Hydro

Lol, I haven't looked at this threads once I posted on it a year ago. I actually built a 80 gallon drop off tank, it's empty at my office, never had water in it. I started building it right before I left for colorado, only had one panel left to install. Still sitting on my work bench. I'll take a pic and post it

You must be dissapointed with the fabricators by now, from your posts they have been working on it for 2 months and still aren't done! Should have went with my guy, you would have had your stand 7 weeks ago! Hopefully things will move faster once you get the stand finished, at this rate its going to be a year or more before you get any water in it. I've got a couple extra tanks if you want to borrow one, you can at least put some water in somthing while you wait

You got plenty of time to do something great. When I was 23 I decided that what I went to college for (autobody collision) wasn't what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.....I was pretty bummed. I basically started completely over with a new trade that I knew nothing about (remodeling houses). I sold a nitrous mustang and paid cash for a wore out ford ranger and used the rest of the money from my car sale to buy some business cards, stickers for my crappy truck, and some hand tools. I literally hustled up work everywhere I could. I was slow at first and barely scraped by for a long time, I was able to hire a couple guys after a year or so but there was many times they were the only ones taking home a paycheck. I grew up poor and although my parents clawed there way to middle class they were never able to help me financially. It was really scary at times wondering where my next job would come from and how I would ever pay my bills. This went on until my late 20's before I started completely over again. My point is that you got plenty of time to do something great. Just stay aggressive in whatever you persue and challenge yourself every chance you get. Oh and BTW enjoy being 23!

Fun topic Awesome, I went to the tstc for collision and paint too. I left there in 99, wow that makes me feel like I'm getting old lol. Offroadodge graduated just before I did, we barely missed each other. Is there an older loud red headed guy last name baetche teaching up there? Offroadode (Jeremy) works at berlis which is the best bodyshop in central texas to be at. Its air conditioned, its 2 stories and has elevators for cars, just an awesome place. He works on mostly high end cars, when I stopped by to see him there was easily a million dollars worth of cars being repaired. I got out of tstc when I was about 20 and moved to austin and worked at caliber collision and champion autoplex as a collision estimator and production manager. I decided I didn't like the body shop anymore so I started a remodeling company with no experience at all lol. Within 5 years I had a crew and we were building houses. I invented some products for gardening which turned in to what I'm doing now, that got me away from construction which I miss sometimes. My job now is running Hydro Innovations which sells several water-cooled gardening products including water chillers and water-cooled a/c systems to distribution companys in the gardening industry. www.hydroinnovations.com Icehouse Distribution which distributes our products and several other companies products directly to retail stores. www.icehousedistribution.com I also do some work for our chiller manufactuer which we will soon be partners in. www.chillking.com All WYSIWYG is my new hobby/project that I'm just getting off the ground. I'll be selling Qted fish and tank raised corals locally and online with a Divers Den type business model. www.allwysiwyg.com I get bored easy so I like to stay busy

If I were setting up a new reef tank I would go all man made or dry rock because of hitchhikers and algae. I wouldn't use live sand either. I've battled aptasia and have gotten rid of most of it and now I'm battling majanos. I think I would go with our new sponsor, cerameco (spelling?), those rocks look really cool and I like how you can still have lots of sand exposed. I'll tell you how I got all my rock for free which is about 500#. I would go out and buy complete tanks of craigslist in austin, san antonio, waco, and even houston. I would offer them a low ball price and if they accepted I would go get everything, sell the livestock, tank/stand and all the hardware and kept the rock or whatever else I wanted. Sometimes I would just break even and sometimes I would be able to keep the rock and make a little money. Its a lot of work cleaning eveything and reselling it but it saved me around $2k, maybe a little more. RCA will give you a discount if you preorder your rock, I think its $3-4 per pound.

This is the company he works for, the owners name is Tim and this is his cell # Putman Electrical Services (512) 751-0340

AJ good talking with you today, I think that you are as obsessed with reefing as much as I am lol. You defintely aren't going in to this blind, you have probably done as much research as you can possibly do. You will be a really good asset to the club and I'm looking forward to your build updates. Too bad the electrician I recommended to you moved to Dallas yesterday, bad timing I guess. The guys he recommended I'm sure will work out fine.

All good man! I reread your post about the electricity....you already had it figured it out lol. This is exactly the way I hooked up my first tank. Do you have an electrician already scheduled? If you are looking around I know some honest guys there in austin that I used to hire back in my construction days, they would treat you right. I doubt it would cost more than $150 to do that. The company name is putman electric, and I got the guys cell number if you want to try them.

Aw man I would never do that, I wish you the best. I hope you didn't take my posts the wrong way, I'm really excited about your build and really looking forward to it. I spend most of the day helping my customers and employees sizing equipment so naturally I want to just jump in here and try to help. Difference is that most of my customers aren't half as smart as you lol. If I sounded condescending I REALLY didn't mean it that way. I'm bad at that sometimes. On your power, I had an idea if it helps. With 12/3 you can actually change that to 220v....running 120v on each leg and using the nuetral for the ground. This is actually completely safe to do and this would give you 40 amps total. An electrician can turn that one plug in to 2 plug with a seperate circuit for each plug. You would leave the black wire on the breaker, add another 20 amp breaker and attach the white wire. BTW thank you very much for your service, that's pretty cool to say the least. I bet you got some stories to tell.

Good luck with everything, I hope that you are right. Short answer is that I put the voertechs all over the tank in many different configurations and it didn't work for me and the advice I offered you on pumps isn't just based only on my tank, my entire business revolves around moving water, we sell pumps of all sizes with every one of our systems. Anyways I'll just tag along instead, sounds like you got it figured out.

I've never met AJ but I'm sure that he can get this build done too. Obviously a smart guy who has already has most of this complicated build figured out. There is no book written for building a tank that size and it takes help from people who have already done it. I just hope that he doesn't dismiss my first hand experience for something that he has read somewhere else by someone that no one knows, I think that is what Jason and Bio were saying. The only reason I have spent time writing here is that I'm simply trying to help him not make any mistakes. Mistakes are costly on a tank that size trust me! I'll use the pump for example.....its actually a perfect example. I bought a reeflo marlin for $350 and spent the time installing it.....well it wasn't enough. I had to turn around take it out and spend another $500 on a new pump to get the tank to fill up. That mistake cost me a couple hours of my time and $350, I still have the marlin sitting on a shelf in my warehouse.This wasn't the only mistake that I made that cost me money. I lost well over $1k when I had to change my lighting fixtures because my original idea didn't work, I wish someone had known it wouldn't work and warned me! I made the mistake of thinking that (5) mp 40's would be enough water flow for my tank, well it wasn't even close. I had to spend another $1,200 on 2 wave boxes to get the water moving in the entire tank, this money was not in my original budget. Even if I didn't want a wave in my tank it would have taken at least (3) more vortechs to have enough flow. This is a good example of advice that AJ is not taking. Right now in his design he doesn't have enough flow in to the tank or inside the tank, this will cost him lots of money when he has to replace his pumps and buy more vortechs or wave boxes. The power requirements of his tank is another example. It may have been a surprise to AJ for example that in the winter he would need 10 amps worth of heat to keep the tank warm in the winter, I didn't know until I built my tank. I thought for sure that (1) 500 watt heater would be enough but it wasn't, I was surprised. Problem is that it isn't as simple as just buying an extra heater, especially when you are short on power. This means that you will have to have 1 apex powerstrip just powering the heaters and must be added to the equipement list. Also when you have heaters on, powerheads on, lighting on, adequate sized pump on he is well over the power of one dedicated circuit even if its a 20 amp breaker. Now you have to get more power, that has to be figured in and I know wasn't expected and is a major problem if he isn't able to run another circuit. Even if AJ takes my advice on some of these things I mentioned he will still make some mistakes, there are no blueprints for what he is doing and that's just the way it goes. You simply can't avoid it on such a custom project no matter how smart you are and how much research you do. Hopefully for AJ money is no object and changes/mistakes won't be as painful as it was for us. If everything goes just right this project is going to cost somewhere between $35-40k. The problem is that once you are commited there is no turning back! Once I realized that I needed another $1,200 in wave boxes for example it was too late, at that point I couldn't decide not to. The tank requires what it requires, you simply can't cut corners.

•HY5000W – 9″ x 4.5″ x 7.75″ 60watts 97% efficiency Max Flow=1300gph Max Head=11ft I checked out your pumps, 2 will not be enough, I'm 110% sure. You would need 4 of them to be in the ballpark, I honestly don't think that 4 would be enough, not enough head pressure. Are you running a calcium reactor? Where are you putting it? Are you putting your top off reservoirs inside the stand too? Maybe you could build a cabinet beside the tank that matched the tank to store some things in.

Oh you mentioned hardwoods! I hope those aren't going where the tank is, you will surely ruin them no matter how careful you are, please trust me on this. I have a pan built in the bottom of my stand to catch spills, maybe you should consider that too. I'm very careful and have still flooded my tank stand more times than I can remember. Its water changes that will get you. You mentioned keeping your water for water changes in your garage. Be careful with this in the summer time. By the time the RO/DI makes enough water to do the change it will be warm/hot. If that water is 90-100 degrees and you put it in the tank it will surely raise your water temperature up too high. Of course you want your water change water the same temp as the tank. Keeping it outside (in the garage) with no chiller running will make this impossible. Also you won't want to add your salt until right before you use it. If the water is warm it will promote algae and bacteria to grow in it, if its freshwater and you add salt it will kill everything in the water. But after the salt is mixed in and the water is still warm bacteria that can effect your tank will start to culture. I hope that makes sense. Oh BTW my sump is 75 gallons and is ran at about 50%, when the tank pump shuts off it comes within 2" of overflowing it. Thought that might help with your sump design.

Well I at least warned you about the pumps, I think that you are going to find out that turnover won't be your issue...it will be filling your tank fast enough. If you don't have enough water flowing in to the tank then your tank will not fill up enough, you will see the water line....I hope that makes sense. That is why I had to upgrade, the water was trickling over the overflow and you could see the water line below the trim across the top of the entire tank. Now that the flow is high enough you can't see the water line. For the UV sterilizer I agree that if not used properly they do not work....just like many other pieces of equipment. I can tell you with 100% certainty that mine works properly and that I would never run my tank without it, no matter what a research paper says. I use a commercial grade 5 gpm sterilizer that I run at 4 gpm (240 gph) for extra contact time. It controls algae and ich in my tank, if I turn it off my glass is covered in algae in less than 24hrs. I hope that you reconsider unless you are going to have a coral tank and cheap hardy fish. I have first hand experience with this and have seen it work, I have seen it save fish (ask Don D about his). This isn't something that I'm just guessing about. I'm afraid that you are going to need more power than that. I need (2) 500 watt heaters to keep my tank warm in the winter time with keeping my office at 72 degrees...I tried to only use one and it wasn't enough. 1000 watts of heater by itself uses 10 amps. Your pump(s) will pull another 5 amps if they are big enough for the tank. This isn't considering any lighting, powerheads, or anything else for that matter. Typically you want to stay at 80% of your breaker rating if you didn't know, hopefully the circuit that you can use is 20 amps and has 12/2 wiring. If its a 15 amp with 14/2 you will be in trouble for sure. How are you cooling off tank stand? Will you have some vent fans under there blowing the heat out? Probably should for the summer time, even if you use LED's it will get hot under there. BTW I use a Deltec TC2560 skimmer for my tank and it seems to work just fine for 400 gallons. Its actually pretty small for a tank that size (as far as footprint goes) but since its got twin chambers it works. This skimmmer would not even fit in my sump and its the smallest footprint I could find. Costs about $2k which is about what you will have to spend for a skimmer for that size tank. Its made to be used external and must connected to a distribution manifold, best to have a flow meter inline to dial in the flow exactly for maximum efficiency. I hope you plan to live there for a while, your tank will be a nightmare to move. Do you know how much it will weigh? My tank by itself weighs 1,100 lbs dry, I had to rent 3 cabniet jacks just to lift it on top of the stand. Honestly I'm not sure how I will ever move it again, just the thought of moving it now makes me sick!

Will your ATO reservoir be in your garage and are you just running a 1/4" tube to a float in the sump? If not you would have to make some room for the reservoir underneath the stand. Mine uses about 5 gallons per day but but that's with the MH, most likely LEDs would be less. I use a 25 gallon ATO reservoir mounted about 6' off the ground in in the equipment room, gravity fed to a float valve in the sump. Simple and reliable vs top off pumps