180 Gallon In Wall Tank

Thanks! I have always loved the in wall tanks. I can keep all of my mess behind the the door. All the sounds stay in the fish room and I get an amazing piece of living art where everyone can see it. 

Cool! Progress picks are always inspiring to me. Thanks for sharing!

Here are some pictures of the fish room. You will have to excuse my mess and and the poor lighting. When we moved in it was a craft/laundry room. It is now a fish/laundry room. It is about 8.5ftx12ft and so there is plenty of room for both my wife and I to get our work done. In fact, my wife and I have both done very well at not getting in each others way. I LOVE having a fish room that is this large it is so nice to have a place where all the noisy equipment and pumps can go. I love that I have my own place to test the water and a large contained to do all my saltwater mixing. I don't have to crawl under my stand to clean the skimmer. Everything is easy to work on and access. I am not done with it yet. I would really like to work seriously on cable organization and having a cleaner overall look but that will come. 

Edited by knowen87 - June 20 2018 at 4:40pm

Well it has been just over a year since I started my tank and it has been way too long since I have done an update. I have been through a lot including bryopsis, and ich outbreak, and a blue tang that decided he was going to go rouge and eat all of my zoanthids. 

Edited by knowen87 - June 13 2018 at 1:14pm

Whew... done. It only took me 2 hours but I fixed almost all of the links for the photos. My wife says she thinks that the island rock looks like Maui flexing his muscles. 

Edited by knowen87 - August 10 2017 at 3:41pm

The other day I just noticed that my main island on the right side of my tank looks like a man striking a pose. I thought it was pretty cool when I realized it.

I like the rockwork. Lots of places for the fish to swim around in between all the rocks. Very nice!

knowen87 wrote: Krazie, I think that I am understanding the bean animal differently. The way I understand it is that the herbie is the full siphon that is restricted to just less than the amount of water that you want flow down the overflow. The Durso takes the remaining (small) amount of water that remains as well as variations in flow. To my understanding the durso never takes a full siphon because it has a hole in the top to prevent this. As far as the emergency overflow being like a hole in a straw I am not sure this will happen because the water level will always separate the different overflows because the water level never goes below the output drain into the sump.  If I am still not understanding this right please point me to an article that you feel can explain it some more. Thanks.  The more that I think about it though I am pretty sure that I want to run the emergency drain as a separate line. I might be redoing the drains.

I might consider making them all separate ,, here is the article I read to get my understanding of the bean animal style overflow,,
http://www.beananimal.com/projects/silent-and-fail-safe-aquarium-overflow-system.aspx

, the primary is the One that is adjustable that is meant to be full siphon you adjust the flow through it with a valve.the second pipe is for extra waterleft over from the first in normal operation , in the case of an emergency if the first one gets clogged this second one turns full siphon once that hole is the top becomes submerged in water i.e. Loss of air ,to help carry the flow with the emergency drain, I think you might have a bit more piece of mind if you cut out that manifold and plumb each drain pipe individually that way if a fat snail gets sucked up one and makes it down to the horizontal section and passed the last tee and decides to get stuck on a mound of detritus he doesn't block off all three of your overflows completely
Hope this helps ! Correct me If I'm wrong Acan,,Your system is coming alone awesome !! Sorry about your daughter and your angel ,, here's a funny meme I found about herbie overflows



Edited by VdubReefer - April 27 2017 at 11:10am

I will make a video in the next few days Krazie.  I knew that having the sump at a similar level to the tank was not typical when I started this build. I will show a couple of scenarios as well (pump start and stop, plugged overflow. 

knowen87 wrote: Krazie, I think that I am understanding the bean animal differently. The way I understand it is that the herbie....

I had siphon on the brain while typing. I updated my post with the correct words to avoid confusion from readers. We are of the same understanding on the drain setup. Any chance you could do a youtube video looking down into the overflow box while the return pump comes back on? One of the drain outlet pipe in the sump while it's running would help as well.

The reason that I believe your emergency drain may be allowing air into the drain is because while running the water level in the sump is just above the horizontal run of drain pipe. This means that the larger manifold pipe will attempt to be a siphon but because the durso and emergency drains allow air in the siphon in the manifold is broken at that point and just becomes gravity fed. You might be right about what is making this entire scenario work and that is the running level in the sump being slightly above the horizontal portion of the drain.

The only actual siphon portion in your design is from the Herbie input at the overflow box to the T where that line hits the manifold. Anything past there is gravity flow unless all three drains are covered in water completely and siphoning as well. This last condition is what I believe is happening during the return startup which creates a full siphon on all three drains (maybe a slight air leak on the durso vent) but once that siphon starts it almost immediately drains the overflow, manifold, the durso and emergency drains and then draws air into the manifold and breaks the siphon for everything but the Herbie. Does that sound like what you see during start up?

I'm just going through scenarios here as I have bad experiences with drains not working correctly so i probably over think them now. If you want to move on just say the word. I'm just trying to verify my understanding, get enough info to understand why this setup works and where it may fail based on the original design concepts of the drain style being used, and hopefully learn a bit more in the process.


Edited by Krazie4Acans - April 25 2017 at 7:48am