As I previously stated, when it comes to reefing I am an addict. So throughout my house there is a fish theme happening. Here was a little project I did using slumped glass. This was all scrap glass that I saved from becoming recycling.
So after being set up for about a year and the tank doing quite well, the seams in the tank started going bad. I called the manufacturer who was local and he came out and agreed that the seams were
an issue and offerred to replace the tank.
It's not often that when undertaking a project of this size, you get a chance for a "Do Over". But now was my chance to fix all the issues that had come up in the past year. First was to have the tank
made taller for better aesthetics. Second was to have the tank built with a steel frame on the top of the tank so that it could be totally open top. And finally build a larger overflow to accommodate
the surge tank better.
In addition, when I setup the 360 I put sand in the tank, and due to my bad habits, the new tank had become quite scratched in the year it had been up. So I decided to go back to bare bottom.
I was very happy with my aquascaping so I didn't want to change anything. So on a holiday weekend I invited my local reef club members open and we had a 2 day BBQ to switch tanks. It took a little over
an hour to empty the tank of all the corals (100's) and load them into a temporary tank on the patio. The hardest challenge was getting all the sand out of the tank.
Then within a few minutes I was able to pull all the rock off the back of the 360g tank. Originally I had applied the rock to the back wall using silicone glue. But when I did that the rock was dry, and now the
rock was alive and moist. So we laid the new tank on it's back and used black pond foam to mount the damp rock to the wall. With this chance to redo the rock wall I added alot more shelves to the wall
to give it more depth and dimension, as well as places to mount corals.
We covered the rock wall with wet towels to keep it moist and let it sit overnight. The next day with the help of some strong guys we tilted the tank onto the stand and in a few hours everything was loaded back into the tank.
In planning to switch to bare bottom, I in advance cuts some sheets of black acrylic and mounted zoas on it and grew them out in the sun for a few months.
So when we set the tank back up the bare bottom tank was black bottom and covered with 1000's of zoas for a colorful bare bottom.
Corals looked great and the tank was back.
As a group of us were sitting watching the tank we saw one of my clams spawn. Lots of Oohs and ahhs, and we went back to drinking our beer and admiring our work.
At the time I had about a dozen clams in the display tank and about a half dozen 1'+ clams in my outside tank for filtration. Well once, one clam spawns, that triggers other clams to
spawn. In the morning my tanks was pea soup with a head of foam on it.
The clams devestated the system. The coral die off was horrible.