Have you ever had one of those days when you wonder, “what have I done to the universe to deserve this?!?” 4:21am Saturday Sept 12 as I stood undressed, in the darkness of my bedroom audibly begging for our reef aquarium to stop pouring saltwater from the split in its side onto my 1 year old $30/yard carpet, that thought crossed my mind.
But let’s back up a bit…
It was a Friday not unlike many others. My wife wanted to “take a day off” and just do nothing. She decided she would join me for lunch as her ONE thing to do. We had a wonderful lunch and then the rest of her day seemed to slide into its normal chaos with one child needing to go to the doctor, another missing the bus, etc. She decided we should go see a movie that night to take a break from it all.
6:00pm, not 20 minutes after complaining how the clip for my iPhone wasn’t holding my phone right, I was retrieving it from the bottom of a porcelin water holder (if you know what I mean). Well, it SORT OF works… Ugh.
Off to the movie we go (Final Destination 3 in 3D. Great slasher ridiculousness.). This was to be the least eventful portion of the evening.
11:00pm. Phone rings. “Hello, this is the Waukesha County Sherriff’s department. Is Tori your daughter?” This is a call that the parent of a teenager absolutely dreads. My heart falls to the office floor, but regains a beat after the deputy on the other end of the line explains how my daughter was in a car with a couple of other morons when one of them decided it would be a good idea to throw a chocolate chip cookie out the window at an on-coming car. Just so happened to be that car was a cop, with his window open… (and here we should note that tossing a cookie at a cop car, whether you know it’s a cop or not, construes ASSAULT which carries a SIGNIFICANT fine). Thankfully our daughter wasn’t in any trouble, and in the end we did have a laugh about it with the cop (who we met a year earlier – long story).
Back home, we hung out for a little while doing those “parental” things like discussing “guilt by association”, etc. and headed off to bed a little after midnight. I even turned off the alarm clock so I could hopefully sleep in. Little did I know I was about to be one of those passengers on the Titanic enjoying a cognac just a few hours before ICEBERG RIGHT AHEAD!!!
In the depths of my brain there are many things I ponder. One is how the subconscious has the ability to react in certain situations. Such was the case when at 4:21am I woke up because there was a sound from the aquarium that just wasn’t right. It was running water, but it wasn’t the auto-top-off, and it wasn’t the overflow. I walked over and peered at it in the darkness, trying to find the source. Then as I stuck my right hand out it was immediately soaked. My first thought was that something was blocking the overflow to the sump and the display was simply overflowing. A little more movement of my hand and adjustment to my eyes and the situation, and I quickly realized the water was coming from a top to bottom SPLIT in the front right corner of the tank. Water was pouring out in a stream about 6″ long and shooting out a distance of about 6″ from the tank.
I stuffed my hand over it like the storybook “finger in the hole of the dyke” and started to actually BEG with my tank “please please please stop STOP STOP NO! NO! NO!”. Then realizing that I’m trying to rationalize with a hunk of glass that obviously has a differing agenda than mine, I yelled for my wife who sprang out of bed, tossed some sweats on and ran over. She grabbed towels and a huge cotton blanket while I finally threw on some pants as well.
I shut off the main return to keep from pumping more water into the busted tank, and drained off what we could into the sump. We still had well over 20 gallons left in the tank. Somehow (I’m guessing Jen ran and grabbed them), a hoarde of buckets and tubs appeared in the bedroom and we quickly siphoned off the rest into these buckets.
Once the water was down below the largest leaking portion of the split, it stopped leaking. However, we now had all of our corals exposed to the air, liverock sitting precariously over the fish and inverts who are all trying to hide, wondering what the hell is happening. We pulled the rock out piece by piece and got it in the buckets of water. I grabbed every snail & hermit I could find and tossed them in the sump, knowing they would survive fine there.
As the rock disappeared, I found the fish, all cowering in various low spots of about 1/2″ of water. They were NOT happy, but were easy enough to grab and drop into a tub of water. Same thing for the corals, shrimp and conch.
Now mind you, ALL of this took place in like 15 minutes. Which again takes me back to the subconscious. My guess is that at most, we dumped 1-2 gallons of water onto the floor. Which tells me it wasn’t leaking for long before I woke up and was THERE.
So here it is, 5:00am and we need to figure out a gameplan for the day. Step 1, we have 5 buckets/tubs with water/fish/inverts/corals in them which we need to keep heated and aerated. Into the shower they went, and we got airstones on them. We only had 2 heaters so heaters were immediately on the list. Second was saltwater. We were gonna need a LOT. I already had around 15 gallons mixed up in the basement and another 15 gal of RO in bottles, so I dumped the bottles in and mixed up the rest of it to have 30 gallons “brewing”. The only store open this early would be the Wal-Mart super center, so we set off to pick up some heaters and fill 4 5 gal bottles with RO.
We picked up the heaters, RO and 4 4-packs of Sugar-Free Redbull and were back home by 6:00am. At home, I finally had a chance to look at the tank and dissect what happened to it (or so I believe).
When we did the sump upgrade to the tank in July, I built a stand for it. Now, I’m far from incompetent, but I’m not Bob Villa either. So it was no surprise that the stand was not 100% absolutely PERFECT. We knew that the top surface had a difference in height between cross corners of about 1/16″ or maybe less. However, we did what “everyone else” does. Put down pink foam insulation and let the tank settle into it.
From the pics here, you can see that the the marks in the pink foam definitely showed that the front right and back left corners were the highest points of the top of the stand. Here are level pics as well.
Pink foam indent in front right corner:
Pink foam indent in back left corner:
Level/straight-edge pic front right to back left corners. You can see the gap in the middle indicating a low spot:
Level/straight-edge pic front left to back right corners. You can see the gap on the corners where the middle is the high spot:
Pic of the tank split. It went from top to bottom on the right front corner. Considering the two high points, it seems kind of obvious that there was excessive downward pressure on the front left and back right corners which would have caused stress to the front right & back left corners. Being as the front and sides are one piece of glass, bent at the front corners, it’s entirely possible that there were already tiny stress fractures in the glass at that corner. There was additionally a LOT of flow at the front right corner, all of the substrate had washed out of it and there was rock that had shifted and was touching the glass. I believe in the end that it was a combination of ALL of these factors which ultimately led to the split.
So now comes the crucial point. We need a new tank, so let’s do it right now that we know a bit more. We definitely didn’t want another biocube as it just didn’t work for what we wanted, but having the custom stand currently holding our sump that was FULL with water & some inverts, rock, etc we had to decide whether to try and level that stand and get a new tank that would fit it or to go all new with SOMETHING that would fit in our space and accommodate the 31″ sump, filter, etc.
We also took this opportunity to re-evaluate our substrate. In late July during our “Big Sump Adventure” we switched substrate from crushed coral to a super-fine Bahama Aragonite sand. The sand was beautiful, but as fine as popcorn salt, it tended to blow around and get on all the rock and in the corals which annoyed us. We both liked the compromise we used in the sump which was CaribSea Fiji Pink sand. It was significantly larger than the powder fine sand we had in the display, but still quite a bit smaller than the huge chunks of crushed coral we originally started with.
Bahama Aragonite:
Fiji Pink:
Now with some heat on everything, we did what we could until all of the local fish stores opened at 10:00.
We walked through the door of the first store as soon as they unlocked the doors and quickly found that they had a couple tanks that could work, but we weren’t really thrilled with them. So we headed over to the next store. In there, we found 2 tanks which would work with the stand we had, but they also had a couple of Marineland Deep-Dimension tanks which I had been drooling over for a long time and intended to get as a “next” tank. The two they had were a 60 gallon cube (2′x2′x2′) and a 93 gallon cube (30″x30″x24″). Both had stands as well, but the 60 was drilled & plumbed “reef ready” where the 93 was not.
After some brief consideration, the 93 would fit the sump, but we would either have to drill it ourselves or wait for the “reef ready” model. Neither option was attractive. Additionally, considering this is a 2nd floor installation, I wasn’t too sure I wanted to setup a tank that was going to be +1000 lbs. The 60 would work TODAY, and had exceptional potential for building a reef like the one we wanted, So the 60 with its stand was going to be the new home. We picked up the Tank, Stand and 120# of the Fiji Pink sand (only used 80#).
Old vs New:
Back at home we had to come up with a game plan. First thing was to spray the back of the tank black instead of using a background. As that dried, we set off to find something to hold the sump. We AMAZINGLY found a bookcase that would work PERFECTLY. It was crazy how difficult it was to find something that would fit this 31″ sump, yet not be HUGE.
I’m guessing this was around 2pm by now, and the next 12 hours went by in much of a blur. Around 2:30am, we had the tank & substrate rinsed, leveled, installed, controller installed, filled with a mixture of new water and ‘rescued’ water, a quick aqauscape and plumbing of the filter to get some of the crud out of the water.
Supervisor gave up on us:
Neptune Apex mounting:
A few hours of sleep and we were up and back at it. Still needed to get the tank up to temp as all of our heaters were (a) small and (b) in use, we had our daughter run pick up a 150W heater. While she was doing that, I finished off the plumbing (which we had one problem with, but that’s another LONG story that I won’t go into).
Around 3:00pm we had things up to temp and were able to get the corals, fish and inverts back into the tank. We quickly found out that our old Koralia 1 pumps were not strong enough for good flow in the tank so we ran out and bought 2 Koralia 3’s which we rotate on/off every 12 hours (one on at a time).
In the installation, we laid down egg-crate on the bottom of the tank to (a) keep the rock off of the glass and (b) ensure nothing can burrow under the rock to the point of causing an avalanche. We also put some egg-crate on the back wall on the sides of the center overflow to allow us to get rock closer to the back without touching the glass. While I’m not wholly thrilled with how it looks right now, it’ll grow over soon enough, and should provide some protection from rock-on-glass which now has me paranoid.
Complete Setup:
Sump:
Monday was ‘Lights Day’. In the past few weeks I had been just starting to look into lighting to see what we might want for our next tank. I was undecided between Metal Halide and T5-HO Fluorescent. Having a 24″ cube this deep did pose a bit of a challenge in that most all T5 lighting was only a 4 bulb fixture for 24″ length. We didn’t want to cobble anything together, and wanted something that would work for literally anything we wanted to put into the tank, so we pulled out all stops and ordered the BMW of lighting… 24″ 8 bulb x 24W High Output ATI Powermodule (arguably one of the best T5HO fixtures on the planet), which should be here on Friday.
At the end of the day, we’re pretty pleased with the new ‘emergency’ tank and glad that the only casualty was our checkbook…
FTS:
Frogspawn:
Nem:
Zoa’s:
Sun’s:
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