Instructions on converting to reef tank

Hey guys:

I am starting in on marine after many successful adventures with freshwater.  I am building a show tank (96x42x36, or 627 gal) to match my freshwater tank I built.  The problem I am running into is the cost, or more particularly the immediate cost (of live rock and live sand especially).

The cost to build the 627 gal tank with stand, overflow, plenum, and sump is only $609 (and a week of my life).  Rather than buy 500+ lbs of live rock and several hundred lbs of live sand and watch my wife divorce me and take my children to her parents' house to live, I would prefer a solution that did not cost thousands of dollars.  I have heard about a couple different options including Utah Rock/Sand, a mix of that with live rock and sand, or even Argocrete, but I don't know the logistics involved.

Still, I have seen that hotly debated on this forum and I don't want to restart a war.  My question, then, is this.  What equipment (above and beyond the basic tank) do I need to keep live rock growing and/or turn other rocks into "live rock" so to speak?  Do I need a protein skimmer for that portion, a pump to keep water moving or will still water work, do I need snails and crabs, must there be a fish to move the nitrogen cycle, etc., etc.?

Ultimately the tank will have back overflows taking from the top and bottom to the sump.  The overflow will have additional biological filtration, and the sump with include mechanical and chemical filtration, along with UV filtration and a protien skimmer.  I want to do this in stages as much as possible, because the initial outlaying of six hundred dollars is not insubstantial, so the less that I need to spend to get my tank maturing the better.  Time is no issue but money ultimately is.  Any advice you have for me will be appreciated.

I would absolutely love to see those plans and designs as well.  Please, please email me [email protected]

Adam

Ok, I have converted my chicken scratches into a word perfect and a pdf.  How do I post them on the forum? 

Let me know, and in the meantime I will email these out.

EDIT: Emails have gone out to [email protected], [email protected], and [email protected].  Anyone else, let me know.

EDIT: I found a picture of a similarly constructed 500+ gallon tank (96" x 36" x 36").  It was done using at least the same design philosophy on the tank (although I can't vouch for the specifics of how it was done).  The designer of this tank put it directly into the wall rather than on a stand.  So there are some differences, but I know people want a picture and I can't give them one, so this at least gives you the idea.  Again, not my work but according to the source it was the same concept.

As a side note, how in the world does he get into his sump, or anything else with the tank in the wall like this?

Plywood tank.

Doesn't work as well for saltwater. Keodog/Kevin built a nice tank and the aquamarine colored 2-part epoxy paint looks good, but it is corroding at the air-water interface. The best I can figure is that salt creep gets into the microscopic pores of the paint and acts like ice on a rock. Over time with repeated wetting and drying the salt crystals expand and crack open the paint.

I would check with Keodog about another specific design difficulty that is creating a problem for his plywood tank, before I jumped into it.

LeRoy and Sally Jo Headlee ( www.garf.org ) have been great friends to the WMAS, especially in it's early days. Several of us have been to their facility many times in the past. Unfortunately, they no longer accept visitors. They are two of the great pioneers in the hobby.

I would think you could line a plywood tank with acrylic fairly easily.  It would cost much less also since you could use much thinner material.