Appareantly not only does it take two to make a baby, but also a reef tank.

This weekend hubby and I were productive and busy little bees on the tank.  The lights are hung, cords are managed, and the refugium is glued.  Here are the photos of our progress!

AQUA ILLUMINATION SOL SUPER BLUE LEDS

The hanging brackets.  We found out that a stud is above one of the brackets and so we used a sheet metal screw instead of the toggle bolt that came with the kit.  The other one did not have a stud behind it so we used the original toggle bolt.

There was a ton of excess wire from the hanging kit and we didn't want to cut it because we plan to move in the near future.  Hubby thought of this creative way of weaving the wire through the mounting rails.  We later secured them with zip ties which you can see in the lower photos.

Once we took care of the hanging, the next dilemma was cord management.  This was solved by using white electrical tape to make the cords much less conspicuous and running them down the walls.

The make the turns crisp and clean, we nailed in small wire nails.  You can  barely see the head in the photo.

Another example of the nails.

This is how it looked before the white tape.

 

After the white tape.

So, there is an extra cord in our set up that looks really ugly because we didn't try to hide it.  The cord is the data cord connecting to the AI controller.  The reason we didn't photograph it or hide it is because we have a wireless adapter coming in three months so we just temporarily made it a little on the ugly side and kept these photos since this is more to the idea of what we'll have with the wireless adapter.

REFUGIUM MOD

I did my refugium mod based off of these directions by El Fab at Nano-Reef.  I skipped the directions for modding the intake tube since my tank is not a pico tank.

The materials I used were:

• DAP Household Sealant
• an Xacto knife
• Scissors
• Toothpicks
• AquaClear 50 powerfilter (or higher, I used 70)

DAP Household Sealant bought at Ace Hardware

photo from the top of modded refugium

The divider.  Make sure the tips are facing away from the algae.  It'll make clean up easier.  I ended up cutting those tips off.

Photo of the front and overflow screen.

 So, that is what we did this weekend.  We also put in an order for 15 pounds of Florida base reef rock from ReefCleaners.org and will be getting live rock next weekend from our LFS (local fish store).  In short, we're planning to begin cycling next weekend! So look forward to that and probably a demo of the lights since we'll most likely be taking video.  Oh, and we decided to hold off on the algae until putting in the clean up crew which we will probably also order from ReefCleaners.

 Happy swimming!