Lookout Joe Yaiullo, there’s another 20,000 gallon reef tank in North America and this one looks like it’s got a lot of potential to be a really awesome reef “tank”. We get a little envious of size in this hobby — always looking for something bigger, something that mimics the ocean better. Bill Wann took it a step further creating a custom home with a 20,000 gallon basement reef. Following along the thread at Reef Frontiers, you can see the entire build from pouring the foundation to gluing coral colonies to the rock. Needless to say, designing, building and maintaining a large reef aquarium of this magnitude it no easy task.
Wondering how you heat and cool that tank in the Midwest weather? The tank is heated with two 200,000 BTU boilers, although one is merely a backup. Cooling is done through 3,000 feet of PEX pipe buried t10n feet in the ground with glycol running through it. Filtration is through one sand filter running and three massive skimmers. Circulation is one massive closed loop with nine 2 in. motorized ball valves and 60GPM flow with a surge system that fills up every 5 min. and dumps 150 gallons through six 3in. motorized ball valves randomly controlled by the controller.
To make this swanky system even better is everything is automated and run by a touch screen PLC. To prevent moisture build up in the air, the humidity is controlled by an exhaust fan and a set of motorized louvers that draw in outside air. Lighting is done by 16 400 watt 10k bulbs on electronic ballasts.
We could go on and on with tidbits from the thread but we think its more impressive scrolling through the build thread (only eight pages) yourself. From what we can tell from just peeking over this impressive setup is Bill loves his surgeonfish and big, monster aquariums. This is an impressive setup and one we’ll have to go visit on our next trip to the Midwest.
[via Reef Frontiers]
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