Cali Kid Corals

Richie's Reefer 500

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richiev

Supporting Member
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It has arrived!

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Looks to be in great condition, and taking it apart was physically easy. The guy rolled it in, no problem, for me. I just helped him push it up the driveway.

That being said, taking it apart was a bit emotionally weird. Context being part of my justification for buying this was a distribution of funds from my parent's estate. I figured given my parents were farmers, setting up a coral tank possibly with a planted fuge was a bit of an homage towards the history of it. As I was using a drill to remove the screws from the shipping container box, I suddenly had flashes of a movie closing up, or breaking open, a casket enclosure. Weird moment, and I'll probably remember that every time I think of setting up this tank.

So far I have the tank, lights, a pump, a gyre and a mp40 for it. I also have misc odds and ends on my existing tanks that I'll end up carrying over.

I do have some big decisions to make still, particularly how much from my existing tank I carry over versus resetting. Particularly my main tank did have dinos, which I've mostly resolved now. I don't really want to transfer those, but I think that's unavoidable anyway.

However the bigger concern was the monti eating nudis that got into that tank somehow. It's been monti less for quite awhile now, but if I can get the anemones off I might just nuke my main rock before it goes in. I do have enough other rock cooking that I could still setup without it.
 
I totally feel you on the casket thing. I think it’s a weird thing for sure, especially with your situation and the whole shape of the crate. The tank is a positive thing. A great hobby, a build, growth and lots of learning. I hope that works out for you!

I would recommend keeping the two tanks very separate if possible. You’ll have to plan for the worst but hope for the best :)

Good luck!!
 
Got most of the stand together. A bit of a pita, and the little turnable hooks that catch the screws don't sit deep enough in so that covers can fully sit flush with the stand face, but maybe that's an artifact of how deep I screwed the screws. Either way it was about the same difficulty as any other furniture. I'm pretty happy how clean all the parts were. No scratches or anything outside of a single roughed up plastic piece my almost 7yr old son told me didn't matter; which properly chastised me

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The sump is almost as big as my Reefer 170 was! Though if I'm being honest I thought it'd be longer.
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I'll have to grab the club suction cups soon to get the tank in place. Though first I need to figure out exactly what I'm going to do with my livestock during the transfer. Corals I can move to a different tank. Fish I can move as well, but I'll need to figure out what fish goes where and probably setup a temporary QT holding tank so that I don't have to rush anything.

Luckily I have everything I need for that, so just a matter of setting it all up.
 
Tank is on the stand. I need to move it a bit further from the wall, which is going to be a bit difficult. The suction cups are amazing though.

After that I need to recheck the level, put the rest of the sides and bottom on, plumb it, then start filling with water.

Hopefully I'll have it up and running this weekend. I might even see if I can take a day off this week to get everything situated

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Got excited, so started setup by giving all the pipes a rodi rinse. Unfortunately both extra drain pipes have damaged threads. They're both damaged exactly the same, which almost makes me think it's intentional, but I can't think of any reason they'd be like that.

Going to mail red sea to ask about replacements.

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richiev said:
Tank is on the stand. I need to move it a bit further from the wall though, which is going to be a bit difficult. The suction cups are amazing though.

After that I need to recheck the level, put the rest of the sides and bottom on, plumb it, then start filling with water.

Hopefully I'll have it up and running this weekend. I might even see if I can take a day off this week to get everything situated

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Nice tank
 
kinetic said:
How close to the wall is the tank? I would recommend at least 5-inches. My peninsula will be about 8" from the wall. Even though it seems like a lot, I just know I'll regret it one day.
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It's complicated. It's on an outcropping room divider. So it's about 5 inches from that, which covers the center 4 inches but it's closer to a foot from the rest of the wall
 
richiev said:
It's complicated. It's on an outcropping room divider. So it's about 5 inches from that, which covers the center 4 inches but it's closer to a foot from the rest of the wall
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Ah that makes sense. So it's only 5 inches from a small area, otherwise there's plenty of space
 
After an ordeal where I ended up building the stand over again I have the tank setup again with some water in it.

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I will now finish plumbing it, and installing the rest of the doors and such.

I also am prepping the rock pieces of my existing tank for transfer over while trying to minimize dinos. I did a 2ish day mostly black out on my existing tank, with the UV running, and there's very little visible dinos. I'm curious to see what happens tomorrow when I let the lights turn on again. I expect they'll return, but TBD.

Either way it worked well and I'm confident I can transfer that rock over to the new tank with minimal dinos attached to it.

Hopefully by next week I'll have the pump running and the tank heated.
 
richiev said:
After an ordeal where I ended up building the stand over again I have the tank setup again with some water in it.

View attachment 43186

I will now finish plumbing it, and installing the rest of the doors and such.

I also am prepping the rock pieces of my existing tank for transfer over while trying to minimize dinos. I did a 2ish day mostly black out on my existing tank, with the UV running, and there's very little visible dinos. I'm curious to see what happens tomorrow when I let the lights turn on again. I expect they'll return, but TBD.

Either way it worked well and I'm confident I can transfer that rock over to the new tank with minimal dinos attached to it.

Hopefully by next week I'll have the pump running and the tank heated.
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looking good!
 
I ended up running with things and set it the rest of the way up. I had it partially filled, and then rinsed the sand, including some live sand, so I figured I might as well put salt in the tank, then I dumped the sand in, then I figured I might as well toss some cooked rock in to get things going, then then then

I might actually move some fish over tomorrow. That's a lot of water and I've got a lot of sand and cooked rock in there. I have 100% coincidence my clowns would be fine.

But in reality I'll do that this weekend, so I can keep playing with the pumps and what not.

I also need to get a cover. I definitely don't want the clowns to jump.

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I now have a light on it, and a coral beauty in it! The light is an ap9x that I bought awhile back and have had in storage. The light is hanging from a steel pipe which I originally got from @Meshmez (I think) attached to a stand I'm using for my frag tank. I hung the light with some twine, and I think it actually looks kind of cool that way.

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The bar is held by a little stand I designed and 3d printed. While I'm not going to win any 3d design competitions, I'm pretty happy with my ability to create these now. Having finally made the plunge and switched to Autodesk Fusion360 for designing, versus trying to do stuff in TinkerCAD / OpenSCAD / OpenJSCad, I feel like I can get a lot done pretty efficiently now. I also have my printer pretty tuned, so I can spit out parts consistently.

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I've been planning on waiting until I got back from a 10 day vacation to put anything in the tank, but I couldn't help myself. This tank is so simple, with just a gravity ATO, a pump, and an InkBird that there's not a ton that could really fail. It's also so much larger than my other tanks that it's certainly going to be stabler in the event something weird happens (like WWIII starts and we all lose power).

I also have my other tank right next to it, so it shouldn't increase the difficulty for my house/tank sitters. Instead of putting two half-cubes of food in the main tank, they can just put one half-cube in the 170 and the other half in the big display.

Given that I today caught my coral beauty and moved it over. That was a nightmare, but eventually he swam into the net and then got caught in it, so I was obligated to do something. I decided to put the coral beauty in because it doesn't need a pod population to survive, nor should it need as much algae to graze on (versus a lawnmower or court jester goby).

Unless something crazy happens tonight, I'll likely move my clowns over to that tank tomorrow, and leave it at that mixed setup while I'm gone. Then in December I'll move the rest of the rock over, try and find all the snails in the sand, and tear down the 170.
 
Clowns went in yesterday, and a handful of corals too (shrooms, GSP). I also setup my fuge with a 1hr light schedule just to have another pod spot and make sure the macro doesn't die. Also tossed a couple snails that I could easily grab from other tanks.

I'm off out of town tomorrow and hoping for the best! A million things could go wrong, but this is by far the simplest tank I have at the moment, so I'm pretty confident it'll be good to go.
 
richiev said:
Clowns went in yesterday, and a handful of corals too (shrooms, GSP). I also setup my fuge with a 1hr light schedule just to have another pod spot and make sure the macro doesn't die. Also tossed a couple snails that I could easily grab from other tanks.

I'm off out of town tomorrow and hoping for the best! A million things could go wrong, but this is by far the simplest tank I have at the moment, so I'm pretty confident it'll be good to go.
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Got a lid on the tank already?
 
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