Tank History

Like many of you I've had freshwater tanks since I was a kid. At one point I had three in my bedroom, all planted.

Our current tank history starts about six years ago when I put a 75g Aqueon freshwater tank in our office. We put some live plants and a few fish in it and enjoyed it for a couple of years.

I mentioned this to my wife who said "You can't shut down that tank! It represents your devotion to your business!" She's a writer and sees meaning in everything.

Hmmm... So I mentioned the possibility of converting the tank to salt to some of my staff and a few of the young guys were super-pumped on the idea. A reef tank at 7,000 feet!

Then, during the work-from-home covid days, I became obsessed with saltwater aquariums. The color and diversity of the creatures, plus the science of it all just did it for me. I spent a few months studying the subject and then talked a few staff members into helping me convert the 75g from fresh to salt.

Like most of you we were immediately hooked by this incredible hobby. And man, I cannot overstate how great the tank was for our team building. The entire staff loved that tank and took great pride in it, and everyone pitched in on the husbandry. It really brought us closer than we already were.

About seven months into the 75g salt venture I bought an Apex Pro and installed it. And that's when things really started to get dialed in. Getting daily test results was nothing short of mind blowing and showed us how unstable our water parameters actually were. With that we stabilized things, gained some confidence, bought some torches (which we'd been afraid to try) and haven't lost a coral since (knock wood.)

Fortunately there's a great LFS in my town. So a few days later I dropped by and in no time I was heading to my office (yes, still 2.5 hours away) with a HOB overflow, an Eshopps RS-75 sump, a couple wave pumps, a box of salt, an API test kit, bacteria, some CaribSea LifeRock and a vague idea of what we were supposed to do with it all.

But after a while the black plastic rim of the Aqueon started to bug me. And the internal overflow takes up so much room. And I wanted a tank that I could put my arm around (to scrape the glass easier) and the Aqueon was just too deep for that. And man, I really wanted a larger tank as well. So after getting the business's blessing, I pulled the trigger on a Planet 180 EXT and the planning and equipment purchasing began.

I wanted a taller stand than what the Aqueon was on since most folks had to bend down to get a good view of that tank. And I didn't want a tank that was too high to reach the sand bed for maintenance. And man, those rimless aquariums POP, so rimless it was to be. I went back forth on Ext vs Int overflows, but the consensus on R2R was that External overflows were the way to go. So I ordered a 6'x25"x25" 180 gallon rimless with a Tideline 16" external overflow and a Tideline 36 sump. The stand is Planet Elegance 36" tall cabinet.

The LFS said it would take about a month to get the tank made and shipped, and about a month it took.

Now we had to figure out how to hot-swap the old tank with the new tank, because the new tank had to live in the exact same spot as the old one. And the hot-swap couldn't disrupt business too much, so it had to happen at night or on the weekend. And I knew I couldn't do this alone, so I needed help. It turned out that planning all of this caused me some serious stress trying to figure out how to get that done, which I'll document in the next few posts.

Spoiler alert: It's been about three weeks since the tank hot-swap, and it's been quite the journey.

I had about a month to wait for the new tank and to fill the void while I wasn't stressing about how to not kill all of our fish and coral when doing our hot-swap tank transfer, I decided that it was time for a proper mixing station. Buckets, pumps and heaters in the office just weren't going to cut it anymore for water changes. I wanted to automate as much as possible so that myself and my staff could focus on making money to pay for all of this! 😅

My DIY research, like most things these days, consisted of watching hecka youtube videos on the subject, and these two were the most helpful and entertaining:

The full parts purchase list below each of those youtube videos was also immensely helpful, which led me to purchase all sorts of plumbing and parts. It was a totally enjoyable process from start to finish.

Figuring that 10% water changes would be about 20 gallons for the new Planet 180g I purchased these two 35 gallon holding tanks: https://www.lowes.com/pd/Norwesco-35-Gallon-Plastic-White-Water-Storage-Tank/5016037975

Another consideration was that the mixing station tanks and all equipment were going into a literal closet, so they couldn't be too big.

In the end it all worked nearly perfectly - though if I had to do it again I'd look for tanks that have a larger opening at the top. With these tanks it's a little tight adding stuff, including salt, to the tanks. It's all doable, just a bit tight.

(ignore the network cable mess in the top left of this photo, that has nothing to do with the mixing station setup)

We have drop ceilings in the office so running RODI lines from a bathroom, to the RODI filters in mixing station closet, and then to ATO tank under the display tank (all in a total of about 50 feet between the three rooms) wasn't bad at all.

I was originally going to use an Apex DOS pump to pull RODI water out of the RODI tank and into the ATO tank (about 30 feet from each other) but one of my staff said "You don't need to do that, those RODI lines are pressurized." Duh! And thank you Nate! You can see the T-valve in the photo above that splits off the incoming RODI water with the straight run going into the RODI tank while the other eventually heads up into the ceiling, across about 30 feet, and then down into the ATO tank that lives under the display tank. I put an Apex Liquid Level Sensor in the ATO tank and connected an Apex solenoid to the incoming RODI line and programmed the Apex so that it opens the solenoid and refills the ATO tank water when the level gets low, and closes the solenoid when the water reaches the height that I like. I also added another non-Apex ATO solenoid shutoff with an optical water level sensor at the top of the ATO tank for redundancy. If for whatever reason the Apex solenoid tries to overfill the ATO tank water the redundant system will shut it off. It works perfectly.

Here's the Apex LLS and Solenoid code for anyone who is interested:
Fallback OFF
If ATOH20 > 15.0 Then OFF
If ATOH20 < 12.0 Then ON
When On > 090:00 Then OFF
Defer 000:30 Then ON
Defer 000:10 Then OFF

We've got redundancy and liquid sensors everywhere so that we don't mistakenly flood anything. No more manually filling buckets with RODI water and refilling the ATO tank for us, it's all automated now. I can add more photos if someone wants to see them.

Load and Transport day

And just like my LFS said it would, the Planet 180g and stand arrived exactly on time. They'd also had all of the new gear that I ordered ready for me (sump, UV, pumps, etc.)

And it all just barely fit into my 2013 Ford F-150. What's not pictured is all of the other things that were stuffed into the cab: Sump, skimmer, UV, plumbing, etc., etc.

The LFS guys loaded it all into my truck and I hit the road, texting my young guys with my ETA to meet at the office two and half hours away. What I didn't realize at the time, because I didn't load it into the truck myself, was how frikkin' heavy that tank is!

Once at the office, my 56-year-old-self and three of my reef-loving, thirty-ish year-old staffers loaded it into the office. Barely! The stand was easy. But if the tank was another 30 pounds I don't know if we could have done it.

Here's us just after we got the 180g up on the stand in the temporary location (it's a small office)

And here it is from the back, a couple days later after we got it mostly plumbed and filled with water for a leak test (UV wasn't yet plumbed in):

Finding that it held water and didn't leak was very exciting! It also looked fantastic.

Here's the full plumbing:

We let the water circulate for 24 hours and then drained it.

At this point it was just days to go until hot-swap day! And we were all pretty excited and stressing. Were we making enough salt water? Were we making too much salt water? Did we have enough heaters, pumps, and air stones for all of the storage bins and brute trash cans for the fish, corals and water? Was this actually going to work at all, or were we going to kill everything?

Salt Worries

We figured we'd need to make and store about 200 gallons of salt water prior to the tank swap day, in order to have enough on hand to fill the new tank and sump and have a little extra on-hand. With our 75 gallon per day RODI system and our 35 gallon salt mixing tank we could really only make about about 35 gallons of saltwater per day (since we were only at the office from 9 to 5 each day.) So we'd have to make saltwater and store it for about five days beforehand.

Up to now we'd always put saltwater in the 75g tank as soon as it was mixed. We'd been using Fritz RPM salt with the 75g tank. Would it store well without precipitating? Online research was quite mixed. So after hemming and hawing for a couple of days I decided I didn't want to worry about that variable (there were enough other things to worry about!) and purchased a bucket of Red Sea Blue bucket for the tank swap.

Tank Swap Day!

Over the previous five days we pre-made about 220 gallons of Red Sea Blue Bucket saltwater and stored it in a 96 gallon garbage can (the kind that you roll out to the curb), two 40 gallon storage bins that we already had on-hand, and filled and mixed both our mixing station 35 gallon tanks with saltwater (yes, we mixed the RODI side with salt as well as the salt side). The salt mixed great and stayed clear.

We had 5 heaters, 2x400 watt, 2x300 watt, and a 200 watt, all with their own controllers on hand and also had plenty of powerheads as well as 1 air bubbler with an airstone for the fish storage bin.

All of our coral from the 75g was mounted and glued onto rocks so our plan was to move them on their rocks into the two, 40 gallon storage bins. Then we'd lower the water in the 75g to about six inches and net and move all of the fish and inverts into the 40 gallon bin that had the airstone in it (we only had one airstone). To recap: Two 40 gallon bins, both with rock and coral, and one of them had the fish and inverts in it as well.

We started the tank swap process at about 4pm, and though I was quite worried about pulling it off, it all worked perfectly! Even catching the four Damsels was super easy with the low water level and nothing else in the 75g tank.

There was really only two real issues:

1) Heaters. We had two small heaters in the two 40 gallon bins (a 300w and a 200w) and they weren't able to keep up.. at all. Which I was very surprised about since the 300w kept the 75g tank temperatures fine by itself. Fortunately we had two 400w heaters on hand and they were both able to do the job in the bins. Though the controllers were off by about three degrees, which mean in the end we had to set the controller temps to 81 degrees to keep the actual water temps at 78. (instant read meat thermo was invaluable here)

2) Fish Death. Our Red Finned Fairy Wrasse committed suicide. We kept lids partially covering the 40 gallon totes and while we were adjusting one of them we heard something hit the lid HARD. We didn't know it then, but it turned out to be the Wrasse, who was dead in the morning. Fortunately it was our only loss.

One REALLY helpful thing that we used through this entire process was an instant read meat thermometer, which I got for something like $19 at Walmart. We used it as our "real" temperature measurement on the 75g before the move, on the tote water during the move, and then 180g after the move. No matter what the heater controllers said (and they were usually wrong), we went by the instant read thermo for our temperature "truth." I can't stress how much this helped us coordinate temperatures between bodies of water.

We then commenced with the tear-down of the 75g, which went surprisingly fast and maybe took an hour before we got it drained, unplugged, and it and the stand outside and out of the way.

However, the setup of the 180g was a LOT of work - even though we'd already plumbed it in the days before. And keep in mind that it was four of us working at it. Pumping was slow, heating the water was slow (it was preheated but needed to come up a couple of degrees) and it turned out that we of course had a leak where the UV connected to one of the return lines - that we of course hadn't tested during our wet test a few days before.

We got the sand in, the water in, the MP40s in, and our new Caribsea LifeRock in.

And then with the pumps and filter socks in place the water started to clear up fairly quickly. Keeping in mind that we started the teardown of the 75g at 4pm, here's a photo of the 180g at 10:30pm.

We decided to call it a night at that point. We were all tired so I sent the guys home. I ended up staying at the office until about 1 am connecting the Apex and important probes (temp, PH, ORP) and ensuring that the temperature in the livestock bins stayed on point - which took a LONG time to dial in - because the controllers were so off.

Here's the tank just before I left the office at 1am:

I didn't sleep more than a few hours that night as my brain was BUZZING and I really wanted to get back to see how the livestock did and get it all back into the 180g.

Upon arriving at the office at 8am and examining the livestock we immediately saw the dead Red Finned Fairy Wrasse, and all of hearts sank. Did everything die?

Fortunately the answer was a resounding NO. Everything else was alive and seemingly doing well so we hustled it all back into the 180g. All told it probably took us about an hour to get all of the rocks and coral into the tank, positioned and settled, then another 15 minutes to get the fish and the inverts back in.

At 11am that day:

Then it took few more hours to get the skimmer, dosers, ATO, and Apex fully hooked up and monitoring and controlling everything.

1:15pm sump shot that day:

That's it for today. I'll post more in the next day or so. Feel free to ask questions in the meantime.

Thank you!

It could be a little high, but it's nowhere near water coming out. I'd say the water level is 3/4" from the top. I'll keep an eye on it though!

A few things I wanted to mention regarding the tank swap: With the exception of the Fairy Wrasse killing himself, everything lived. All of the fish, inverts and corals made it into the new tank with seemingly no ill effects. It was shockingly great.

And the difference in quality and general appearance between the 75g Aqueon and this new tank is remarkable. This tank is just absolutely gorgeous. The build quality of the Planet and the cabinet are also remarkable.

Here's the tank the day after the upgrade went live:

And I forgot to mention that I did test the Alk, Ca, and Mag before we put the livestock into the 180g and dosed up all of them to match the parameters of the old tank.

After the swap I tested nitrates which were understandably very low at 1. And phosphates were about half of what they were in the old tank at 0.03. I decided to not do anything about either and see where they went over the next week.

Within about 24 hours all of the corals with the exception of a cranky Goniopora were fully opened.

More Tangs! And stress and sadness...

It seems that nearly everyone who upgrades their tanks want more tangs, and I'm absolutely one of those people. In our 75g we had a Half-Black Mimic Tang that we all love, who we call Wu Tang. He's kind of a bully, but he's a hard worker and while Mimics aren't currently a hot tang in the reefer world, he's grown quickly and into a striking individual. Here is Wu Tang today:

I researched how to add more Tangs to a tank that already has a tang, deeply, here on R2R and discussed with my LFS. My LFS recommended I purchase new tangs and add them to the tank within 10 days of the tank upgrade and could add an egg crate divider if the new tangs were being bullied. So four days after the upgrade I bought and introduced similarly sized Gem and Whitetail Bristletooth Tangs to the tank.

In retrospect I should have watched the Bristletooth in the LFS tank a bit longer and picked up on what the stress clues were that it was already exhibiting there as it was doing a lot of glass surfing. I should have bought a divider and used it as well. But the Gem was rock solid at the LFS and continues to be so to this day. Here's some video from the day after we put them in the tank.

All seemed OK at this point, but not great. The Mimic would flare up on both the Gem and the Bristletooth. The Gem would flare right back at the Mimic and not back down. However, the Bristletooth would flee and start glass surfing along the back and a corner of the tank, for hours at a time. There were no actual attacks that we saw and no damage to the Bristletooth. Some days it seemed to be doing well, but overall it started eating less and less and we all began worrying more and more. The Mimic would flare up next to it from time to time, but wasn't actually attacking, and wasn't bullying it any more than it bullies our other fish. Regardless, it was too much for the Bristletooth and within five days it was gone.

Here it is about an hour before it passed away, unable to maintain its position in the water column.

It was all a bit traumatic. And we've agreed not to try and add another Tang as a result. My LFS was kind enough to give me credit for the fish, though I really didn't expect that. In retrospect I would have observed the fish longer at the store and not purchased him. The glass surfing seemed to be the give away.

The good news is that our Gem and Mimic are fast buddies and get along great.

This tank is now about six-weeks post-upgrade and here are the things that really stand out:

Stability! In the 75g we'd feed the coral a slurry of aminos, phyto plankton, and reef roids and the next day the phosphates would literally double from .05 to .1. No such issues at all with this tank. We feed the corals reef roids and the phosphates don't budge. Alkalinity is MUCH more stable as well. The water volume just seems to absorb so much.

The fish have room to roam and are clearly more happy! Especially our Azure Damsels and Royal Gramma. In the 75g they'd mostly stay in and very close to the rocks. In this tank it feels like we have more fish because of how much the Damsels and Royal Gramma are now swimming around the tank. Even the clowns seem to roam more.

What's not so good? Lighting! Our existing four AI HD 16 Primes that we brought over from the 75 did not cut it. Even with our predominantly LPS corals. They just don't get the PAR down deep enough, nor cover enough spread. So I added another Prime and that still didn't cut it, so I then replaced two of the Primes 16s with two Hydra 32s and I think we're now good. It's a bit of a hodge-podge but all of the corals, including our SPSs, have enough PAR.

Any recommendations on how I could mount these lights so it just looks better? Some sort of rail hung from the ceiling? It would need to handle both the Primes and the Hydras.

Oh yeah, I know this drill!

Yes, every piece. And I added a large new rock as well, one of these: https://www.saltwateraquarium.com/liferock-plateau-rock-18-caribsea/

That said, we still went through a bit of "new tank syndrome" after getting everything moved over. Nitrates and phosphates were still quite low and I had to dose both of those back up, and we got diatoms for a few weeks, which did eventually clear. The fish and corals all did amazingly well though. We lost nothing to the tank swap, other than a wrasse who knocked himself out on the lid of the storage bin that he was in.

None of my rock was glued to each other so it was actually very easy to put them in the temporary storage bins for the night, and then again to place them in the new tank the next morning. With my 75g it felt like the rocks and fish were packed in tight, but after the move there was soooo much more space in the 180g, and it looked amazing with all of the sand/negative space. Other than the one new rock I haven't felt the need to add any more. All of the fish seem to love the new swimming space.

We had a combination of old water and new water in the 40g storage bins. I'd say 60% old water and 40% new. We just didn't have enough old water from the 75g to fill both bins with all old water, but in retrospect it was probably a good thing that it was a mix of old and new water for the corals and fish, otherwise the shock when we moved it all into the new tank might have been even greater. I did a lot of manual testing of the salinity, temperature, and alk of both the old and new water though, and ensured that it all matched.

My suggestions would be to have more pre-made water than you think you'll need, more heaters than you think you'll need, more storage bins than you think you'll need, and have an instant read meat thermometer so that you can use that as your temperature baseline between bins, old tank, and new tank water.

Current tank look with video. Fighting what we think are dinos in the sand in the lower right sandbed. Microscope arriving tomorrow though!

I'm not quite following the water math here as it seems a little short, but I'm sure you've thought through all of it, and I'm sure you'll rock it.

Also, maybe pump some iron leading up to the big day because it's a heckuva lot of work and not easy on the body! 😄

Right on! That Neptunian is a super-cool looking tank.

OK, I totally get that you'll have 120g new plus 90ish old to fill up the new tank on the first day. And you'll mix another 55g overnight, to get the sump filled too. All good there. The only piece that I'm missing is what water will you use for the temporary livestock storage bins while this is all happening? Will that be all new as well? Just making sure that you aren't missing that piece.

OK, great info. I'd love more tangs but don't know if we can handle watching another one die, so this is hopeful. Thank you!

That should work. Well thought out, as I suspected! Looking forward to seeing it unfold in your tank thread!

In other news, we're now fighting off Dinos, as confirmed via a new microscope purchase today. I've posted the video and images (which are off-the-charts-cool) to the Facebook Macks Reef Dino Support Group as well as this R2R thread for positive identification as we're not sure if they're Prorocentrum or Amphidinium (Large-Cell). We noticed a reddish-colored, algae-like substance in a few spots in the sand a few weeks ago, and wish we knew what we were looking at and addressed them then, as I suspect that fight might have been easier. But alas, it's full-blown now.

The good news here is that we have a microscope, and that's hecka cool.

One thing to note: The new mixed water that I put in my 180g was totally cloudy until I got the tank connected to my returns and water running through the filter socks. So cloudy that I could barely see the large rock that we'd put in the tank (see photos earlier in thread.) It cleared fairly quickly after the sump and filter socks were connected, but that might be a small issue for you as you are trying to place your rocks from the storage bin.

We added a few things to the tank last week, and I'm happy to report that everyone is doing excellently.

Dragon Soul Torch

Hellfire Torch

Male Splendid Pintail Fairy Wrasse. He was totally freaked out and being harassed by our Azure Damsels for a few days, but is now fighting back and settling into the tank.

We also added this spunky little Blue Hippo Tang, maybe 2.5 inches. I never thought I'd want a Blue Hippo but this little guy caught my eye and immediately fit right into the tank. He took absolutely no **** from the aforementioned Damsels and our existing tangs didn't give him a second look. Everyone loves her/him/Dory.

And just for kicks, neither of these two are new, but these are our Tangs. A Half-Black Mimic that we've had for over a year and his newish frienemy Gem Tang, who we added soon after we upgraded to this 180g tank. They mostly cruise the tank together and occasionally stop to flare up at each other.

Here's a video of our new Pintail Fairy Wrasse being chased and launching himself out of the water. Fortunately his launches have all been vertical to date, and he's always splashed right back into the water. But it's making me seriously contemplate a cover.

Exciting times! What type of tank are you setting up? And what are you upgrading from?

Never mind! I see your tank thread, and your earlier comment in this thread. Time to get off the pot and get that 180g going, you'll love it!

Seven months in build update:

The tank is by and large doing extremely well. It's really gorgeous. People drop by our office from time to time just to see it. My staff and I are feeling so proud about where it's at now, as well as all of the challenges that we've gotten past. I'm sure there will be many more to come though!

The good:

Salt! After experimenting with Red Sea Blue Bucket and Fritz RPM salts, we switched to NYOS pure. There was nothing wrong with the Red Sea or Fritz, it was just that the awc salt mixing container would get a little stinky and had what looked like bacterial deposits growing in it after some time. Those issues went away with the NYOS salt.

Dosing! I also switched us from the Red Sea Complete Care four-part dosing to NYOS ion-b. I think the math shows about a 50% money savings from that switch. Plus that freed up two dosing heads. Very happy with this as well, as I'm now dosing calcium nitrate to keep nitrates around 10ppm~ and ChaetoGro with a stirrer in the other dosing heads. Parameters and ICP-MS tests show our numbers to be spot on.

Refugium! We added a fuge to our system a couple months ago as phosphates were climbing (0.3) and we wanted a Mandarin Goby. And man, that fuge is so great. It slowly brought phosphates down (0.1 now), it produces soooo many copepods, and there's now practically zero algae in the tank. I'll never go without a fuge again.

Auto feeders: We have an Apex auto pellet feeder and an iF4 frozen auto feeder, which we have set for both to feed twice a day - for 4 feedings per day. It's totally game-changing in terms of consistency and happy fish and corals. We now even have a fat and happy Purple Queen Anthia, which we couldn't keep alive in the past.

The bad:

Torches and BJD. Not sure we'll ever buy torches again as we've had BJD kill so many beautiful and thriving torch colonies over the course of a few months. We dipped, we used chemiclean, we moved them apart from each other, and one by one, no matter what we did, they died. We have a small dragon soul left, that's it. No more torches for this tank.

Dinos: The chemiclean treatment led to a phosphate spike and then dinos. However, a 3D Reefing UV Sweeper made dinos relatively easy to mostly get rid of. We still UV sweep every now and then, but on the whole the dinos aren't much of a concern.

Metals in RODI: When we did the big upgrade from the 75g to this 180g we pre-mixed 200 gallons of saltwater for the hot-swap. What I didn't realize at the time was that the main RODI filters were past their prime, and the single DI resin cartridge was fairly used up as well. The first ICP test post-upgrade showed high levels of tin, copper, lithium, and aluminum as a result. I just didn't realize when it was time to swap out those RODI filters. I swapped them all out and also added another DI cartridge (it's now a 5 stage) and now quickly replace the DI resin as soon as it's 3/4 brown. It took a few months but now we have no more issues with metals according to the last ICP-MS test.

Here's a current photo and video:

Video near the end of a feeding:

Our refugium, a few weeks after it was set up with a tennis-ball-sized amount of chaeto. We put black sand and reef mud in it and a cleanup crew in there taking care of that. It's now even more full of chaeto that we cull every few weeks.