Red Sea Reefer 350 build thread

[Happyschneider]

Recently, I have not been very active on the forum, nor with my previous aquarium. The lack of proper care let the algae take off and I lost the joy of looking at the aquarium or working in it. Many business travels and life in general just took over in the past months. House is sorted, the family is happy, Christmas is coming and I found some cash to blow on a new saltwater project.

Purchased a used Red Sea Reefer 350. That was an adventure in itself to get it to my place. Who would have thought glass could be that heavy. Not that every single thread that begins with an aquarium move does not mention exactly that of course.

What I like about the Red Sea Reefer is that I get more volume, a sump (such a luxury) and a straight front glass. My previous aquarium was a bow front which makes taking photos difficult at best. So now I have 350 liters (90 gallons?) to play around in the system. Not huge, and I will not be keeping any sharks but plenty enough for a nice mixed coral garden with a few fish to keep the water full of nutrients

I especially am looking forward to keeping all the technology out of the display and allow me to work in the sump. Now all I have to do is sort my knees out so I can get into that cupboard

This thread will be a point of reference for me (more like a journal), a lot of input from you guys (feel free to shout support, criticism or ideas) and finally give me a place to reflect my plans and decisions to get this going and keep at it.

[Happyschneider]

Water mixing Station
Until now I only had a bucket to fill with RO/DI and mix salt in it. I lugged that over to the tank and used a pump to move the water into the tank.

New plan: Saltwater mixing station to allow me mixing enough water to do a 30% water change at the time (100 liters). Obviously, I will normally do less, but like this I could do it if I needed to. It will be 2 rooms over in the laundry room where my RO/DI is.

Ordered two of these:



The one for RO/DI will be on the top shelf, gravity feeding lower one which will be for the saltwater mixing. I plan to plumb it so that I can mix it with an external pump and have a hose to directly pump it into the new aquarium which will be approximately 10 meters away. Not decided on which pump to use but I don't think I will invest in a very expensive one. This saltwater tank will still be higher than the display so I do not expect a lot of power needed to get the saltwater over there.

Do people have heaters in their saltwater mixing stations? Not sure if I should have one in there.

[Happyschneider]

Next to the saltwater mixing station there will be the QT tank. Currently, I have two 50 liter (13 gallon) tanks that I will be using. I have an old ATI hybrid lamp which I will mount so that I can have it lighted in a controlled way. Somehow that lamp seems to be a shame for a QT system but maybe I will have some frags in there one day. Not sure if I will connect the two or keep them separate.

In any case, I will try to have new fish go through TTM. Interestingly, TTM is not really known here in Switzerland. People look at me as if I had two heads when I talked about it. I just use some rubber bins to do it the last time and will continue doing so. As catching the fish was always a little bit stressful for both, me and the fish, I want to come up with an easier way (something like having the strainer already inside the rubber bin so that I can just lift it out, fish stays in and I slide it into the next bin, containing also a fresh strainer for the next transfer.

[Happyschneider]

Tank placement

The tank will be in the basement, nice and cool in the summer and not freezing in the winter. No sun light, perfectly controlled conditions. Need to make sure the humidity will not rise too much. In summer it rose to 70% even without an open tank, need to see what happens if we add this aquarium on top. Currently, it is at 58%.

I don't like that the Red Sea Reefer stand comes with these tiny little plastic feet. It will stand directly on a tiled floor with underfloor heating.

550A8228.jpg


I will therefore place a wooden board underneath. Found one which is surfaced in the exact size I need. Only one side is untreated so I quickly painted it with water repellent wood paint. will need several layers though. Should be ready to be placed by the weekend.

550A8226.jpg

Don't mind the pictures. I know they are not that interesting. I just want to make this thread a little bit more visual and want to play around with my second favorite toy

[rishma]

Enjoying your thread so far. I have a small redsea reefer and I am a fan. Looking forward to your equipment choices

[rishma]

Originally Posted by Happyschneider

Water mixing Station


Do people have heaters in their saltwater mixing stations? Not sure if I should have one in there.

For the first time ever my mixing station is in the garage and not the house. I am struggling with the low water temp since it cooled down. I’m contemplating a heater

[Happyschneider]

Skimming and flow

Pulled the trigger on some of my still needed equipment. Should all fit in there.

The biggest decision was on the skimmer. I have no experience with skimmers as I did not have any in my smaller tank so far. Some of my local fellow reefers helped me though and I ended up with the Royal Exclusive Bubble King Double Cone 180. It is a sweet looking piece of technology, supposedly silent as a whisper and reliable. Bonus, the manufacturer is just a couple of hours away so I could visit them if there was ever any problems. This version comes with a controllable pump, so hopefully this will help me to adjust it to my needs more easily.



The lights are a given, as the previous owner gave me his two AI hydra 26 HD for an excellent price. They are currently over my previous tank as the T5 driver broke and I do not plan to invest in it anymore.

Finally, I need flow. As I had good experience with the MAxspect Gyre, I decided to go with them again. The newer models seem to have a much better control, especially if you install two. I ordered two Maxspect XF230 with controller. One for each side to generate a lot of flow. The plan is to maybe have different flow in the left and right part of the tank and group the corals accordingly. Not sure if this will really work though!

[Happyschneider]

Filling the tank

We had a slow morning. We had friends over and the head was not feeling like doing much. However, the guests helped me to move the aquarium to its final place before they received any drinks, so I had this little voice bugging my pulsating temples to start working on the tank. Did all the plugging, connecting and so on. The beauty of these systems is that everything fits and seems well thought through. At least to a complete beginner like me I made some pictures of the setup so that people can get the idea if they ever consider getting a Reefer system. I particularly like the extra black surface the previous owner added. It is supposed to reduce noise coming from the stand even further. We will see. Hopefully it will not get moldy after some time. It feels rubbery so fingers crossed.

The shelving on the right hand side seems like it wastes a lot of valuable space. There is absolutely no space in the main compartment to fit anything else in there anymore unless you put in some extra shelves. With the skimmer choice I made, I do not believe that there will be much headroom for anything like that. I am planning to use balling light for replenishing the consumables. So I will need at least 3 pots for the usual consumables.

[Happyschneider]

The RO/DI for the top off is in a small glass vessel above the socks. I don't think I will be using this. Most people online seem to say that the volume is not near enough and that they do not necessarily trust the Red Sea standard ATO. I have a tunze one, so I plan to have also a reasonable big RO/DI container on the right hand side to supply the ATO. That means, I need to get that shelving out of there and start thinking what I want to place where and how. But I will wait until I have all the electronics here so I can see how big the transformers are and how many plugs I will need.

Finally, there was the time where I could start filling the aquarium. Not a friend of lugging canisters around, I decided to have the RO/DI line directly hooked up to the tank. It looks a little bit rough, but it is not supposed to look nice but functional. At the current rate it will take me almost 24 hrs to fill the top tank. So I will let it run through the night and hopefully by the time I come back from work tomorrow evening it will be nearly finished. Can't wait to get the rock in, already starting to make mock ups of the aquascape on dry land. I hope to get a tower on the left and something like an "airy wall" on the right to provide plenty of hiding space for the fish and shelves to place corals.

[Happyschneider]

And here is the tank in its full glory. Had to turn off the lights as the glass was mirroring like mad. Need to find my old polarizing filter again.

[Happyschneider]

Look at what the postman brought today

[Mark9]

Why are your pictures so dark?

[Happyschneider]

Originally Posted by Mark9

Why are your pictures so dark?

Good question. No idea. They look fine on my computer with a calibrated screen but on my phone I agree, they are very dark. I'll have to a look over the weekend on what is going on here. Thank you for pointing it out!

Sent from my ONEPLUS A3003 using Tapatalk

[Happyschneider]

Christmas time is no time to start a new tank

There was such a good plan. Everything was there. If only there was no such thing called life! I completely under estimated the amount of work that needed to be done in preparation of this years Christmas. We had my wife's family over for the first time and it took just a tad more preparation than I originally thought.

Well, no harm done and I just left the stones in the RO/DI water for much longer than originally planned. This will hopefully help to remove any phosphates and Nitrates that were somewhere in there. Today, I exchanged all the RO/DI in the display tank to give the system another week or so with water only, before I will do that same again in 7 days and add salt. As I can only store 200 liters of water, it took a little bit longer than I thought, the display has 290 liters in total so it took a few extra trips with the buckets.

However, I thought I add some pictures of some equipment that has arrived in the meantime. I will install these in the coming days.

[Happyschneider]

It seems as if this build thread was completely forgotten. Well, that is not the complete truth. Life happened.

Work stress took off and all of a sudden it was summer. The good news is, my rocks really had time to cure, even if it was without any bleach. So, rock has been in RO/DI for several months when my wife finally lost her patience and asked me if I ever plan to start that thing 😂

It just so happened, that we had 2 weeks off over summer and that gave me the perfect opportunity to install everything and get this baby off the ground.

I knew from the beginning that I wanted to try a fast start. That means no fish but a ton of corals that can take over the surfaces in the display tank. This should work as corals do not seem to mind lower concentration of ammonia or nitrite and with a little bit of luck, my algae reactor and skimmer should be able to take care of the nitrates and phosphates. Just to be on the safe side, I plan to run some phosphate remover in a small reactor to begin with. Long term, I hope to be able to leave away the phosphate reactor and just rely on algae and skimmer. If nitrates become too much of a problem, I will be using siporax with which I had very good experience in the past. This build will be automated as much as possible so I will be installing an ghl profilux 4. We will see how successful I will be with that! For dosing, I have a ghl Doser 2.1 slave ready that should do the trick to stabilise calcium and alk to support LPS and easy SPS from the beginning. Light will be provided by two ai 26HD. Flow by two maxsoect gyre 250 (yes, complete over powered, but I want to have very little noise and play with tidal simulation). So, with a little bit of luck, this thread is going to be more interesting in the future.

[FortyFour]

Nice thread. I agree about the ATO reservoir, even more so with the 525XL. I fit a 23G slim trash bin in the right hand cabinet and added my own ATO. There is still room for my controllers, and some gear. I have to refill the reservoir every 1.5-2 weeks, vs. every 3-4 days.

As for the ATO reservoir, I converted it to a refugium by drilling it and adding black vinyl. It is a tiny refugium, respectively, but I did it anyways and threw some chaeto in there for pod reproduction. Innovative marine makes a slim fuge light (magnetic) that I have on a reverse light cycle.