[Hookup]

Some more details on the tank. The tank will have black sillycone and eurobracing. I hope to maintain the minimalistic look. I will be creating "netting" out of some pond cover materials and acrylic which will fasten to the eurobracing to stop fish from jumping. I have not yet located the materials but there are many threads about specific materials that work. As mentioned there will be 9 holes drilled for 1.5" bulkheads in the bottom pane of glass, which will be tempered for safety. I have not yet determined the exact placement of the holes, however, I'm fairly sure they will be bascially around the 4 corners. Two holes for the closed loop input are also a bit of a mystery at this point. I'm thinking of having them towards the center, but I do also know that I do not want any corals growing dead center, so no rock in the center to hide those inputs... I'll have drawn up some diagrams of possible rock work layout and posted them below as a way to help with placement of the holes.

The lighting for this tank will be driven from a 10bulb T5 fixture from ATI. The ATI Powermodule has active cooling on each pair of bulbs which creates the right conditions for the bulbs to output their spectrum for the longest period, at least thats what I keep reading. The fixture will be 5 feet and suspended over the tank, centered. I didn't feel there was a need to cover the entire 6 feet (72") of the tank with direct lighting and the streamlined look is better maintained with the slightly smaller fixture. The down side to this fixture is the bulbs. Not so much the direct cost, but the availability of 60" bulbs. It's limited. Very limited. And from what I am told, shipping will not insure bulbs of that length. Trips to Toronto (5hrs away) are required now, twice a year to get replacement bulbs... oh and whatever else might be awesome...

The tank stand itself is going to be very minimalistic and simple. Nothing fancy, but clean simple lines. The stand will be only used for display. What I mean is the sump is already in the basement, and I will just tie into that system. The closed loop will also get driven down into the basement because even though the pump is a gold-series, I want the system to be dead silent. So I'll mount the closed loop pump on the underside of the floor from some hangers that minimize noise through vibration but keep the pump relatively close to minimize pressure. (Closed loops do not suffer the same type of head pressure as return pumps, but still).

The sump will remain mostly as-is... with the removal of the fuge being the only major change. I'll be finding a spot to crate a frag-rack in the sump as well, but in all likely hood that will take months before i bother with it... with the new system, i'm hoping to achieve large colonies for the look. I will post a write up on the existing sump in this thread soon so everyone has an idea of what is keeping the display on life support.

I hope that gives you some more information, and honestly, writing it down helps solidify some of the concepts in my mind as well.

Thanks for reading
-Tim