dread240

Well this past weekend was the final push with finishing everything up on my new 75g reef ready tank. I'd like to say it went off without a hitch, but frankly it didn't, and I've had some losses since I started moving everything christmas weekend. Long story short, I should have given it a bit more time to cycle, or only moved 1 fish over at a time instead of all 4 from my 29g, as I had a small (1.0ppm at it's highest) nitrite only spike. Ammonia stayed a solid 0 the entire time, but that tiny bit of nitrite was enough to take out some of my favorite things in the tank by far. I even was dosing Microbacter 7, as well as Prime every single day trying to keep them at bay and non toxic, but it was too much for one of my clownfish and my acan frag apparently. I do still need to finish up the fans in the canopy, my dosing pumps and my ato, but that is all minor setup stuff for this upcoming week.

Final Equipment list in the setup
AGA Reef ready 75g tank with center offset overflow.
Rear glass tinted 5% limo tint to keep some reflection into the tank.
Outer orbit t5 and metal halide combo fixture
Cherry stand and canopy (canopy will have 4x 120mm computer fans mounted to draw air across the top of the tank, and the canopy will have netting across the back so I don't have to worry about jumpers anymore)
Coralife Super skimmer 125
2x phosban reactors, one running BRS GFO and the other with bio pellets. I'm looking to add a third for carbon this week as I definitely want a low nutrient system this time around
75lbs of marco rock dry rock
60lbs of fine white argonite sand
15 gallon food grade barrel for auto top off
My old 29 gallon tank cleaned up and baffled as a sump for this tank
Chaeto and some live rock rubble in the refugium (mostly marco rock rubble, going as sterile as possible)
about a 5-6" deep sand bed in the refugium, shallow sand bed in the display tank
2x Medical dosing pumps with their own control timers for dosing BRS reef complete 3 part. (They say to only dose the magnesium once you use an entire gallon of calcium supplement)
Aquacontroller Jr. controlling the metal halide and t5 lights, the heater, and all the circulation pumps and the cooling fans in canopy. The rest of the items like reactor pump, skimmer, ato and dosing pumps will be given constant power.

Anyways, lets get to some pics. I'm going to apologize in advance, I recently put a new SSD in my gaming computer (the one I always use) and haven't reinstalled photoshop on it, so these are unedited other then a quick resize in the very advance and highly technological microsoft paint included with windows 7.

A full tank shot

Here's the view from across the top of the tank with the light fixture.

Pics of the left side island in the tank

Here's some pics of the right side island in the tank

And here's a terribly crappy pic of the sump underneath of it, and you can see how snug it is in there with the 15 gallon ato resevoir. I really did like the barrel though as it was a smaller footprint then most 5 gallon containers I could find so that I could use a 30" long tank for the sump, everything else I was looking at being stuck with a 24" long sump or having to build one of my own which I seriously didn't have time for.

And then also, amazingly in the same weekend, I got skipper, our red eared slider setup in his new home. This is a 20l tank but they make the side of it half height so that I can put a HOB Filter on it without water splashing and he still has room to get up and out of the water to bask on his rock. I really like the 2 different lights on the tank as well too, the left one is a straight UVB bulb which is why it's a whiter/brighter bulb, and the one on the right is a day blue heat bulb, which explains why he likes to soak up the sun under it as seen in the pics . You may recognize the stand as well too, he got the hand me downs to make him a happier turtle. I need to go out and pickup some nice pieces of driftwood though to complete his setup, still kinda looks barren in there imho.