Habitat - Indoor :: Moe's new 75G home - build thread.

[Kalt]

I just read your entire build thread instead of going to sleep like I should have. Now I have an ATBA all planned out and to be made with almost no tools as all I have is a dremel and a drill. Thank you for the inspiration!

[VeipaCray]

LOL.. thanks for the kind words.

Yeah tools are sort of key to building however most home improvement stores have panel saws and things. With some careful planning you could have the store do all of the cutting for you - wood, acrylic, tile etc. You'd be left with assembly (which could be done with your drill) and any finishing (sanding by hand or with your dremel, and some painting / staining).

When you do decide to take on your ATBA, please start a build thread if you could. I think we all learn from each other and we'd love to see your thought process.

Cheers and thanks for reading!

[robert98374]

Your tank is a great inspiration! I cant wait to get my tank up and running!

[VeipaCray]

Thanks for the kind words. Please post pictures when you do.

[VeipaCray]

I haven't added anything to this thread in a while so here we go...

Due to my son being born and a few other demands for my time (like work), I realized I no longer had the time to dedicate each day to working on my reef setup to keep it looking like it should. After many years of being in the saltwater/reef hobby I've decided to give it up. This left me with an empty 75G tank in the wall. My first thought was to move the cichlids down to this tank but nah... boring. I knew whatever I did had to be freshwater. No time for mixing salt and dealing with algae outbreaks and RO/DI and all of the mess. I decided to turn this tank into a planted tank to serve as an aquatic plant garden for my turtle. I've tried planting my turtle tank a few times, but Moe just tears apart all of the plants and eats them. The poor plants never have a chance to take root and grow.

After giving away my reef + fish +some of the equipment to friends and coworkers *sniff* I was left with an empty tank...

[VeipaCray]

I've never had a planted tank before. I've had freshwater tanks with a plant or two, but never tank focused on growing aquatic plants. I did some research and discovered there's basically two ways to do do a planted tank: 1. Low Tech. 2. High Tech. Low tech involves minimal lighting and equipment with slower plant growth. High tech includes high output lighting, CO2 injection and fertilizers. Since this tank was previously a reef setup, I already had T5 HO light fixtures. I brew beer on occasion so I have spare CO2 tanks and regulators. High tech sounded like more fun and I already had most of the expensive parts.

One of my pet peeves with this tank was the loud plumbing. This is an Aqueon Reef Ready (drilled with overflow) tank that had the Aqueon MegaFlow kit (durso standpipe) and an Aqueon ProFlex IV sump. This tank lives in the wall above the coffee bar in my home office where I spend most of my day. The loud sound of the running water was driving me nuts. The running water sound also interfered with my other great passion... high end audio. My stereo is also in my home office. After a bit of reading on how to silence the drain system on this tank, I decided to remove the annoying loud megaflow standpipe and replace it with a DIY Herbie drain setup.

The concept of the Herbie drain is simple yet genius. By flooding the drainpipe with water, there is no air and therefore no sloshing water sound. I won't go into too much detail on the Herbie drain system as there's many many posts all over the internet and on reef forums about it. I will say that it is completely silent, very easy to build and if you have a reef ready tank it's a very good option once you source a PVC gate valve.

Here's my pair of Herbie drains from the backside of my overflow. One drain is submerged (right side), the other drain is the safety drain (left side) in case the first drain gets clogged. The water level going down the drain is matched to the flow from my return pump with a gate valve on the drain side. You can see the water level near the top of the left drain pipe. The black thing in the middle is a temperature probe. The water level doesn't fluctuate in the overflow more than a 1/4". All is good.

[VeipaCray]

Since we're on the subject of plumbing - here's the rest of the drain system for the sump. I replaced the long drain connectors Aqueon gives you with the sump with some really short ones of the same diameter I found at the hardware store:



It's hard to see but the return pump on the left side is an Eheim 1262. This is a fantastic pump for the $$. I've had it for a few years now and it runs like a champ. It's very quiet, doesn't use much power considering it's a 900GPH pump, and it's a workhorse. I like this submersible pump MUCH better than the Danner Mag Drive I used to have.

At this point here, I had just completed the plumbing. I was running cold water to check for leaks and tune the drain system. Nothing fun yet other than the silence while it was running. If you put your ear down by the sump you can barely hear a soft hum from the pump. Once in a while you'll get a very quick faint trickle sound. The 1262 is running full out and you can't hear much of anything... it's SWEET!

And that gate valve...

[VeipaCray]

The beauty of the proflex sump is that is has movable baffles. I used to run the middle section as a refugium when this sump serviced the reef. I changed the baffle heights, took out the sponge and opened the door between compartments 2 and 3. The less water turbulence, the less gas-off of CO2.

I decided to add some bio media to that middle compartment. Instead of running a trickle filter (high rate of CO2 gas-off), I just submerged a large media bag of ceramic bio media. I'm not sure if the bio media is needed on a planted tank - in theory the plants do the same thing as they consume the ammonia. It's so cheap online and doesn't really hurt to have it so I added some. OK I added a lot. I bought the 4 pack of bio media that I've linked on the deals section of this forum a long time ago. I needed a media bag...so I took a trip over to the store and found a very large mesh laundry bag for 99 cents. I poured all of the bio media in, zip tied the bag shut and cut off the excess part of the bag.







Into the middle section of the sump it went.

[happycamper]

Planted tanks are beautiful! Good choice. I have a little ten gallon jungle in my living room

[VeipaCray]

Are you feeding your turtle from the trimmings? Picture?

[VeipaCray]

Since this tank was freshwater and I was going for low(er) maintenance, I opted for auto water changes.

I bought a solenoid off ebay for $12 and hooked it up to my incoming water line. The solenoid is plugged into my auto top off / float valve system. When the water level drops, the float switch makes contact and tells the controller to turn on the outlet for the solenoid. When the solenoid gets power, it opens and water flows through.

I realized that I hadn't dealt with chloramine yet. I didn't want to add water conditioner as I planned on adding fish later. There's much debate about running carbon in a filter for a freshwater tank. The general consensus is that carbon will strip out fertilizers and chemicals beneficial to plant growth.

The solution I came up with was to re purpose my Bulk Reef Supply dual reactor. It was meant to be run in a closed loop with carbon in one container and GFO in the other on a reef setup. I took it apart, cleaned it, replaced the fittings to accept my incoming water line and stuffed both reactor chambers full of carbon. Now any incoming water from the tap to fill up the tank is forced through an absurd amount of carbon stripping out the chlorine and chloramine. Yeay... filtered tap water to keep the tank full.

You can see the incoming water on the left with a shut-off valve, the solenoid, and then into the reactor (all on 1/4" polyethylene tubing). After the reactor, I just used a piece of 3/8" PEX to bring the water straight into the sump. At first I used more 1/4" tubing for the return line, but the water pressure (remember this is at house water pressure 70+PSI) caused the 1/4" tube to want to fly around. I anchored it but was afraid it would come undone, so I swapped the 1/4" tubing for the pex. Works like a charm.




For the auto water changes, I took a maxijet 1200 utility pump that I had laying around and hooked it up to the Digital Aquatics Reef Keeper Lite controller for this tank. This is the same controller I use on the turtle tank to automate things. I've become so dependent on these controllers, I couldn't imagine running a tank without one. So the output of the MJ1200 pump is plumbed with 1/2" PVC to a nearby floor drain in my basement. The MJ1200 is rated at 295GPH @ 1 foot of head. I only needed to raise the water about 1' to go up and over the side of the sump.. so this pump should be putting out close to its advertised 295GPH. I setup my aquarium controller to turn this pump on 4x a week for 1 minute. 295GPH/60minutes ROUGHLY equals 5 gallons of water if this pump runs for a minute. My total system volume (75G tank + sump) is about 100G. I'm changing out roughly 20% of my water every week on this tank. So the pump turns on and pushes the water out down the drain. The water level drops, and the auto top off float switch described above turns on. About 20 seconds after the water starts pumping out.... the top off system begins to replace the water with clean filtered cold tap water.

And no more manual water changes for this guy. *happy dance*

Here's the controller. If you'd like to know more about it, visit Digital Aquatics here: http://www.digitalaquatics.com/

[happycamper]

I tried to grow anacharis for Sheldon to eat, but the carbon supplement I'm using killed it. This is my first attempt at a planted tank, so its not terribly impressive. I met an interesting lady on a local aquarium forum and she hooked me up with some trimmings, I honestly don't even know what type of plants are in there! She gives me a bag of duckweed for Sheldon every 2 weeks or so too, he loves it! I started it in November...



That's the first day or so.



That's a current pic. I recently hacked away most of it, I should have taken a picture before I did! Crappy phone pics sorry, its just so easy to post from my phone I can't resist.

[VeipaCray]

That's very nice! I recognize most of the plants in there. If you ever come back to Chicago, stop by and aquascape my tank You've got a really good eye for that.

Carbon supplement - were you using Seachem Flourish Excel? I've read Anacharis doesn't like it. I've been using it sparingly on my tank. My anacharis and most of my other plants turned brown dropped all of their leaves and started to grow them back. I was told this was a normal process when you first plant a tank. The plants were growing in different water, different PH, different lighting and nutrients. I was told they sort of need to re-acclimate to your system. Everything started to regrow for me so I assume this was an accurate statement.

What substrate did you use? Is that ecocomplete or flourite?

[VeipaCray]

I was going to go with eco complete for this tank but then I saw the cost of that stuff and how much was needed for a 75G tank. I didn't want to spend that much not knowing how the tank would do my first go-round at a planted tank. After some reading, I discovered there's a cult following of people who use Black Diamond blasting media. It's coal slag and it's a really cheap dark inert sand-like substrate. A 50lb bag was $8 at Tractor Supply Company. My biggest challenge is I live in the Chicago suburbs... there's no tractor supply places around here. After some googling, I found one way out in the boonies and loaded up my trunk with 3 bags.

[VeipaCray]

Decent driftwood is apparently hard to come by around here. I was going to order some off the internet, but I don't really have a good imagination when it comes to visualizing what a piece might look like. I called up one of the better local fish stores - Tropiquatics in Lombard, and those guys were super helpful. They said they had just ordered some and they got all of their driftwood from a local person who lets them select the pieces individually. I told them what I was looking for and they were very accommodating. I grabbed two large pieces...