Go Big or Go Home, Mikes 150 Build

i would use new sand,,, unless you take all that sand and boil it all and let it dry in the sun i wouldnt use it....theres no telling what nasty stuff was left over in the sand....

i went barebottom in my 150 and love it, plus saves a good bit of money as well

 

What are the advantages of going barebottom? The guy at the LFS was all for having a deep sand bed.

 

Just remember one thing about LFS's. They are there to make money. I live in Austin, Texas and ran into a good LFS that I can trust. I have learned a lot from this site. Everyone is really helpful.

 

You can put as many pictures up as you want. I think. ;D Photobucket.com is a good site to use to put pictures up on this site.

 

Hey guys the tank came with approximetly 150lbs of dead rock. I hosed off most of the sand that was clinging to it. Is there anything else that needs to be done to the rock?

 

UPDATE!

Alrighty, these past couple days have been quite busy, setting up the tank and classes are beginning. First of just moving the tank was an adventure. I made the mistake of keeping about 125lbs of sand in the tank with the thought of recycling it.

Anyways finally got the tank in place thanks to four of my buddies. and gave it a quick scrubbing.

Made the mistake of using tap water to scrub initially, left me some calcium stains. After laying out all my hardware and cleaning some things I got ready to start playing with the rock.

 

The tank came with around 150lbs of dead live rock, so after hosing off with garden hose, I gave most of the rock a quick scrub to clean of any dead algea. Once semi-dried me and all my roomies got to work designing some rock
structures.


I was determined not to build a rock wall when designing this aquascape. Let me tell you 150lbs of rock is incredibly overwhelming!

Not only that, but it is impossible to rebuild any cool structure inside the tank. The rock just never lay the same way twice.

We wanted to incorporate arches and shelves in our design.

 

All in all the rock design took two days of building rock and getting frustrated with the lack of coolness. All in all the tank came together nicely. Alot of the structures I wasn't happy was initially, but once the sand and water was added it all just worked.

I mentioned earlier that the tank came with sand. Well me and my fellow reefer/ partner in crime, vic, decided to bite the bullet and buy new sand. We purchased three 30lb bags of aragamax fine sand. This stuff is super fine sugar sand! we mixed in a 20lb bag of course broken coral mix to try and give a more realistic consistency to the sand. Then finally added a 20lb bag of live sand to help seed everything, which also was more course than the aragamax. I failed to take any pictures of the sand/ water filling process. However here are some after water pics. Nice and cloudy!

A few hours later!

A few more hours! I was extremely surprised at how quickly the water cleared up. About 8 hours after filling the tank it was virtually clear.

 

We bought two pieces of live rock with coralline to help seed the dead rock, and speed up the cycling process. Added an entire bucket of salt to the water and our salinity is 1.023. We used the shrimp method to introduce some ammonia/ nitrogen into the enviroment. Now just waiting for the bacteria to do its thing. Tested ammonia this morning, Day 3 of having water and day 2 of having shrimp in the water. It was .25 ppm.

 

Nope 8)