Almost forgot my good manners!

Hello All,

I'm twowordz, AKA reef newbie.

A couple of months ago it was my girlfriend's birthday, I didn't have much money so I got her a black telescope goldfish and a small jar for it. She said it needed a bigger tank so I started looking around to find a used one. Nobody answered our e-mails or phone calls so we went to the LFS and got a 20 gallons tank and everything that comes with it.

She went through about 16 goldfishes before the tank was able to support life. While her fishes were showing all sorts of problem and she was trying to get her tank running, I started to look around on forums for answers. It was her tank and I could not interfere but as I was looking around I saw reef tanks. I thought they were the coolest thing and decided I should have one.

I bought a 50 gallons that needed to be resealed, build a stand for it and started to buy more material. As I was going through all the expenses required, I almost gave up. Later I saw someone selling a 75 gallons all equipped I negotiated a deal with him and it is now in my living room.

I am just finishing a stand for it as I didn't like the metal one that came with it. Furthermore, the previous owner and I do not share the same passion for cleanliness so I am about to redo the plumbing and this is where I am today.

I have been hanging around for some time now but I forgot my good manners and didn't introduce myself yet.

Hi everyone, I am twowordz and I am a reefer!

 

Hello twowordz welcome to 3reef, you have come to the right place for useful information. I hope you enjoy your stay here.

 

Welcome to 3reef!!! lots of brilliant minds here to help out...Enjoy.

 

Welcome to 3reef..if ya can post some pics of the set up so we can give you the best advice for your set up..

 

Welcome to 3reef!! We will help in any way we can!

 

Welcome to 3reef,sounds like you got the bug now!Very addicting.

 

jkat21: pics coming as I build.

I was too tired to work on my stand tonight but I picked up the stainless steel corners I ordered today. I am looking for some cool screws to put them up.

After work tomorrow, I will bring the stand inside and set the tank on it. I still need to figure out the plumbing and get the material which seems to be quite rare around here. The original owner of the tank glued some PVC pipe inside the durso and return... I still don't know what I will do about it.



I wanted to remove the overflow and return to clean up the tank, looks like I will have to cut part of the pipe.

Here's the tank:



Sorry for the poor pictures, my camera is broken.

 

Cool tank. Welcome to the board! You say that the overflows are glued on the inside of the overflow.. Its not good, but it can be fixed I believe. Do you have the other side of the pipe unions under your overflow?

 

Yes I have everything. The guy had the union going GLUED again to a barb fitting THEN to a flex line where he shoved a smaller flex line in, hooked up to another barb on the return pump... go figure. For the drain, it is just a 10 inch piece of straight pipe crashing the water down in the sump.

Stuff could get stuck in the piece inside the overflow and plug the drain. I don't like that.

I would like to re-organize the sump to have a refugium, so it means a different water path.

I guess I can put my finger in the bulkhead and figure out how far the pvc is then cut right over it. Hopefully there will be enough thread to hook up something else.

 

Hmm, that sounds very confusing. Maybe you could start all over with the plumbing since you got such a good deal on the tank. I would say that you could do plumbing for $50-$70 depending on how fancy you want to go. Search some 75 gallon tanks on here and look at their setups. I think new bulkheads would run about $15 for both if you bought them online and you could make a new overflow pipe.
Here is how I did my 90. Its simple, works very well, and was pretty cheap to put together. http://www.3reef.com/forums/show-off-your-fish-tanks/bamas-90-gallon-build-94517-4.html