Slowly but Surely

I am making progress every day with the tank, but I am still far from where I should be.  The big mistake here was buying a tank already set-up and not having the plumbing ready to go. 

I am now roughly 3 weeks into having the tank (with fish in it) but no filtration is happening. 

Over the weekend, I managed to run the plumbing from the tank to the basement.  Both the drain lines and the returns are hooked up to the tank and the plumbing is run to my make-shift fish room in the basement.  It was a bear getting the lines run from the living room down.  We ended up cutting a few holes in the closet on the other side of the wall from the tank and then drilling a big hole in the sub-floor.  We then went from the basement up.  I ran 2 lines of 1 1.2 inch Spa Flex horizontally through the floor and then up into the living room.  However, the lines are not finished in the basement.  They are just hanging out of the ceiling.

Why?  Because the folks at Eagle Glass can't seem to find the time to drill three little holes in my two tanks for the basement.  They have had them for over 2 weeks and keep telling me they will have them tomorrow.  I got pretty ticked off at them Friday morning and they said I could pick them up Friday evening.  Went down at 4pm and 5pm and 6pm and no one was there.  Worse yet, I can see the tanks through the window and they are not even started. 

Unfortunately, I am going away for 3 days now and I am praying they will have them done when I return.  Then I can finish the plumbing and get this thing powered up on Wednesday night.

Also, I got the RO/DI unit all plumbed and it is making nice clean water.  Unfortunately, I ran into an issue there too.  We have that draining into the sump in the basement (the one used for the bathroom, not for flooding).  Well, it failed last night and I had a fair amount of water on the floor.  Luckily, it was in the back area and just concrete foundation, not the finished area.  But, the hits just keep on coming.

So, the plan is to finish up on Wednesday night and fire up the pump and get some filtration going!!!

Oh I also got my 50lbs of Florida rock from Live Rock International.  It was a lot of rubble and much of it was crushed in transit.  So, I ordered 50lbs more from Premium Aquatics and that came Saturday.  It went right in the tank and is very very nice rock.  I also added a CUC (clean-up crew) of three varieties of snails and scarlet hermit crabs (also from Premium Aquatics) and they are taking care of the algae bloom from the cycle.

I hope these fish last until I can et some filtration going.