500 gallon reef system with basement fish room

Rcs_12 · Dec 16, 2023

Huge Thanks to Marcos (monkiboy on R2R) from ERC for hooking me up with amazing healthy fish! They were delivered with no problems and have been great ever since they hit my tank. Marcos was great throughout the process and followed up numerous times to check on the fish and make sure I was happy. I can't wait to stock the rest of my tank with fish from ERC

Rcs_12 · Dec 25, 2023

I did my first 200 gallon water change yesterday. This gave me the chance to use my water change set up for the first time. The two mixing barrels are plumbed in to the return pump and the sump has an overflow plumbed in to the floor drain. I have to turn two valves and turn on a pump. One valve stops the flow between the sump and return pump and one opens the flow from the barrels. Doing this causes the water level of the sump to rise above the over flow and drains in to the floor. This whole process took about 10 minutes once my salt water was mixed.

Rcs_12 · Feb 1, 2024

I've done a few small updates while waiting on some bigger stuff to come in. I added an Avast marine Ozone reactor and a poseidon 200 Ozone Generator. I also added another table to the fish room. This one will end up holding my frag tank. I also started running my inline UVs as well as my algea scrubber. I think the lights give off some really cool colors.

Rcs_12 · Feb 1, 2024

The bigger stuff I was waiting on. I'm really excited to get all this hydros gear up and running but I am dreading the idea of having to cable manage all of it. I already regret not buying the larger controller board from adaptive reef

Rcs_12 · Feb 18, 2024

I got all my hydros gear installed and programmed over the last few weeks. Let me say...I love this brand. The product is much easier to use and much more intuitive than any other controller I have used. Set up and install were easy and the programming was easy to pick up.

Rcs_12 · Feb 18, 2024

I also got my frag tank set up and running too. I will primarily use this tank as a quarantine tank for new corals. This tank is 36x24x12 aio from advanced acrylic. I am running a sicce sdc 3.0 for the return pump. I have an octo aquatics custom media basket that hold my mechanical and biological filtration. I run pinkie filter floss in the top of the media basket. Under that I have 2 polyp lab genesis rocks for biological filtration. The tank has an Illumagic x4 for light and 2 mp40s for flow. I'm excited to start buying some corals. I'm not sure what I want to start with. Any recommendations for the first corals in the tank?

Raul-7 · Feb 18, 2024

Excellent! Love the MRC sump; how do you like the integrated UV?

Rcs_12 · Feb 19, 2024

Thanks! I love the integrated UVs. They seem to work well. Plus the color they put off when the lights are off is awesome.

lubeck · Feb 20, 2024

I love this fish room!

tritonpower · Feb 20, 2024

Rcs_12 said:
I got all my hydros gear installed and programmed over the last few weeks. Let me say...I love this brand. The product is much easier to use and much more intuitive than any other controller I have used. Set up and install were easy and the programming was easy to pick up.

How is the iV working for you? I have the pH probe dialed in but having trouble with accuracy of the salinity probe.

Huskereef · Feb 20, 2024

Heck of a setup! Great work. Are you running the x4’s on the display as well? Interested to see how you like them. Thinking about switching to them.

Rcs_12 · Feb 20, 2024

tritonpower said:
How is the iV working for you? I have the pH probe dialed in but having trouble with accuracy of the salinity probe.

I haven't calibrated my probes yet so I can't speak to any amount of accuracy of the testing. With that being said the results seem to be fairly consistent. Everything else seems to work great. I had no problem setting it up or getting the pumps calibrated. The tests run flawlessly for me and I haven't had it overflow yet.

Rcs_12 · Feb 20, 2024

Husker_Reefer said:
Heck of a setup! Great work. Are you running the x4’s on the display as well? Interested to see how you like them. Thinking about switching to them.

Thanks! I am going to run the 6 ft illumagic blaze on the display tank. I'm still waiting on cabinets and the canopy for the tank. Until then I can't mount the light for the display. I met the cabinet guy this morning so hopefully I can get that taken care of in the next month.

robertjules1981 · Feb 20, 2024

Awesome build! Love the fish room as well! Any more pictures would be appreciated. I’m planning a fish room behind an in wall DT and a couple large 6’ long by 4’ wide frag/lagoon tanks in the house we’re building.

Rcs_12 · Feb 20, 2024

robertjules1981 said:
Awesome build! Love the fish room as well! Any more pictures would be appreciated. I’m planning a fish room behind an in wall DT and a couple large 6’ long by 4’ wide frag/lagoon tanks in the house we’re building.

Sounds awesome! Can't wait to see how it turns out. If you're building a house then you have a chance to make an awesome fish room while you're at it. Put a floor drain in your fish room of possible and then figure out how to plumb your sump into it. Water changes are a breeze this way. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions about how I set my room up.

robertjules1981 · Feb 26, 2024

Rcs_12 said:
Sounds awesome! Can't wait to see how it turns out. If you're building a house then you have a chance to make an awesome fish room while you're at it. Put a floor drain in your fish room of possible and then figure out how to plumb your sump into it. Water changes are a breeze this way. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions about how I set my room up.

How are the Panta Rei’s working for you? Did you go with the covers in that Unique Corals video you posted?

Rcs_12 · Feb 27, 2024

I love the Panta Rhei's. They are great. Tons and tons of laminar flow. They have no problem pushing water the full 8 foot length of my tank. I can drop food in one corner and the pumps will send it to the far end of the tank in no time. I finally got my hands on two different sets of the covers from panta rhei. The first ones weren't quite right and had to be modified a little bit to keep them from floating. The second set works much better. They send the water out at a 45 degree angle and are pretty easy to rotate them to send the water where you want. The two on the left wall of my tank are pointed to the left and right with a downward angle. They shoot water all the way down both sides of the tank. Aiming them that way also puts a ton of flow behind my rock work and helps to keep it clean back there. I don't have to worry about detritus collecting back there. The two outlets on the bottom of the tank are angled up and back towards the overflow. They send water from the bottom towards the top where the return lines help to push the water to the overflows. So water starts at the bottom left corner is sent the length of the tank along the bottom then back to the surface and across the top of the tank and down the overflow. My biggest problem if you want to call it that is the programming of the pump. Having to drag out a laptop is a bit of a pain but it's not something I do often so I can live with it. I feel like I'm leaving a little bit on the table with these pumps and programming them correctly. I can't find much info on how to program them online. The only place I found that seemed like it would have some info was a panta rhei Facebook group but it was all German people, which makes sense, but I couldn't get anyone to help me with the language barrier that was there. Once I get some corals in the tank I'll try again to see if I cant figure them out a little better