Reef 301: Hollywood Tank Wet Work Production Video
Transcript:
What's going on, guys? Jake Adams here. And I am so thrilled to bring to you a very special aquarium. This tank has been in the making for 2 or 3 years, and it is packed with some of the rarest fish and some of the most exotic corals. And I am really lucky that I've been involved in this tank in several ways, and so have many of my friends.
From setting it up to maintaining it to stocking it. And, so thankfully I have my good friend Joe Kopra who's here, and he's going to tell us all about this tank so I can ask him the questions and he can give us the answers. So without further ado, here is the tank. And here is Joe.
How you doing, everyone? Good to see you again. Well, tank kind of speaks for itself. It is a 300 gallon tank product of the imagination of a private client called Mr. F and Sam Schabowski from Wet Works after doing installations for 20 years. This is as good as it gets. I haven't been maintaining it for the last year.
And to, take a lot of project as though it's almost my own tank. A lot of these pieces did come for me to talk a lot about the tank, the plumbing, the design, the mechanics, and of course, the livestock in here, which is some of the the best stuff. A lot of these things, like Jake mentioned, has been written about a rating on reef builders, like this spectacular kantha philia.
Well, it's an iOS ten, so only minor chamfered edges over here. Super polished. There's not a bubble in the glass. Optically clear glass. I just I mean, the tank is just like museum quality for glass. You just you look at it, you think it's acrylic, but it's it's glass. It looks so crystal clear. I'm really impressive. Do you know the rough dimensions of it?
Actually, I never needed to know any rough dimensions, so I would say six feet by 28 by 28. Okay, maybe a touch touch higher. Yeah. So it's an aluminum splash tank. Yeah. And what is this funky light you have on here? It's just like one solid luminaires like, you know, light fixture anymore. It's a luminaire. What can you tell me about that?
This is the actual optics light, which I have to read more of them before. The light has been great. Fully programable for a bunch of channels we actually have. It almost has three in this individual panels so we can adjust the lighting. This is a high bar area on the right, which we're putting most of the corals. Then this is the medium the way up over here.
More of it helps. And then over here some lower light. Most of the you feel filters from here. Anything that shows a little bit of light shock, you move it over to the left and usually it rebounds. Making the zones for all those different types of corals. It's really it's a, it's a must right for this type of aquarium because there's so many different corals.
And that's the thing he didn't want to I'm going to take you on a little bit of everything. So to figure that out, this was a lot of foresight on the on the designers part. And it's worked out, laid out perfectly. Very cool. Now, something that might not be quite obvious is that this risky is actually kind of radical because there's technically no live inside.
Right? Correct. Well, yeah, there's a couple of small pieces maybe under some of the the coral. So hold them up. But but for argument's sake, it's really no live rock. So it's a ceramic roof scape. Okay. So tell us about the ceramics inside. Yeah, it worked out really perfectly. I was a little worried that, you know, not having water.
Think you might have some weird issues possibly some leaching of, say, aluminum or not having proper surface area that the, you know, traditional line probably provide a few, but so far it's been it's been really great. But then now you can never even tell that it's not. And so one of the benefits is that that's, it's pretty much all cemented together.
It can really move. There's maybe a little bit of some small things. Yeah. It looks a little weird at first, right. But it's, you know, kind of whitish. Oh yeah. But now we can see there's a lot of coralline growing on every corner. If I had said anything, you would just think it was. Yeah, it was by proxy.
You could really see over here how much is glued perfectly on that edge. The only issues we've had was trying to get fish out. You can't move anything. And a chlorophyl. You have to kind of get in there. You creative like an acrobat trying to get in there and get it out. So we've taken a good look at the tape, taking a good look at the light.
We've taken a good look at the reef scape. This thing is actually really, really quiet. And I believe there's a lot of magic hiding underneath. So, why don't you pop open all the panels and then we'll just cycle from one side to the other? I'm sorry, Joe, you have just opened Pandora's box on one hell of a reef aquarium.
Some food management system. Holy crap. Well, I guess, just, you know, walk us from right to left and tell us what's happening in here. Sure. It's a custom designed MRC. Some, with some really cool stuff with the advanced Marine Spyglass Reactors removable acrylic top. We run JioPhone carbon in there, and it's just overflowing gently. The spectra oh one return pumps are silent.
Don't mind that little zip tie right there. I just have to place a suction cup. ZIP ties are our friends. Yeah, it looks like you. Hello. I got an inspector. Pure as I just know. It's a liter meter. Up LC two is what that is. The top one? Yeah, one on, top off. Cool. I really like the window.
And, the rounded corners on the Saab. It looks so modern. I've never seen a sound like that, ever. Yeah, I think its inspiration was the, Space Odyssey 2000. Okay. Yeah. Now we've got, royal exclusive protein skimmer. Yeah. Do you know what model that is? I think it's the the bubble between 250. I believe it is.
That sounds about right. Got it. Automatic waste collector with you, like a little carbon tire to keep it nice and not smelling bad. I love those tight shooting lives on the sump as well. That's an accessory fans that help, with temperature control. Yes. There's no children, so those are programed to turn on one at a time.
And the temperature hits 78 and 79. They do a good job. Very cool. And then, you see, there's a lot of valuable fish in here. So this is, a rare addition, I guess, to a reef tank nowadays is the, the dual UV sterilizers. Yeah, yeah. These are 18 watt tubes, each, built by an MRC custom unit.
And it's got the same, matching rounded corners. Oh, yeah. It's super, super cool. Yeah. You see that theme throughout the entire build, and then you have two packs. Bell on period. The key to Morpho reactors. Yeah, yeah. What do you have? Do you have a manifold feeding a bunch of different things. Yeah. So there's one of the L one pumps over there, actually runs up one lake, goes up to the aquarium, the other one comes around and tees off and does both of these, goes into one of those returns.
And then the other side of the T will go through the UVs and don't backing over there. And then the other leg off that common manifold goes in, feeds two gate valves. That allows us to precisely control the water level and type of carbon in the GSO. Fluidized reactors. So it's a lot of networking off of one pump, but the other L one is just fully dedicated to the aquarium.
So cool. Let's scoot over left. And, we have another tank over here. And I just assumed it was for top off, but it's actually, for water changes. Oh, yeah. Oh, my goodness. This whole thing slides out. Oh that's crazy. So this is filled with water. Hold on. Yeah, but it's just enough to actually get our salt.
There's a big Tunzi circulation pump in there, which we turn on, and that will just provide all the mixing. And then the L one with a flip of a switch fills up the some the water change. Let me get the strap. You have. $450 control. Will DC pump to return your water flow your water nurse. And that's not always the best.
All right. Okay. Yeah. So that what we do is we open up a valve and it's takes water out of the top of the bottom. It sends it off to the household plumbing. And at a certain point, we would shut that valve and then fully evacuate this water storage tank and replenish that item there. So it's just a matter of valves.
So we switch have to be the salt. There's no buckets, no. This must be so nice for you to have purified water made on site. Oh, you just mix it on site. Oh yeah. What's the second to the chamber for? This is a first priority. Overflow. Storage for the top. So should both be down in this cold water.
This gets priority first over this one. Okay, so you've got a complete dosing center here with, some peristaltic pumps and, some dosing caps, containers and, which thing it does in containers. So this is core seven, Triton four seven, which we've been running since the beginning. Actually, we're running the base elements, and then core seven became available.
We've we switched it over to course this is the Triton method, not the other method. This is correct. This is a Triton method because we're running quite a more fun reverse photo period in the Pax films. There's enough nutrient export going on to keep the levels low, because the core seven provides essential elements to support the needs of mankind.
So these are the additives straight out of the bottles, not diluted water and correct foreign. How much do you dose? Right now with dosing 30 meals a day on each part of each part? Yep. Which part? Two. It's number one. Number two. And actually three and three be combined. So we dose 60 miles a day on this one okay.
Which is really the same. And then this one is just a little bit of extra power. Oh I retired from. So yeah thanks for showing us you know, how this tank operates and some of the basic elements. But what's involved with basically upkeep in an aquarium like this? As you can imagine, with a fish like this and that type of high protein through the nutrient that was due to build up.
So I'm constantly employing Ro force, water changes when needed. It is a fragmented tank. So with the nutrients being processed by the parts built into the protein skimmer, the GFR and the carbon and the minerals being replenished every day by the core seven water chain, it's almost become redundant. But again, since there's so easy to do, we have so much confidence in our source water, we track it down for water and weekly ICP tests that we're doing here.
I'm free to do water changes as needed. So this is the point where I just realized that I can't see any water pump since I have a tank at all. How is the water flow provided in this tank? Well, there's one, element running independently. There's a return on the top. And then another one. Sam had plumbed it, and it's hidden in the rocks.
There's a return right here. No way. Yeah, I call it rock, but they're not really. Rocks is a return, right? There is another return right back here. Oh, man. I'm real magic. Real magic is the two tons that are buried in here. And the wire is hidden as well. There's one right in that back over there. Right there.
Just kicked out a little bit of detritus and stuff on the fish. Try to eat, see it over there. And the other was buried in the back, and it's just shooting up through this little cavern right up there. The tank is also like, really, really clean, you know, despite having so many fish, I don't see a single speck of algae, the corals here, you know, all appropriate color.
And the other thing that's really cool, as you see, a lot of great color definition, but it's not Windex and blue, right? It doesn't look at the color of your shirt. It looks pretty natural, you know, reef style. But but yeah, it's just not like, just blown out still really, really great color balance. It's time to look at some of these fabulous corals and fish.
Again, it's so cool that you zone the aquarium with, basically the high energy, acros and stony corals SPS on the right and some of the Alps on the left. Do you want to point out, maybe just some of the smaller zones within it? Sure. So, the coin is an active chalice and mushroom collector.
So we've kind of taken, like less than mousses and created one area of the chalice is we put them on area. Mushrooms are kind of congregated to this area over here, though sometimes they break off and they spread around to this area. But traditionally this has been the chalice area, the low light super high flow area on.
And I've got a lot of familiar friends here. There's the, Splatoon chalice right there. That was actually at one of my local fish stores several months ago. There's the, the Bennett's hogfish that I, came across in, cans Australia. There's also going to be an angelfish who just decided to take a nap. He's been out this whole time, but I kind of into some B-roll.
Those are some of my super favorite fish. And then one fish that's on my, Well, my holy grail wish list is this player's fairy wrasse. It's just one of those that's just from so far away, that you just never, ever see them. So it's really cool to see in this tank. What about some of the corals?
What are some of the really cool corals in here you alluded to earlier to this example field. But this thing is just insane. Yeah, actually, you know, the story probably better than I on the island is that we've got some reef builders love a while back. I don't remember who he got that one from. That was before I got involved with the aquarium.
Very cool. And then, like a stripe, Puerto Rico or Santa Rosa that has green splashes are super, super neat. The homewrecker that's adjacent foxhole. Next wrecker got a home wrecker in the house. Bunch of various macros. Big purple milk. Nice. Classic green polyp leather, coral. Oh, that is so cool. Koji, what is one of my favorite one?
The pink net for you came in a couple of years ago. We could probably getting that, giant space invader back to you right there. Yeah. Very cool. Man, this cluster of the, Australian skull is is just on another level. It's just a bunch of master and UFO's, convenience all grouped together. Very, very cool. Man, this tape is just beautiful.
Whether you're close up or far away. What are some things you just want to mention about this, this tank. The kind of things that I wouldn't even think to ask and, maybe 1 or 2 things that the tank has taught you. Well, balancing the needs of a reef aquarium versus balancing the needs of a private client sometimes don't mix.
Well, for instance, when somebody does collect the right, it's that one of the portals traditionally would give them a lot more space. Like, you notice how tight everything is. There's not a lot of room for these things to grow, especially like the monster core back there. Now those things are going to need two feet across. And in a year or two, especially running a system all the way, running with the growth that we set.
So putting them all in in the beginning works, but leaving enough room for them to grow, that's going to be a challenge. Another thing I want to point out, which, is really cool, is having a full blanket, lighting, coverage on the farm, and a lot of guards songs like T5, like it's one of the benefits of T5 lighting is that it covers the entire footprint.
Unlike spot landing, this kind of bounces light all around the poles, so the energy of it all isn't just focused on at the top, it's kind of hitting all around. I think that's played into the success. Also having modern equipment like DC pumps, there's very little heat that's being put into the aquarium. And that was a big thing with Sam.
The client did not want to deal with a chiller for obvious reasons. So often the heat, the space issue. So going with the DC pumps, the LED lighting allowed them to not need to chill out. So of course we got to give some shout outs for this. This aquarium. The biggest shout out was to Sam's of Husky.
Without him, that would be here. Brickworks is his company. And you could look this tank up on their Facebook and on their website for brief 3 to 1. Another shout out goes to the aquarium manufacturer of Italy and water them, aqua optics for the custom lighting. I do not have a stand manufacturer, but this is a custom beautiful stand, so if anybody's interested, obviously you can get in touch with Sam regarding that, my company, because aquariums do the service for some of the corals and of course vehicles for bringing this up to.
I would know the space here if it wasn't for them. So, you know, hit us up a comment. Don't forget the acrylic. I'm going to forget Mark, but I remember seeing this tank wouldn't be filter garage over Denmark. Eco tech vacuum pumps, Pax bellum. I think the most of this is from the department. Department actually has helped me out quite a bit on this as well with programing, but if you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button.
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