ethipelagic
New Member
About 8 years ago I moved from working as an aquarist in UK public aquariums, to making wildlife documentaries. During this time I’ve carved out a niche for myself setting up and maintaining aquariums for filming but realised there aren’t many places specialised enough for this kind thing…. So I’ve built my own!
The idea was to have a permanent tropical marine system that can be fed to temporary tanks located anywhere in the room - here's my initial design from SketchUp:
Now, we all know as reef aquarists that reefs love stability and changing things around all the time is a recipe for disaster. This is a bit of a conundrum for me as I'd love some stability but will be changing livestock and stocking densities about quite a lot so I need a system that can be tuned to the finest detail to help me with that. I've definitely over specced a lot of it, but I'm pleased with how it's going so far...
But anyway, let's not jump ahead too much. Back to the building! I don't want to dox myself so I'll keep photos to the inside, but essentially I've had a large building put up not far from my home - here's the bare bones; a thick concrete base with 200mm of insulation inside and rebar reinforcement:
Once that was stable and cured, it was time for 200mm of insulation on every other surface to go in:
And finally from a structural standpoint; a layer of plaster (the LED in the middle is a grow light from a previous project where I built a fully tidal mangrove system):
Jumping ahead a little bit now; walls and floor painted - heavy duty condensation and mould resistant paint on the walls and non-slip hard wearing paint on the floor. The beams do act as a thermal bridge to the outer structure of the roof so I painted them in several coats of glass-bead insulation paint and so far they've not been an issue. There's PVCu skirting boards all the way around, siliconed at the base so if there is a big flood at any point, it won't ruin the plaster. The electrics are in on this photo too - all high up with some on the ceiling, every socket closable and IP67 rated, and 7 different electrical circuits, as well as one for the heater. The room has a smoke alarm and hard wired ethernet too.
Next step was the aluminium profile frame for the main system; this stuff is like lego, so easy to build and yet so strong! Hurts just like lego when you stand on it with bare feet too...
Aaand here she is fully assembled!
At this point it's really starting to take shape - I've put in a standing desk, a work bench and a double sink with one of those IR activated taps. That white box in the right corner is an 850 litre potable water container for holding RODI water and the cylinder on the left is for mixing up to 750 litres of seawater at a time. The normal running volume of the system will be about 1000 litres but scalable to 2000+ litres depending on what other tanks are in the room.
The RODI machine is the one from Glamorca - not too excited about the propriety filters and the instruction manual was trash but it's an all in one and it fits under the sink, out of the way really nicely. I've also put in a Meaco dehumidifier - at this point it needs to be manually emptied but eventually I plumb that into the drain for the sink. The other thing under the table is an old 3D printer but I think the latest firmware update has bricked it.
Next up was the sump build. I'd initially wanted an acrylic sump so I could have the sides clear and the base white so it's easier to see what's inside, but the cheapest I could get a quote for was £1,800 + VAT (20%), so I decided to build my own out of glass and put white sticky back plastic on the underside for the same effect.
I've been building tanks for a few years now so this wasn't a complex one, but it's the first time I've built a sump so I asked for some advice here and got some great feedback! I like to build tanks where all the panes rest on the base, use small bits of VHB tape to hold the glass together 2mm apart and then use a powered caulk gun to inject silicone into the gap. Always keen to learn some new methods but information on bigger builds seems pretty scarce!
This one was no different but I had some help from another ex-aquarium friend to help hold everything together and smooth out the silicone bead before it started skinning over. I specced it and water tested it to the brim because I wanted to be sure that it could hold water if there was a power outage and the sump filled up past its normal volume.
I'd need at least 3 people to move the sump into position though so in the mean time, my friend and I cracked on with the plumbing.
I wanted to have a ring of water pumped around the ceiling but the roof was an apex shape so a bit of a pain to work with in that regard. I also wanted the pipes to be high enough up for me to reach without a step but low enough not to max out too many of my options for return pumps. The main return line is all 63mm diameter pipe whereas the lines off and taps are all for 25mm pipe.
Here's a work in progress shot. You can also see where I've started to put the wooden base boards on the frame - each is 25mm thick marine ply. I'm leaving the wood unpainted so that if it gets wet, it can dry out; I know lots of people paint their wooden bases but my fear is that water will eventually get in and not be able to get out.
Getting the pipes secured to the ceiling was a bit of a pain; I had to kind of connect pieces together that weren't meant to work together - a U-bolt over each beam connected to some 10mm threaded rod and then a padded pipe clamp. I put heat-shrink wraps over the U-bolt too so it wouldn't scratch the paint.
Here's the 75mm drain line being plumbed in. Honestly, after being so meticulous over making everything perfectly straight and true for the build so far, its a little upsetting to have this drain line be at an angle! Still, a drain line that's perfectly level wouldn't be any use!
Most of the plumbing done at this point and I've put in the heater too - it's an Elecro 3kw inline titanium heater and it's amazing. In hindsight, this was too powerful a heater for the volume of water I'm running at the moment but their sales team were lovely about swapping out the element for a more suitable 1kw one instead - still too powerful to plug into an Apex without melting it, but has a great internal thermostat and it's own electrical circuit for safety. It also connects to my wifi so I can monitor it from anywhere, but I'll get more into that later.
There's valves basically everywhere so I can tune the flow to the tanks or the rest of the room to my heart's desire - plus I've put in a bypass for the heater for easy switches when it eventually fails in the future (I like to plan for everything failing eventually, because it always will).
The sump is in position here as well as one of the holding tanks I built earlier. Getting the sump in was a pain because we had to pivot the whole frame out by 90 degrees and then slide it in from the side. Not as difficult as I imagined but not super easy either!
Finally time to plumb in the first holding tank (more to come in the future but starting with one) - I went with a beananimal style overflow which I'd never set up before but absolutely love.
Next was to put in the return pump. With the height of the water in the ceiling going up to 2.5m, I needed something powerful to get any meaningful flow through the whole of the system. The solution to this was the wonderful Abyzz a200 pump. It is eye-wateringly expensive but blows everything else I've used out of the water. I've put in plumbing to allow me to put a second one in in the future if I need to have two running for whatever reason, and there should be just enough space in the return chamber to fit an a400 pump in if it came to that. Both have non-return valves and ball valves above them but it was a bit of a squeeze to get all these chunky pipe parts close enough to each other to make it work. The hard pipe parts are connected to the Abyzz with a little bit of flexible hose to minimise vibrations, but this pump doesn't really vibrate much anyway.
At this point the overflow for the tanks went straight into the filter socks, which was rather noisy and kind of negated the benefit of the beananimal overflow when I tested the system with freshwater - so, after emptying all the water I moved the filter socks a little further down and created a chamber that the pipes can go into, below the water level for near silent running.
When reading opinions on this extra chamber I saw several people concerned it would become a detritus trap which I intend to circumvent by putting in a little powerhead to stir up any settled detritus every now and then - there's also the bonus that if any animals do make it into my sump then they can chill out in here rather than getting waterboarded (airboarded?) in a filter sock.
Nearly caught up to where I am now - just a few little personalisations to make it nicer to work in here like this Ikea Skadis board with some custom 3D printed parts and a TV a friend donated after he upgraded his - I had to re-jig the sockets a bit to make it fit but this will have all of my monitoring data on it (tablets are so last year).
Here's the system from a few weeks ago - I don't have a lot in it at the moment and I don't want to have a lot in it permanently since I'll need the space for holding animals to be filmed. At present it's just 10kg of live rock that I've had curing in a box for the last year, 3 Astrea snails and two peppermint shrimp. No sign of any pests so far but I know I'll get them eventually if I'm going to have different animals in all the time.
Despite the complexity of the build, I'm trying to keep the system relatively simple. I don't like to chase numbers, just stability (within limits). I don't like to add anything to the system without knowing what it actually is. I'm not sold on ICP testing and adding a boatload of isolated elements, but I'm fond of kalkwasser dosing and found that to work well for me in the past.
I'm currently running the system on a very very old Apex system that I'm going to upgrade in the next month or two. Since I'm awaiting an imminent upgrade, I'm hesitant to spend hours customising my Apex Fusion page but I am set on going with another Apex because I've worked with them a lot, including on some really high end systems for absolutely loaded clients where they've been rock solid. I'll keep this unit for when I'm travelling abroad and need to set up a temporary system in the middle of nowhere. The bonus of knowing I'm going to upgrade was the willingness to experiment with what I already have - I needed to extend each of my Apex's probes as well as the sensor cables for my ATO by about 2 metres so after some trial and error I have that working without any errors.
One thing I'm doing a little differently that I've not seen a lot of people talk about is monitoring everything through Home Assistant. I'll save some of the nerdy details for another post but I'm loving how I can integrate my data and controls from the Apex with environment monitoring in the room and monitor it from anywhere. For example; I have an Aqara temperature and humidity sensor in the room as well as some MVHR units and an extractor fan which allows me to adjust the air flow and exchange depending on indoor air conditions, water temperature and outdoor conditions (both current and forecast). Another benefit is being able to graph out my Apex's ATO unit - with Home Assistant I can see how often the optical sensors and pump have activated over the last 24 hours rather than just being able to see when they are currently active in Fusion.
So, looking to the future I'll be upgrading the controllers, getting some better lights in and not be allowed to post anything I film until after the documentaries air on TV! I've recently started dabbling in Frigate and have flashed the firmware of a Wyze cam for monitoring the tank - you can get window mounts for these cameras so I'm hoping I can stick it to the back of each holding tank and stream the feed straight to Home Assistant. I think I could manage a coral spawn with this setup too so that is something I'm working towards.
The idea was to have a permanent tropical marine system that can be fed to temporary tanks located anywhere in the room - here's my initial design from SketchUp:
Now, we all know as reef aquarists that reefs love stability and changing things around all the time is a recipe for disaster. This is a bit of a conundrum for me as I'd love some stability but will be changing livestock and stocking densities about quite a lot so I need a system that can be tuned to the finest detail to help me with that. I've definitely over specced a lot of it, but I'm pleased with how it's going so far...
But anyway, let's not jump ahead too much. Back to the building! I don't want to dox myself so I'll keep photos to the inside, but essentially I've had a large building put up not far from my home - here's the bare bones; a thick concrete base with 200mm of insulation inside and rebar reinforcement:
Once that was stable and cured, it was time for 200mm of insulation on every other surface to go in:
And finally from a structural standpoint; a layer of plaster (the LED in the middle is a grow light from a previous project where I built a fully tidal mangrove system):
Jumping ahead a little bit now; walls and floor painted - heavy duty condensation and mould resistant paint on the walls and non-slip hard wearing paint on the floor. The beams do act as a thermal bridge to the outer structure of the roof so I painted them in several coats of glass-bead insulation paint and so far they've not been an issue. There's PVCu skirting boards all the way around, siliconed at the base so if there is a big flood at any point, it won't ruin the plaster. The electrics are in on this photo too - all high up with some on the ceiling, every socket closable and IP67 rated, and 7 different electrical circuits, as well as one for the heater. The room has a smoke alarm and hard wired ethernet too.
Next step was the aluminium profile frame for the main system; this stuff is like lego, so easy to build and yet so strong! Hurts just like lego when you stand on it with bare feet too...
Aaand here she is fully assembled!
At this point it's really starting to take shape - I've put in a standing desk, a work bench and a double sink with one of those IR activated taps. That white box in the right corner is an 850 litre potable water container for holding RODI water and the cylinder on the left is for mixing up to 750 litres of seawater at a time. The normal running volume of the system will be about 1000 litres but scalable to 2000+ litres depending on what other tanks are in the room.
The RODI machine is the one from Glamorca - not too excited about the propriety filters and the instruction manual was trash but it's an all in one and it fits under the sink, out of the way really nicely. I've also put in a Meaco dehumidifier - at this point it needs to be manually emptied but eventually I plumb that into the drain for the sink. The other thing under the table is an old 3D printer but I think the latest firmware update has bricked it.
Next up was the sump build. I'd initially wanted an acrylic sump so I could have the sides clear and the base white so it's easier to see what's inside, but the cheapest I could get a quote for was £1,800 + VAT (20%), so I decided to build my own out of glass and put white sticky back plastic on the underside for the same effect.
I've been building tanks for a few years now so this wasn't a complex one, but it's the first time I've built a sump so I asked for some advice here and got some great feedback! I like to build tanks where all the panes rest on the base, use small bits of VHB tape to hold the glass together 2mm apart and then use a powered caulk gun to inject silicone into the gap. Always keen to learn some new methods but information on bigger builds seems pretty scarce!
This one was no different but I had some help from another ex-aquarium friend to help hold everything together and smooth out the silicone bead before it started skinning over. I specced it and water tested it to the brim because I wanted to be sure that it could hold water if there was a power outage and the sump filled up past its normal volume.
I'd need at least 3 people to move the sump into position though so in the mean time, my friend and I cracked on with the plumbing.
I wanted to have a ring of water pumped around the ceiling but the roof was an apex shape so a bit of a pain to work with in that regard. I also wanted the pipes to be high enough up for me to reach without a step but low enough not to max out too many of my options for return pumps. The main return line is all 63mm diameter pipe whereas the lines off and taps are all for 25mm pipe.
Here's a work in progress shot. You can also see where I've started to put the wooden base boards on the frame - each is 25mm thick marine ply. I'm leaving the wood unpainted so that if it gets wet, it can dry out; I know lots of people paint their wooden bases but my fear is that water will eventually get in and not be able to get out.
Getting the pipes secured to the ceiling was a bit of a pain; I had to kind of connect pieces together that weren't meant to work together - a U-bolt over each beam connected to some 10mm threaded rod and then a padded pipe clamp. I put heat-shrink wraps over the U-bolt too so it wouldn't scratch the paint.
Here's the 75mm drain line being plumbed in. Honestly, after being so meticulous over making everything perfectly straight and true for the build so far, its a little upsetting to have this drain line be at an angle! Still, a drain line that's perfectly level wouldn't be any use!
Most of the plumbing done at this point and I've put in the heater too - it's an Elecro 3kw inline titanium heater and it's amazing. In hindsight, this was too powerful a heater for the volume of water I'm running at the moment but their sales team were lovely about swapping out the element for a more suitable 1kw one instead - still too powerful to plug into an Apex without melting it, but has a great internal thermostat and it's own electrical circuit for safety. It also connects to my wifi so I can monitor it from anywhere, but I'll get more into that later.
There's valves basically everywhere so I can tune the flow to the tanks or the rest of the room to my heart's desire - plus I've put in a bypass for the heater for easy switches when it eventually fails in the future (I like to plan for everything failing eventually, because it always will).
The sump is in position here as well as one of the holding tanks I built earlier. Getting the sump in was a pain because we had to pivot the whole frame out by 90 degrees and then slide it in from the side. Not as difficult as I imagined but not super easy either!
Finally time to plumb in the first holding tank (more to come in the future but starting with one) - I went with a beananimal style overflow which I'd never set up before but absolutely love.
Next was to put in the return pump. With the height of the water in the ceiling going up to 2.5m, I needed something powerful to get any meaningful flow through the whole of the system. The solution to this was the wonderful Abyzz a200 pump. It is eye-wateringly expensive but blows everything else I've used out of the water. I've put in plumbing to allow me to put a second one in in the future if I need to have two running for whatever reason, and there should be just enough space in the return chamber to fit an a400 pump in if it came to that. Both have non-return valves and ball valves above them but it was a bit of a squeeze to get all these chunky pipe parts close enough to each other to make it work. The hard pipe parts are connected to the Abyzz with a little bit of flexible hose to minimise vibrations, but this pump doesn't really vibrate much anyway.
At this point the overflow for the tanks went straight into the filter socks, which was rather noisy and kind of negated the benefit of the beananimal overflow when I tested the system with freshwater - so, after emptying all the water I moved the filter socks a little further down and created a chamber that the pipes can go into, below the water level for near silent running.
When reading opinions on this extra chamber I saw several people concerned it would become a detritus trap which I intend to circumvent by putting in a little powerhead to stir up any settled detritus every now and then - there's also the bonus that if any animals do make it into my sump then they can chill out in here rather than getting waterboarded (airboarded?) in a filter sock.
Nearly caught up to where I am now - just a few little personalisations to make it nicer to work in here like this Ikea Skadis board with some custom 3D printed parts and a TV a friend donated after he upgraded his - I had to re-jig the sockets a bit to make it fit but this will have all of my monitoring data on it (tablets are so last year).
Here's the system from a few weeks ago - I don't have a lot in it at the moment and I don't want to have a lot in it permanently since I'll need the space for holding animals to be filmed. At present it's just 10kg of live rock that I've had curing in a box for the last year, 3 Astrea snails and two peppermint shrimp. No sign of any pests so far but I know I'll get them eventually if I'm going to have different animals in all the time.
Despite the complexity of the build, I'm trying to keep the system relatively simple. I don't like to chase numbers, just stability (within limits). I don't like to add anything to the system without knowing what it actually is. I'm not sold on ICP testing and adding a boatload of isolated elements, but I'm fond of kalkwasser dosing and found that to work well for me in the past.
I'm currently running the system on a very very old Apex system that I'm going to upgrade in the next month or two. Since I'm awaiting an imminent upgrade, I'm hesitant to spend hours customising my Apex Fusion page but I am set on going with another Apex because I've worked with them a lot, including on some really high end systems for absolutely loaded clients where they've been rock solid. I'll keep this unit for when I'm travelling abroad and need to set up a temporary system in the middle of nowhere. The bonus of knowing I'm going to upgrade was the willingness to experiment with what I already have - I needed to extend each of my Apex's probes as well as the sensor cables for my ATO by about 2 metres so after some trial and error I have that working without any errors.
One thing I'm doing a little differently that I've not seen a lot of people talk about is monitoring everything through Home Assistant. I'll save some of the nerdy details for another post but I'm loving how I can integrate my data and controls from the Apex with environment monitoring in the room and monitor it from anywhere. For example; I have an Aqara temperature and humidity sensor in the room as well as some MVHR units and an extractor fan which allows me to adjust the air flow and exchange depending on indoor air conditions, water temperature and outdoor conditions (both current and forecast). Another benefit is being able to graph out my Apex's ATO unit - with Home Assistant I can see how often the optical sensors and pump have activated over the last 24 hours rather than just being able to see when they are currently active in Fusion.
So, looking to the future I'll be upgrading the controllers, getting some better lights in and not be allowed to post anything I film until after the documentaries air on TV! I've recently started dabbling in Frigate and have flashed the firmware of a Wyze cam for monitoring the tank - you can get window mounts for these cameras so I'm hoping I can stick it to the back of each holding tank and stream the feed straight to Home Assistant. I think I could manage a coral spawn with this setup too so that is something I'm working towards.
Last edited:
