My 420 Gallon Display

FutureInterest

FutureInterest

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So, I've never had a tank above 180 for a display before... and now I finally do. The master of the house finally approved it and I couldn't be happier :).

The tank is 8x3x28 and all starfire glass. I've had larger acrylic tanks before and man keeping them clean has always been a headache and stressor... so I'm glad to have finally picked up a glass display.

The stand is aluminum and 40" tall.

I need to throw up some pics... but we are putting it in our living room and plumbing it into one of my existing systems which already had a 200 gallon stump. The tank is being put in place today and I'll be plumbing it and lighting it up shortly. This is going to be fun :).

Pics to follow...
 
T
FutureInterest said:
So, I've never had a tank above 180 for a display before... and now I finally do. The master of the house finally approved it and I couldn't be happier :).

The tank is 8x3x28 and all starfire glass. I've had larger acrylic tanks before and man keeping them clean has always been a headache and stressor... so I'm glad to have finally picked up a glass display.

The stand is aluminum and 40" tall.

I need to throw up some pics... but we are putting it in our living room and plumbing it into one of my existing systems which already had a 200 gallon stump. The tank is being put in place today and I'll be plumbing it and lighting it up shortly. This is going to be fun :).

Pics to follow...
Click to expand...
That stand alone...is a beast!
 
So, the first thing I did was change out the overflow... For such a large tank... being 8 by 3 ft it had a relatively small overflow that looked like this:
1583811676006.png

I didn't like that the returns were sticking through the grate and felt that I wanted more capacity for tank turnover than this overflow would allow... Besides, it's also somewhat of a tradition for me to make my own overflows... As odd as it sounds, I've built the overflows in all my major tanks over the years. Again, its odd... but just how things turned out. Anyways, thanks to @Doberman13 for the acrylic. I ended up using almost every scrap of it on this.

So, I made the overflow 7 feet so its almost a coast to coast... I did it in the shadow overflow style to minimize its in tank presence. Since the tank is 3 feet front to back, giving up a lil under an inch in the very back is acceptable to me. In this picture you can see my girls painting it for me... it was their first time using spray paint... They were excited to use it and were a lil overzealous in its application but it makes the overflow more interesting... :p

1583811973601.png

Got it installed using a custom acrylic bracket that is built into the overflow... and bonded to the overflow using weld-on and acrylic studs. This was my first time bending acrylic to make something. That was interesting and a lot easier than I thought it would be. Here is a picture of the overflow installed. It's so wide that I can't even really get all of it in t he shot while on the ladder. You can see a lot of "character" in the paint job. :)

1583811859579.png
 
Here's a pic of the tank on the stand the day after it was put in place. My wife is in there cleaning it up.

A spouse that supports you and your crazy hobby so much that she gets her beautiful hands dirty for yah... She is a keeper. I blurred her out since she was not in presentation mode and I value my quality of life... :)

1583864203111.png
 
hzheng33 said:
you got a dedicated circuit breaker for this beast?
Click to expand...
Well the tank is plumbed into my main floor frag system which already has a 200 gallon sump to share. So the tank only needs pumps and lights to be powered... the lights are going to be a bit on the heavy side. We had a 30 amp circuit installed just for this tank. It's the two plugs that are installed one on top of the other in the pic. This pic is a bit older as I've already plumbed the tank but I still haven't repaired the walls yet or filled the tank with water.

I'm still working on the canopy and light setup... and figuring out the rock work. More pics to follow... :)
 
The rock work is in and it's acceptable. Thanks to @aestheticlibra for the rock. He had been hoarding some nice pieces for a long time and finally sold them to me. :) I'm looking to adjust it a bit and add more shelves overall but I'm content with it currently.

I'm a lil concerned with the weight as the tank is on my first floor. It sits directly over the boat garage in the basement and we so have some 2x6s giving the flooring under the tank support. It's an older home so the floor joists themselves are 2x10 and they do run perpendicular to the length of the tank which is good. I think we're ok but I'm not mechanical engineer... :p

The tank is filled with water and is already exchanging water with my 8x4 frag system and its 200 gallon sump. It took several days to fill up the tank and lots of salt...I filled it by basically doing massive water changes on my two existing large systems and it got the leftover water. So 420 gallons of water changes later... we're full. Thank you neighbor @bzb for helping out with the water. :)

Now I'm working on finishing the canopy... Thought I'd be done by now but its been more painful than I thought it would be. It'll be an old school mechanical lift canopy using 2 linear actuators that are both rated for 300 lbs. I went with an aluminum frame for strength and weight savings with a simple thin plywood shell on it. I am using tubular steel on the back of the canopy to hook up to linear actuators for the mechanized lift. I tried using tubular aluminum but it was simply too flexible for this task. I'm hopefully finishing this up today...
 
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