Alright folks, for those of you not familiar with my "addiction"... my name is Brett, and I am addicted to Nano tanks. (phew that was hard!) Some told me that to cure my addiction I needed a bigger tank... so I went out and built a 400 cube... and I hated it, and shut it down. So I'm back to the nano tanks. I have posted the builds on some other boards, but it's time to add them to this one.
Here is my tank at work, thankfully where I work I am required to have a tank... This is a 12 gallon "el cheapo" tank picked up at a mom and pop shop somewhere out in the ghetto of
Anaheim CA.. I liked the design so much that I bought all the ones that the store had made... and I have never seen another one.
Basically I had retrofitted a 70w halide, 2x 36w PC's and an Aqua C remora on it... made a wood canopy and threw it together...
I liked the tank, hated the aquascaping... so I revamped it...
And an update on it's current condition.... I added a 6 gallon fuge, 1 gallon kalk topoff, a ReefKeeper2, 4 more powerheads, a lot more livestock (including a seahorse in my fuge) and here's what I got.....
Now... on to the new tank....
So I had another one of these tanks alying around... and while I love the one I have set up... there are things that I wanted to do differently... I want more flow, more light... less "Clutter" and more attention to the inside of the tank... so over the next few months I will be building this new tank....
Pictures to come... I need some time to find my camer
era again so bear with me
For starters... I'm going to work on the "flow issue".... In my current tank I have 3 Maxi Jet 600's, 1 maxijet 900, a 1200, and a mini-jet 606... They produce a moderate amount of flow.. but not enough… Over the past few weeks I have been working on a design for a surge bucket.. but scratched the ide
a and have decided to go with a
closed loop system with some spray bar returns… I like to not be able to see powerheads in my tank. I feel that it takes away from the beauty of the aquascaping. By hiding the returns or blending them in to match their surroundings a viewers eye will not be distracted from the look of the tank. In a perfect world, I feel that the viewer should never really know where the water flow is coming from, they should just be able to see the movement of the water in the corals that are in the tank. But then again.. that is in a perfect world. I will do my best to hide the returns and the intake for the closed loop, but in this small of a tank, that is going to be hard to do.
For the return pump on the closed loop I am going to most likely use a Mag 5, because it is laying around my house and I’ve now had over 50 people tell me that it can’t be done… Supposedly Mag Drives leak… we will see… if I can’t make the Mag work, I’ll buy an Eheim Hobby pump.. either way.. I will have more flow than I know what to do with, so I will most likely have to use a ball valve to slow some of the water movement down… I will attach a SQWD to the ball valve and then off into my spray bar returns that dump down into the tank on the left and right side…
Lighting will be a 150w HQI fixture that I will most likely end up making out of a Current USA Satellite fixture.. or if I get lazy again, I will just build one out of wood.. There will be no fuge on this one… or at least not yet… there probably will be one, but it’s down the road a bit.
That’s what I have for starters.. Tonight I have to go home and drill a hole in the tank for the Closed
Loop… I’ll build the
spray bars and take some pix of them… this is the start of the “Wicked Cool Canadian (that’s Living in Socal) Build Up”
Let me know what you think, I’m always up for ideas…
-Brett
