ToasterWaffles

It only took us a few hours — 8 to 10 — to get the old tanks broken down and the new tank set up. Since we did so much prep everything went very smoothly. Charles helped quite a bit and so did Jess’ parents.

After Charles went home Saturday night Jess and I decided to play with the plumbing for the new tank. We quickly discovered that there were some things we’d have to do differently, and some extra pieces we’d need. This wouldn’t be so bad since we could pick them up Sunday morning.

Sunday morning we went to breakfast, then ran to Lowe’s to pick up some more plumbing, and run some other errands. By the time we got back home Charles was there with his monster (100g) water container. We loaded that in to Jess’ station wagon and I took off for Scripps. The SIO (Scripps Institute of Oceanography) has a free “clean” seawater spigot at the land-end of their pier. For free you can take water that’s been put through a few sand filters. For aquariums this works out pretty well, until there’s red tide. It took 20 - 30 minutes for 100g to come out of that little garden hose.

By the time I got back home Jess & Charles had already broken down the 55 and were about half way through the 120. Jess had gone to Home Depot to get another big trash can to hold rock and such so Charles and I just bagged up coral and tried to catch fish. By the time Jess got back home I’d got a hold of her parents and they were on their way over. We managed to have the 120 nearly done by the time they showed up and just had to move it out of the way. Now the fun could begin!

We moved the stand and sump in to place and used a level to get it as good as we could. We then put some 1“ styrofoam insulation on top to even out the surface for the tank to sit on. That way it could compress where it needed to even itself out. The next bit was some heavy lifting to get the tank in place. At that point we sent Kurt & Marla home and started putting the plumbing together. A quick change of plans required me to get some more plumbing parts and some more 2” PVC. By the time I got back Jess & Charles were putting the finishing touches on the sump: a little light to make working down there easier.

We loaded up our pitiful amount of sand, then water, then rocks. And more rocks. Then a few more rocks. Then some water out of the containers the rocks were in. Then some water out of the back of Jess’ car. Repeat. I ended up going back to SIO for another 80g of water to get us where we needed to be, and have some left over for water changes. I got back to see a big murky blue tank. I couldn’t tell, but there were fish in there too! We pumped some more water in and called it a day around 9:00 PM.