Cali Kid Corals

Bennett’s 57G Rimless

bee505

bee505

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I have decided to replace my TruVu 50 gallon tank with a 57G Oceanic Illuminata tank. The reason for the upgrade was because my wife and I were unable to look through the tank anymore. The tank because the ugliest piece of furniture in my living room. Unless a glass tank cracks on me, I would probably not go back to acrylic again. It was too difficult to clean without putting a scratch on it. For the new tank, I’ve decided to use most of my equipment from my old set up and transfer all the live stock to my new tank.

Here are the equipments:

  • 57G Oceanic Illuminata tank
    black stand (built by xcaret)
    20G L Sump with custom baffles
    AquaC Remora Skimmer
    Outer Orbit Lighting 2x150w Phoenix, 3 ATI Blue Plus, 1 ATI Aquablue Special
    Flow: Koralia 1050, Koralia 4
    Mag 5 return
    1” drain
    2 Drews Doser Parastaltic Pump
    Reef Angel Controller

I decided not to go with the reef ready Illuminata because the overflow takes up a lot of room. I also heard that it was really hard to keep clean. The tank was drilled on the upper left hand corner.

Here is a picture of my old setup. The plan is to weed out the corals I don’t want. The tank is way too full.



Here is a picture with the old setup that my wife and I had to shift over to set up the new tank.



More pictures to come.
 
Thanks for the nice comments.

iCon said:
Very nice. Plan on hanging the light somehow?
Click to expand...
I am planning to use the mounting legs for the Outer Orbit light fixture. It doesn't look that nice on the rimless, but I don't trust myself hanging the light fixture above the tank. The light fixture is quite heavy.

Raddogz said:
I think you'll like the extra room on the 57g. Awesome stand!
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I love the extra room in the tank. Especially comparing a 15" width to a 18" width. It gives more a lot more surface area to work with. The stand is really nice. it's about 3ft. tall. I'm 6'1. So now I don't have to bend over to looking inside my tank.
 
bee505 said:
Thanks for the nice comments.

iCon said:
Very nice. Plan on hanging the light somehow?
Click to expand...
I am planning to use the mounting legs for the Outer Orbit light fixture. It doesn't look that nice on the rimless, but I don't trust myself hanging the light fixture above the tank. The light fixture is quite heavy.
Click to expand...


There's got to be a way!
 
Hi Bennett !

Nice to see the new tank !! :beer:
There's always a solution to hang the lights and if you have an attic space, there might be a good solution with a couple wire hanging thingys from Ikea
3/4" EMC can take some weight too, Christina's tank has a heavy fixture (built in ballasts) hanging off of one conduit; yours of course would need two and attach those to the back of the stand.
 
Yes, Mario is the best when it comes to stand building and light bar fabrication! My Cadlights fixture is securely hanging above the 29 gallon tank, providing more than enough light.
 
Seems like the best option would be to use conduit pipes to hang the light fixture. This is the first time I'm running halides and I'm am not 100% sure that I am happy with it. I may consider switching back to T5 in the near future. My corals have more color and the olor pop a lot more with my 6 bulb T5 configuration.

dlipton, You might have saw a similar setup at Neptune.
 
Coral reefer said:
What bulbs are tou running in there? I'll have to bring my reefbrite over and see if it gives you that pop!
Click to expand...

I'm running 2 Phoenix 14k 150w, 3 T5 Aqua Blue Plus, and 1 T5 Aqua Blue Special. I've heard that the Phoenix 14ks are suppose to be blueish. Maybe it's still in the break in period.
 
Here is the sump inside the stand. I kept it very simple, with the drainage going into the left. The middle section has rocks, chaeto, and skimmer. The 3rd section is return pump. The peristaltic pumps are also adding calcium and alkalinity to this section. My issue with the alkalinity dosing into the sump and not the main tank is that the alkalinity settles at the bottom of the sump. On my old setup, the dosing pumps were dosing directly into the main tank, the main tank had enough flow to dissolve the alkalinity.



Here is the tank in the living room.



Mike (Coral Reefer) helped me big time in transferring all the live stock to the new tank. It probably took a good 3 hours at night and 3 hours the next morning. The mistake I made was that while I was transferring the live stock to the new tank, the new sand kicked up everywhere and I was unable to re-scape the rock work until the next morning. I was dropping rocks on top of acros, found a bunch of broken pieces in the morning. This is what I came up with. I'm not sure if the acros are getting enough light in the tank. If it doesn't get enough lighting, I will need to add more rocks to move them up.
 
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