Johns 135 Cube build

[HarleyGuy]

Here is the cabinet that I built to house the Apex and all the electronics. 

 

[HarleyGuy]

Here is the lighting fixture that I built to house the ATI - 8 bulb T5 fixture, the 2 x A360 Kessils, and the Neptune Lunar Lights. I will stain this fixture to match my Kitchen cabinets in the near future. 

 

 

 

 

[victoly]

I love that beer wall! And the tank looks great too...

[HarleyGuy]

Thanks!

[+BobcatReefer]

Looking good John!  So clean!

[HarleyGuy]

Thanks Bobcat. I added sand yesterday and I’ll have water in it in the next couple days. I’ll send a pic or two of the sand. I used the Caribsea Aragonite.

[HarleyGuy]

Well I'm adding water (finally!). Not quite done but almost. One more garbage can of RO water to add before adding salt. I'm going to use HW-Marinemix Reefer Salt Mix. It's synthetic so no extra chemicals or nutrients added, the company has been making salt mix since the 60's, and it sets up at Calcium at 445-450 ppm, Alk of 9.0 dKH, Magnesium at 1380 ppm which is where I want to be. Here are some pics of this part of the build. Still got a ways to go, but I'll have fish in a week. Starting with some damsels that I like, yellow tails and Talbot's. Both are very hardy and are good little reef fish, don't touch the coral and are not aggressive.

 

[victoly]

That aquascape is gonna look amazing with corals. Reallly well done.


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[HarleyGuy]

Thanks! Much appreciated! I put a lot of time/work into building that with all the fitting and adding a bunch of fiberglass rods to make it all fit together like a puzzle and be secure. It is hard to see, but there are a ton of arches and caves so the fish should love it! Thanks again!

[HarleyGuy]

I finally hung my custom built light fixture. Thanks to Marvin for the help hanging it, it turned out perfect. Like the Electronics cabinet, this lighting fixture was built in my garage. 🙂  It was designed to provide a slim profile and still house my 8 bulb ATi T5 fixture, 2 x Kessil A360WE's , and the Kessil lunar lights. It isn't stained yet, that will happen last when I build the side skins and then stain everything to match my kitchen cabinets. It looks pretty good without stain though. You may also note that I added a plex cover under the ATI T5's so that they don't get hit with salt splash. It wont affect the cooling as the T5 just sets on top of this plexiglass panel. I also mounted everything flush with the bottom to give it a more professional look. The pics look bluer than they are in real life. My Iphone doesn't take good pics of the T5's.

Let me know what you think.

[HarleyGuy]

Well its been a while since I posted anything here, but the tank is almost done and looking very good. I installed the skins on the stand and they are replicas of my cherry kitchen cabinets. I also added the granite for the 4" ledge. The homemade light fixture is also stained to match the kitchen cabinets, and I had a cover built for the electronics/controllers cabinet that is also stained to match the kitchen cabinets. All in all, it looks like a nice piece of furniture in my dining room. :-)  I also added Neptune lunar lighting in the reef light and the red LED's electronics/controllers cabinet. I attached pics with just the Kessil's blues on which I run for the last hour of the cycle and pics with all lights (including the ATI T5's). Let me know what you think....

 

 

Edited September 15, 2020 by HarleyGuy

[jolt]

Love it!

[victoly]

Looks awesome !


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[HarleyGuy]

Thanks guys! This was a TON of work and time. I still need to do some wiring cleanup and finalization and move the CO2 tank and Trident waste container. I'll take some close up pics of the coral frags and fish as well and add them. The tank is stable but still young, so I don't have the color on the SPS yet that Id like. I've also had a few HW issues that I needed to fix that I will discuss later in this thread. Im going to want some more SPS frags as well :-). I need to make a trip over to Ty's house. :-) 

Edited September 15, 2020 by HarleyGuy

[mhart032]

2 hours ago, HarleyGuy said:

Thanks guys! This was a TON of work and time. I still need to do some wiring cleanup and finalization and move the CO2 tank and Trident waste container. I'll take some close up pics of the coral frags and fish as well and add them. The tank is stable but still young, so I don't have the color on the SPS yet that Id like. I've also had a few HW issues that I needed to fix that I will discuss later in this thread. Im going to want some more SPS frags as well :-). I need to make a trip over to Ty's house. :-) 

Jolt has a good sale going on. might hit him up as well. 

[HarleyGuy]

Hi All, I wanted to add a few more things about the cabinetry. Note, this is not reef specific, but more fit and finish of the overall build. 

Side Skins:  The hardwood side skins each have neodymium magnets that make removal for maintenance very easy (pic below). I also added adjustable feet to the skins to add in adjustability of how they line up with the top, sides, floor, and to keep them off of the floor incase of a water spill. (pic below)

Apex Stand Alone Electrical Cabinet: The hardwood exterior to the APEX cabinet is a 1 piece skin that is open on the right hand wall side (you cant see that) and just slides over the cabinet. I think it tuned out great and and tied the wood finish in with the tank skins. (pic below).

Wood Finish: All hardwood pieces are stained to match my kitchen cabinets (including my handmade light fixture).  

 

Edited October 17, 2020 by HarleyGuy

[HarleyGuy]

135 Build/Setup Issues: This is a list of issues encountered during this build and how I responded:

Plumbing: I re-plumbed a few questionable items before adding water to hopefully ensure no leaks. Unfortunately I ran into one leak with the manifold the was visible after adding water and only showed up with the pump at full speed. Having all the unions and valves helped in stopping water flow to enable the fix of this issue. You cant have enough unions! 🙂

Return Pump: Since I've invested so much in Neptune, I decided to go with their COR-15 pump for my return. I've since had some issues with it intermittently showing unavailable on the APEX screen. It doesn't turn off, but it is irritating. I update the code on it. If it comes up this way after a power up it takes a few power recycles to get it back. I could probably send it back to Neptune, but I've decided to go away from a smart pump and install another Varios 6 from Reef Octopus. I've never had any issues with those and that is what I have currently on my manifold so it is a nice backup. Note, the COR-15 will be up for sale at a discount shortly. It works obviously as its been running the tank for the past 4 months.

Alkalinity Spike: I noticed a drop in PH overnight (larger than normal) and the PH stayed below 8 during the day so I thought I'd buffer it with Seachem Marine Buffer as it limits the PH rise to 8.3. However, as this did buffer up the PH, it also resulted in a large spike of my Alk from 9 to 13. I know, this is horrible. So, with the aid of my Trident, I turned off my Calcium reactor and let the Alk level come back down slowly to 9 which is where it is now. I will not be doing any PH buffering again. The good thing is my PH has stayed stable at around 8.1 to 8.3 since then. 

High Calcium Level: My Calcium level started high in the tank (a little over 500) and grew a bit and never came down. Alk was variable so I still had to feed it with the CALC reactor. So I did the same above, turned off CALC Reactor to let the CALC level go down slowly and manually fed my Alk daily with two-part. With the aid of the Trident it was easy to correct. With the exception of precipitation I haven't heard of any other negative issues with High Calc except it makes it harder to raise Alk. I have kept a higher Mag level which helped me keep the Alk where it needed to be during this issue. 

Flow: I kept seeing flow, flow, flow on all the  SPS articles and how you cant have too much, this is NOT true. If you have a 36" cube, and have a 5000gph Gyre on one side of the tank and a 4500gph MP40 on the other side, both blowing directly across the reef in the middle, this is TOO much flow, even with them at half speed. Yes, I overdid the flow in this tank lol. Even with these at half speed it stripped the flesh on some SPS corals. I've since got them turned down to 20 and 30% respectively and note this was/is gyred flow, not full time on. Before you place a coral, make sure the flow in the location you plan on for that coral is not going to overwhelm it. With too high a flow it may not strip the flesh, but it could keep the polyps retracted which will cause the piece to starve to death over time.

Nitrate/Phosphate: I have had some self induced issues here that I believe, with the above Alk spike, led to the RTN, white/algae covered tips, and death of some pieces. This was due to my lack of knowledge on these parameters. I was under the impression that you needed to keep these down to almost 0 to ensure reduced growth or stop the growth of "bad" algae's. I'm learning now that this will also negatively impact the immune systems of SPS corals and possibly kill them. Note: I also noticed that my LPS growth has slowed, but my Lonestar leather is growing like a weed (may be unrelated). That said, I'm bringing my No3/Po4 levels up from 0 and am hoping the RTN, white tips, and death will stop on the currently affected pieces and not start on the others. I'm guessing my manual weekly feeding of Reef Energy AB+ may have helped so that I didn't loose all my LPS, just a few pieces have been affected. I'm continuing the AB+ for SPS and spot feeding of Reef Roids on my LPS corals. 

Neptune Trident: This isn't an issue, just a rave review. I LOVE my trident! I wish I would have had this a long time ago. The ease of multiple tests a day, the accuracy, the reporting to understand and control trending,..... This thing is awesome and I am really in touch with my key parameters. This plus the APEX automation and monitoring has made reef keeping MUCH more easy of a task. I highly recommend the Trident as it allows me to maintain the stability of these parameters much more closely. If any of you have any questions about it please feel free to ask me.

This is about it at the moment (I know, this is enough 🙂). I'm embarrassed to admit to some of these blunders, but I've learned a lot in this process and hope to have some beautiful SPS colonies in the future. Please feel free to provide comments (positive, negative, any...). 

Current levels as of today: 

ALK: 9.46, CALC: 360,  MAG: 1533

PH: 8.13, Po4: 0.04ppm, No3: .5ppm

Salinity: 1.027, Temp: 78.3 

No3, Po4 were higher (10ppm, .07ppm), but my Chaeto has started growing in the fuge and I believe that brought them back down, so I turned off my Biopellet and GFO reactors to compensate. Hopefully my feeding levels will bring these back up. My intent was to only have the refugium, but had an initial Chaeto die off (no idea why), so I had to start the reactors to keep these params under control. The Chaeto is back to thick green growth again so I turned off my other reactors as they shouldn't be needed.