can see the chaos of cables for extra heaters and powerheads to run the spare holding tanks during this setup. Oh, you’d probably laugh if you saw my plumbing because I’m forced to snake it in and out around my hot water heater, sinks, etc. Everything passed with flying colors, well except for the one pvc joint that I forgot to cement but that was an easy fix.

Finally, two weeks after my old tank failed, it was time to move liverock, fish and coral back into the tank. Here is a shot three days into the process. Most of my corals are still on makeshift frag racks, but the fish are doing great in their new quarters – swimming all over left to right AND front to back with the tank’s deep dimensions. The aquascape isn’t 100% to my liking but is good enough to live with and I’m happy that my animals have a new home.
So what’s next? The tank obviously has to settle in. I won’t get much cycle because most of the rock was already mature and acting as the biofilters in my holding tanks. I need to make a couple of important equipment upgrades:

1) A stronger return pump. I have a major goal for this build – not to use more electricity than my old, smaller tank. So I want a really efficient pump to provide about 1100 gph against 11’ of head pressure. Turns out that Reeflo is getting ready to release a new model of the Barracuda that meets my needs (less than 200 watts for more than 1200gph) so I’m going to demo it!
2) More lights. I was in the process of shifting my 110g tank from 2x 250MH to LED when it leaked. I had planned three 24 LED modules for that tank but I made a fourth due to this upgrade. The 296 watts of LED lights the whole tank with just a few shadows, but I plan to add about 30% more. I’m undecided about additional LEDs versus supplementary T5s and hope to take some PAR readings soon.
3) Increased protein skimming. I currently have an Octopus Extreme 250, which works great. However, it will be a little underpowered once this tank is fully stocked. Luckily that will be a while so I have some time to research and save up for this new purchase.

Thanks for sticking with me. It has been an insane couple of weeks but I’m happy to be able to post in the large reef tanks forum.

[OrrG]

Nice find, you will love the depth for aquascaping. Your old tank looked nice, cool rockwork. If you don't want to wait for the Reeflow a Panworld 150 would work. I just set one up on my 200DD and am going about 10 feet up and it's plenty of flow. 1100gph and 180 watts.

[coraltastic]

good luck with the new 250. that sucks about the old tank.

[cmbspd]

Nice find, you will love the depth for aquascaping. Your old tank looked nice, cool rockwork. If you don't want to wait for the Reeflow a Panworld 150 would work. I just set one up on my 200DD and am going about 10 feet up and it's plenty of flow. 1100gph and 180 watts.

How is the noise for the Panworld? I know that the stats are right (and the price too!), but my blueline 40 seems very loud and I worry that it might be true for the panworlds too. Of course, I'd actually prefer a magnetically coupled pump...

I had made a foam & rock wall for the old tank, which worked really well. I decided that I didn't have time to make one for the new tank. However, my new aquascape is much better - more room for corals to grow up and more caves for the fish. Unfortunately, it is hard to get a good photograph of the three-dimensionality of these DD tanks!

[OrrG]

The noise isn't too bad, a lot quiter than I thought. I don't really have anything to compare it to since this is my first external pump but my theater room is right next to the sump area and I can't even here it running. Got mine from Salty Critter, they seem to have the best price.

Let's see your scape pics! I got some decent pics of mine in my build thread, take them from all sides and angles we will get the idea.

[cmbspd]

I've been working hard and the tank is about 90% setup. For the past few days, most of my corals have been sitting on two improptu frag racks that I made during the teardown of my old tank:

http://i856.photobucket.com/albums/ab125/climbingspider/FTSfrontJune-1.jpg

They are now gone and I've only got a half dozen or so frags still left to place on the rockwork so the tank looks more like this now:

http://i856.photobucket.com/albums/ab125/climbingspider/FTS4Jul2010.jpg

and from one side:

http://i856.photobucket.com/albums/ab125/climbingspider/FTS4Jul2010_side.jpg

You can see the mix of newly cycled liverock and healthy liverock from the old tank - the former is now covered in diatoms and some green algae. My sand is also undergoing the inital stages of cycling - it is all old sand but I had to wash it thoroughly after it sat in my garage for 2 weeks while the new tank was setup.

So far everyone is adjusting to the new tank. I expect some issues with cyano and other algae in the first few weeks, but at least I have enough cyclced rock to support the bioload. I don't have much of a CUC in the tank right now - just a few snails and a couple of hermit crabs.

I even had a snail decide to spawn during the transition. You see its sperm (I assume) wafting out from the birdnest. I didn't know that they broadcast spawned.

http://i856.photobucket.com/albums/ab125/climbingspider/snailspawning.jpg

[SilverGTS]

Wow that sucks about the leak but thankfully you found it before it was much more serious. Had the bottom fall out of a 55gal when I was 15, not the best sound to wake up to.

-Chris

[cmbspd]

So I thought that I'd update on my plans for this tank. I'm really looking to make this setup as energy efficient as possible. Not so much because I'm stingy, but to be as environmentally responsible as possible in this rather impactful hobby. I try to mostly populate my tank with propagated corals and at least some captive raised fish to minimize the collecting impacts, but what about energy? My goal is to use no more, or at least only a little more, electricity than with my old 110g setup. How? Let's look at the main power hogs - heating, lighting and pumps. I've made changes to each.

Lighting: my old tank came with a typical 2x250W MH plus 4x54W T5 setup

http://i856.photobucket.com/albums/ab125/climbingspider/light.jpg

That's 716 watts of lighting, pretty typical. I'm switching to an all or mostly LED setup. I currently 4 of the 24x3W Cree DIY lights on this tank. They clearly provide awesome PAR, even though I haven't taken any readings yet. I say this because I can see the most exposed branches of my birdnest bleaching, even though they are about 6 inches deeper underwater than in my old tank. That's 296 watts! The downside is that I intended these fixtures for the much smaller footprint of my old tank so I currently have lots of spotlighting. I guesstimate that about 48 more LEDS should fill out my tank for somewhere around a total of 440 watts. That saves 256 watts, plus some change because I now only run some of the LEDs in the early morning and late evening. Yes, I can imagine that LED manufacturing isn't pretty, but I would be buying a new light setup regardless for this tank.

Heating: When I first started this hobby, most sources said that the optimal temperature was over 80F. I've since seen enough nice looking tanks run at much lower temperatures that I'm now targeting 78F. Not sure how much I'll save here because I'll still have to heat an extra 140g of water compared to my old system.

Water flow: I have a basement sump with about 11 feet of head pressure on the return. My old pump isn't strong enough for the new tank so I've been looking for a replacement. I wasn't happy with the energy consumption of most of the pumps that could generate a minimum of 1000-1200gph flow for this setup, but I finally found one. I'm going to demo next year's model of the Reeflo Barracuda. I talked with Chris via email and he stated that it has been redesigned for lower flow and much lower energy consumption. I'll be setting it up in a couple of weeks but it should produce 24 gpm at 12 feet of pressure and consume 195W. My old pump pushed about 8gpm at 120W. I should get about three times more flow for just over 1/2 the electricity.

Final verdict for this upgrade: old tank 836 watts plus heat (1/3 the volume two degrees higher). New tank is 635 watts plus heat (more water but 2 degrees cooler). More tank, less electricity is a good thing!

[cmbspd]

Almost two months since my last update. Shortly after starting this new tank I had to travel for a couple of weeks for work so I left my girlfriend in charge. I would never chose to leave for so long with a newly set up tank, but the trip was scheduled long before my old system sprung its leak. My girlfriend did a great job of following my list of instructions to care for the tank but three things worked against her: 1) much of the tank of was new - all the sand and about 1/3 of the rock, most of the supporting equipment was intended for our old 110g tank, particularly the weak return pump. and 2) the timer for 1/2 of the lights got stuck so that they stayed on all night so that the tank suffered 24 hours of moderate lighting instead of 10 hours of intense lighting. The result was almost eerie:

http://i856.photobucket.com/albums/ab125/climbingspider/algaeonhydnophora.jpg

The tank was full of basketball-sized mounds of algae everywhere! It was almost like a strange green fog. Can you see the clam? Of course somebody was really happy about the situation. Our algae blenny was about to explode:

http://i856.photobucket.com/albums/ab125/climbingspider/algaeblennyfat.jpg

Once home, I began to work on the problem in four ways: 1) my new return pump arrived from Reeflo. So far I love it! Plenty of flow from the basement, more quiet than the old pump and still low electrical use. 2) get the timing of the lights to work again (definitely do not use a coralife timer/powerstrip!) 3) add more CUC and a couple of algae eating tangs and 4) manual removal. The first day I removed almost a gallon of algae. Of course I also busted up tons of frags as I groped around in the giant green algae balls. But it helped a lot and the tank looked like this just a couple of days after my return:

http://i856.photobucket.com/albums/ab125/climbingspider/FTSpostalgaeremoval.jpg

Two weeks later and the tank is looking great. There are a couple of stubborn patches of algae that don't seem palatable to the tangs (darker and tougher than the algae in the picture), but most of the problem is under control.

[jusn317]

I love seeing all the DD builds people have going on. One thing that worked for me yeras ago when I had a similar algae outbreak was bumping my mag up to around 1800. Really helped to clear it up.