130 Gallon Reef in the Babies Room!

[ajn81]

Well, I have been with out a reef tank for over a year now, slowly building some stability back after a time of unemployment. About 3 months ago, I starting getting the itch to start another reef, but really had no idea where I would do it. My fish room got completely converted into a craft room over the last year and there is no way that my wife is letting me put a tank in there again. Our only other bedroom is turning into a nursery now that we have a kid on the way. With that in mind, I pretty much decided, well guess I can't do another reef until we move somewhere else. Then, in March, we went to Hawaii (one last get away before the kid arrives ). While there enjoying the hawaiian reef, as a joke I say, "wouldn't it be cool if we put a tank in the garage that was built into the wall of the nursery?" To my surprise, my wife says, "yeah, that would be awesome". Pretty sure she regrets that now because that is the only opening that I needed .

Needless to say plans began to emerge. I decided that I would start with the dimensions 4' long x 2' high and at least 2' deep, so I began to look for something in the 120 - 150 gallon range. For filtration, I decided that I wanted a method that would really promote the availability of natural foods in the aquarium, micro fauna. I've been influenced by a few different sources including Eric Borneman's 7 part article on Reef Food. That in mind, I decided rather unconventionally to go without a protein skimmer/sump. For me, the filtration method came down to two choices, gravity returned ATS or gravity returned refugium. Ultimately I chose to go with a refugium because the ATS was just one more thing to have to clean and worry about, and for me, the simpler the better. After putting some thought into it, the initial designed looked as so:



An early decision was to build an insulated room in the garage to house the tank. My garage can get up to 100 degrees in the summer and it is hard enough to keep a reef tank from overheating in the summer without a chiller. Only thing is that I didn't want to lose my parking spot in the garage to the fish room, so it needed to be rather small. While coming up with the design for the fish room, I noticed that Minh (GoTakuF1) was selling his entire 130 gallon (48x24x30) setup. I have to admit that his setup was one of the inspirations for the design that I came up with, so I couldn't pass it up.

This setup has the same design principal 130 gallon tank with 30 gallon gravity fed refugium. The change in equipment required a slight change in design: