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Well the thought of a 300 gallon tank was just a dream
of mine back in 2007. We were living in San Antonio Texas, I had a 150
gallon Bare Bottom(BB) SPS tank and my wife had a 75 gallon LPS tank. My wife
has always been a huge LPS fan and I have been a colored sticks ( as she
calls them) fan since as long as I can remember. We decided to
move to Pflugerville (p-ville) Texas and thus for the move I got to get
a tank upgrade ;-)
We overlapped the lease in San Antonio with the purchase of our home in
p-ville which gave me about 2 months to get the new tank and all the
equipment setup and running and do the transfer.
I searched and sent out for price quotes on tanks in various sizes from
various manufacturers but my searching was a little frustrating.
The first few quotes I got back were WAY over my budget on a tank.
I got lucky and was very fortunate to hook up with
Kingfish
Aquariums out of Austin Texas. They got in touch with
A.G.E(Acrylic & Glass Exhibits ) out of Houston Texas and they could
meet my time restraints as well as giving me a great price on an amazing
tank.
The tank had to be large enough to accommodate all the live rock and
livestock of both the 75 and 150 gallon tanks. Since my wife had some
really nice wrasses I also choose to go with a shallow sand bed so that
they would be able to live in the tank. After I received the dimensions
of the stand I soon figured out that my Euroreef RC500 wouldn't work as
it was too wide to fit under the stand or behind the tank where I wanted
the skimmer to go. So once again talked to Kingfish Aquariums who got me
a Deltec AP902 and I was also graced by my wife who bought me a Deltec
PF601S Calcium reactor for my Christmas present.
Our new house in p-ville was setup to be a gas house and only had a
100amp service ran to it. This had to change as I wouldn't be able to
support my tank without throwing breakers constantly. I have
friend of the family who is an electrician and as long as I ran the wire
and helped he got me a new panel and parts at his costs. I upped
my service to 200amps and the tank has its own subpanel.
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Huge fork lift |
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Tank Arrival |
Tank showed up on December 22, 2006 and the trucks lift gate couldn't
support the tank so we had to go rent a fork lift. All the normal
size fork lifts were rented out so we had to rent a HUGE fork lift.
It was very scary there for a bit but we were able to get the tank off
the truck and we had plenty of help to get the tank into the house. I
also rented 6 glass carrying suction cups which helped a lot on lifting
the tank and getting it into the house.
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| Everyone about to lift |
Room Before construction |
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| Tank on stand, Pepsi can on top for
perspective |
Once the tank arrived I went to work on getting the tank plumbed with
the help of John from Kingfish. Two solid days of plumbing as well
as a few mishaps of wrong bulkheads that I ordered and me not double
checking what I had ordered. I also had the tank drilled on the
bottom which is made of PVC, so that I could run a closed loop which is
ran by a Sequence Hammerhead pump with an OceanMotions 4-way. The
closed loop turned out great and looked like an octopus once plumbed in
lol.
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| Four way in back |
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| Drain lines and Deltec AP901 in back right |
Once the plumbing was done time to fill and check for leaks. I
purchased a 300gal/day RO/DI unit from Aquafx called the Mako which only
took a short time to fill half way, I plugged in the closed loop pump
and no leaks. So I left the RO/DI running and filled up the
tank and put in all of the sand (Carib-Sea ARAGA-ALIVE Bahamas Oolite)
and geared up for the up coming tank transfer.
AquaFx Mako 300GPD RO/DI
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half full with closed loop running (closed loop drain has the
black strainer on it) |
Sand in and tank running
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Bright and early on 1/3/2007 we arrived in San Antonio at 7am and rented
a Uhaul Truck. We had 8 large plastic containers over 350 plastic
bags of all different sizes for the corals ride home. Also brought
with us 2 100gallon trash cans which would hold the rock and
miscellaneous items.
I totally didn't think it would take as long as it did, and I thought we
would be back in P-ville in the late afternoon but I was VERY wrong.
We started bagging coral first from both the 150 and 75 gallon and put
them into their own plastic containers. Once coral was out of the
way we moved as much of the rock into the trash cans so that we could
catch the fish. All of this took HOURS and HOURS, we finally
caught the fish and put them into their own plastic container and I put
tank water into the container also to help ease the pressure on the
bags. We started loading the Uhaul with coral and fish up front
with us with the heat on because of the cold temperature, and rock in
the back area. When we finally finished loading the truck we
looked down at the clock and this is what we saw:
Then 2 hours later we arrived in P-ville and started unloading all the
livestock and rock into the house. First we floated the bags of
coral and fish in the tank for about 20 minutes while I laid out a large
plastic tarp on the floor and started to put the rock on it so we could
see all the pieces we had to work with. I personally am horrible
at rock work but I'm fortunate to have a wife who is amazing at it.
So for the next few hours she would ask for rock by calling out its
shape and I would try to find the correct rock, didn't always get it
right on the first try but it all worked out. It was hard to put
the rock in with all the bags floating in the top also but it had to be
done. At 3:30am rock work was finished and it was my turn with
take the coral out of there bags and place them into the tank. I
tried my best to find spots to lay the colonies and frags so that they
wouldn't get covered by sand. Then at 5:30am I finished putting the last
coral in the tank and I was about to fall over from being so tired.
After that super long day we only lost 3 fish, all coral except a couple
of small frags made it just fine. I know that a lot of people were
worried since I was using 90% new water but I don't think it matter much
at all and everything the very next day looked great expect for some
brownouts. Then a few days later we drove back to San Antonio and helped
move out my old tank to its new owners and had to clean up the house.
If you have to move a tank the easiest way is to have another tank up
and running to transfer your old tank into but its still no cake walk.
mobile coral mover ;-) |
Deconstruction of the 150gallon |
Morning after (still building the light rack during this
picture) |
Morning after again |
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