Isaac's CADE 1500s2/ Peninsula Reef Build

[Isaac Alves]

Secondary rock and sand moved into tank finally. My current rock will be placed in the rear beneath the overflow. At least that’s my thinking.

I went with Tropic Eden larger granules to reduce the movement of sand by the wave makers. Hopefully it’s not too much or still okay for my goby.

 

[Reefer Reboot]

Is it getting close to water time?

 

[Isaac Alves]

Is it getting close to water time?

Sooooooooooooooooo close. I'm planning this week sometime if I don't chicken out, get busy, get lazy, etc. etc. etc.

 

[RBarth]

I've been following this and you are anything but lazy lol! So nice man!

 

[Isaac Alves]

So…this week has not been good for time. I’m tied up in a PGConf.eu for Microsoft AND stupidly scheduled the entire family for Covid boosters and flu vaccines.

But I did slowly add a couple of things this weekend…

Added a Kesdil A360x for shimmer and moonlighting with spectral controller. Still need to run the wires and mount controller:

Cut and mounted some black acrylic over the converted Refugium to shield light spill even more:

Went ahead and installed the Avast Marine Spyglass to the manifold for when I need to run carbon:

and got the heaters in place:

this coming week though…want to get water running… crossing fingers

 

[Isaac Alves]

Did a list of things that need power and deciding which go into which apex power bar and which can go directly into the CADE power center bars.

The EB32 should be used for things I need to monitor wattage. The EB8 for anything automated but not need power logs. And the EB4 for any BRS dosers since this is all low wattage relays …I literally have 8 of them laying around for “I have no idea” how, or when, I got them.

 

[salty_noob]

The first partition in the electric panel is a dark stained plywood.

here’s my technique for mounting stuff to it.

I first check to make sure the electronic component actually has clearance away from the glass door. There is unfortunately not much space between this plywood portion and the glass door.

I’m thinking of putting the Maxspect Gyre controller here at the top…

I see your power strips are annoyingly mounted in different orientations like mine was. Do you see any reason for it to be like this? It annoyed the crap out of me with the switches inverted.

 

[salty_noob]

The question I have is: how do I mount things to the thin plastic walls without pointy screw ends jutting out on the opposite side?

I can’t find anything on R2R from other CADE owners regarding mounting techniques….

I tried to avoid having to mount anything on those walls because a) they are really flimsy and b) I wanted to use that cabinet for storage and not have it full of wires. I have mounted the big stuff like the power supplies for the lights on the back of the plywood door in the wiring area, there is space on either side of the cable management, just use short enough screws not to go through (same as when you are mounting on the outside with your controllers. This made the wiring quite "full" in that area between the controller panel and the inner divider, but once it's all in it leaves the rest of the system clutter free.

 

[Isaac Alves]

I tried to avoid having to mount anything on those walls because a) they are really flimsy and b) I wanted to use that cabinet for storage and not have it full of wires. I have mounted the big stuff like the power supplies for the lights on the back of the plywood door in the wiring area, there is space on either side of the cable management, just use short enough screws not to go through (same as when you are mounting on the outside with your controllers. This made the wiring quite "full" in that area between the controller panel and the inner divider, but once it's all in it leaves the rest of the system clutter free.

To be honest I didn't really think too much about the power strip orientation initially. I was excited to have "DJ" strip-style power plugs but realized as I was putting electronics in that the power strips are not how I typically want to control my tank. Since I'm relying heavily on the APEX I want to be sure I have power access to different components through Fusion's interface. I find myself struggling to figure out what should go into these strips -- This could also be because of the placement of my tank and the limited space, easy access to that side of the stand --- there is a tiny mini wall that separates my CADE and the entry area of the home. You can see in my wiring worksheet above that I didn't even think of including the dJ strips. If my tank was low tech (like my office tank) then the DJ strips would be fully used.

But YES...I do wish the PVC wall partition was thicker than 1/8" (?). My main complaint right now of the CADE build is literally just the width of those PVC walls and the area in front of the plywood controller board and glass doors. I ended up doing a lot of mini bolts to hold things to that PVC board -- which honestly appears durable enough to hold the weight of everything but would have been easier if I could have just used wood screws -- Because prepping for small bolts is a pain in buttocks.

I'm sure I could have spent more time and tried to dismantle and remove the PVC wall to do my mounting. But I'm taking so long on this build as it is.

I wish there were two rack cable management finger rails and I wish there were multiple heavy duty channels for wire management -- which there are none.

 

[Isaac Alves]

Adding a couple of switches to more easily turn on the sump lighting. Since my stand orientation is not the “most” accessible.

 

[Isaac Alves]

Switches mounted.

__
fan mounted for cooling

…not sure if that’ll be enough but we’ll see.

__
First 98 gallons is sloshing up right now. I measured 28 cups of TM Pro Reef and I’ll test salinity in about an hour to see if that mixes to 1.026.

 

[Isaac Alves]

I'm trying to know exactly how much salt needs to go the 100 gallon tanks to mix up ~98 gallons of water to 1.025sg - 1.026sg. I figured if I know this exactly I'll never have to worry about guessing again in the future and just simply dump in what I know is the required mix.

I had my phone note my amounts as I added them. So...almost there at 42 cups. About to add in another 4 cups to hopefully hit 1.025sg.

 

[Isaac Alves]

50 cups of Tropic Marin Pro Reef gives my 98 gallon mixing container 1.026sg of fresh saltwater. Time to mix the other one now. Too bad I don't have a scale that can hang a bucket --- it would be easier doing this by weight.

 

[Isaac Alves]

Hilariously (but not really) I literally ended up with a leftover power supply I finally went through all my wires and found that it belonged to the UltraReef Skimmer pump. Geez.

Now it’s tagged and mounted onto a bar holder thing. Wiring is never fun for me..I either get confused or just miss things.

For reference: the UltraReef Sicce pump has a Mean Well AC/DC adaptor:

 

[Isaac Alves]

The wiring is still “rat-nasty” sort of. Not what I had hoped but my space limitations really came into play wiring this guy up.

Closed door:

Behind the door:

 

[Isaac Alves]

I think I'll pick up these 1 foot short right angle power extensions that go straight down.

For reference link:
Otherwise it seems I'll miss out on a plug for the left MP40...here's how the wiring turned out for the APEX controller:

So currently outlet "7" on the EB8 is blocked...

 

[Isaac Alves]

Glass doors have been mounted onto the frame. Looks rather nice.

Now you can more clearly see the space between the small wall and the tank. It’s semi-tight but it’s ok.

The room won’t get arranged until the 70 gallon in the background gets broken down and its inhabitants move into this CADE.

 

[Isaac Alves]

Sump layout:

Overflow —> to ReefMat 1200 —> to UltraReef Skimmer —> to heating and avast marine spyglass chemical filtration —> to biological filtration —> to return with the L2 which feeds tank, spyglass and Refugium

and the dosing and kalk reactor are here:

 

[RBarth]

Looks sooooo good!!! Love the aquascape as well. Job well done!

 

[Isaac Alves]

Water in sump!

23 gallons sitting in main chambers of sump now. I’ll let this sit for an hour to make sure nothing leaks.