Here's the write-up and subsequent responses....(copy and pasted
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I thought I was done for a while when I got my 125 up and running but then I found a 180 nearby from a guy in need of some quick cash and on a snowy evening I drove out to view the tank, hand over some money, and get a receipt to pick up the tank later....It made me a bit nervous but it all worked out.
I picked up some friends in my minivan with the rear seats removed. somehow crammed a 180 gallon tank, a 100 acrylic sump, a hood built for a 125, and 3 grown men inside the minivan. and strapped the 2x4 stand to the roof rack...The guy with the longest legs, got to drive with the seat all the way forward, my other friend got to ride shotgun with his seat all the way forward. I rode on one knee between the two seats on a forty minute drive back home where another friend met us to unload the thing.
The tank was to go in my living room which was in the process of a full remodel...new flooring, new drywall, new trim. Fortunately the drywall was up and the flooring was done, so we set the stand on an upside down rug and put the tank on it, so I could slide the thing around as I finished the drywall, put up trim and painted. Once It was home and in the room, I noticed a few things about the stand. It was too tall for me, It was built to hold up a lot of weight vertically but had very little to prevent lateral movement - I was going to build a new one. So, there it sat, empty, getting moved around as needed until I my semester finished and I had time to work on things.
The tank had originally been drilled with an overflow in the middle of one of the sides. My wife and I did not like this arrangement and wanted to repeat the dual corner overflows I had done in our 125, so...I removed the overflow, cut it in half, drilled 4 new holes in the bottom of the tank and reinstalled the acrylic as two corner overflows. The next project was to decide on the size of the sump I was going to build and the layout. I was thinking I wanted to try some plants in the sump to help in filtering but also as a safe place to grow some plants that may eventually make it into the main tank. After bouncing a few ideas around the web I got my plan. I had some tanks available with various problems that I picked up cheap, that I could scavenge glass from and a nearby glass shop to get the rest and built my 48"x16"x20"high sump/refugium (holds 60+ gallons when running). The size sump and the visual design i wanted dictated how the stand would be built. Some furious pencil work, and many many alterations/revisions later I came up with a plan for my stand. Got some wood, cut it up and started assembly with a little help from my girls.
While all this was happening I was also looking around for rocks, I had an idea of what I wanted, just need a place to find them...fortunately for me, the gas company had recently done some extensive work on a pipeline through my father-in-law's property and dropped a few a thousand pounds of rock into a creek bed to prevent erosion...I found a couple hundred pounds of rocks to my liking and washed/bleached/sunned them to prepare them. I also got a few bags of pool sand and painted the back of the tank black.
After getting the stand built, the sump put together and leak tested we moved the new stand in, set the tank on it, slid in the sump and got to work on the plumbing. The goal is to have a continuous drip system, so pipes were run up through the wall, a drain was installed in the sump. Everything was going to plan until I needed to fit a DIY spray bar. I wanted to have nothing outside of the tank except the power cord for the hood and the drip line. This meant I needed to remove a couple of teeth from the overflow to allow the spray bar to exit the overflow and still be under the tank bracing. I began by using a coping saw blade to cut the required teeth out. I then switched to a file to file out a round so the spray bar could fit. It wasn't working that well so I thought I'd try wrapping sand paper around the pipe for the spray bar and sanding down the acrylic. It worked great.
So, plumbing was basically ready, time to put in the rocks and sand starting with the rocks. I got my brother-in-law over to help me lower some massive rocks into the tank, got the rocks in was moving them around and....crash.....my heart sank. The file that I had used on the acrylic and had foolishly set on one of the cross braces and forgotten, dropped onto the bottom of the tank and chipped it. It was a small chip, but it seemed a bit deep and wasn't smooth. I didn't know what to do...time to hit the forums. Got some advice, bought a dremel, ground out the chip, filled it with epoxy, siliconed some glass over the patch, finished moving my rocks and went to leak test...after a stressful hour of filling, the repaired tank passed the leak test and it was time to get the filter running for a test of that system. It kind of worked, there were several adjustments that needed to be made.
I was going to run a herbie/bean animal type setup for a quiet, high flow filtration. But, the full siphon in one overflow wasn't doing the job and the other overflow with the intended trickle drain was drawing some serious amount of water and a lot of noise. New plan, two full siphon drains, one in each overflow, no trickle drain and a backup drain that if required would be heard through the whole house. It works. It's very quiet, some air bubble noise due to some turbulence at the gate valves but the stand isn't even skinned, that noise should disappear when I skin the stand.
I cut the poret foam for the filter, put the sand in the main tank, put the fluorite into the sump refugium, grabbed some ceramic rings from my 125's sump and dropped in a handful of juveniles males to grow out and be joined by the big boys in a month or so.
Hope you've enjoyed this so far and will come back for the updates as I get some things finished like replacing the white spray bar with a painted one, getting some lighting and plants for the sump, skinning the stand, building the canopy, and finally getting all the boys into the tank.
Stock list.
Peacocks
Aulonocara stuartgranti - usissya
Aulonocara stuartgranti - cobwe island “blue regal”
Aulonocara stuartgranti - Ngara “flametail”
Aulonocara korneliae
Aulonocara kandensis
Aulonocara hybrid that looks like a “bi-color”
Aulonocara hybrid that looks like an otter point
Haps
Copadichromis trewavasae "Mloto Likoma"
Copadichromis borleyi – Kadango
Dimidichromis compressiceps
Mylochromis ericotainia
Otopharynx lithobates - Domwe Is.
Placidochromis electra "deep water"
Placidochromis electra "yellow makonde"
Placidochromis sp. Jalo
Placidochromis johnstoni
Placidochromis milomo
Placidochromis phenochilus "Tanzania”
Protomelas kirkii
Protomelas spilonotus – Mara Rock “sulfur head”
Protomelas taeniolatus “tangerine Tiger”
Protomelas taeniolatus - Namenje Is. “Red Empress”
Tramitichromis sp. “Intermedius”
Mbuna
Labidochromis caerulus
Labidochromis palidus
