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Red Sea 130D AIO

Trio91

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so, its been a long time coming, but I am finally ready to take down my old tank (72gal bow) and set up a new tank (smaller tank) in my living room. The 72 gal bow front wasn't working for me as it was in my basement and pretty much outta sight, outta mind type of deal. When we held the meeting here in my place back in February of this year, Karen (Karenvas2) told me that she had a spare tank that was sitting in her basement and that If I wanted, I was more than welcome to have it. long story short, I finally got around to picking it up about 2weeks ago and here it is, the red sea D 130L or 34gal AIO.

rst.jpg


here is a photo from a website so can get a sense of what it should look like when its all done.

here is a photo of the actual tank in my living room, before I gave it a good cleaning with some water, vinegar and razor blade.

before.jpg

and here is the after pic

after c.jpg
 
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Trio91

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now that she's been all shined up, now it was time to give this thing a "once over". Now back tracking a little bit, to my surprise, I never really knew that red sea had an AIO line that resembled a bio cube. so after doing a little more research on it, I came to realize that RS has discontinued this item (which is probably why I never heard of it) I am mentioning this because after my "once over" on this beast of a tank, I came to realize that at 1st glance, this was a pretty much built to be a plug n play type thing and aside from a few things being a bit dated, it was well thought out by RS
Nice job cleaning the tank up! Best of luck with the new tank!
thanx kev
 

Trio91

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power hub.jpg the 1st thing I noticed was the power hub. what they did was essentially notch out a section of the glass tank to house a discreet power strip with all your plugs to go into

IMG_20160403_160238.jpg

as you can see they also label each plug for you so that you know what controls what. so basically you plug all your items into this canceled strip and then plug the strip into the outlet, no messy cords and very simply done.

plug hub.jpg
 

Trio91

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now, with this fancy plug/hub thing going here, my attention is now drawn to the main plug itself. apparently a previous owner (not Karen btw as this tank was given to her) had removed the ground plug, either that or it broke off somehow but in case it made me kinda nervous (given that lights, pumps, skimmer, fan, timer and everything else will be powered by it.

old plug.jpg
so I decided to replace the old plug with a new one

new plug.jpg

broke out the tools

tools.jpg

and just went at it. I just snipped off the old cord. wired the new plug with a new ground and voila, instant plug

connection.jpg fin plug.jpg
 

Trio91

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the next thing I wanted to address was the equipment itself. 1st the pumps. to my surprise, this AIO tank, originally came with 2 return pumps which are supposed to be mounted in same chamber, side by side to fit into the 2 holes.

here is where they are intended to go

IMG_20160406_102340.jpg IMG_20160406_102419.jpg

at 1st I didn't get it, but after finding a red sea dvd on youtube about this tank
(youtube is where I found most if not all info on this tank) the vision made sense.

here is a pic of the original pumps

IMG_20160406_102708.jpg

one is damaged and the other should be installed on this something like this with the stock nozzleIMG_20160406_102722.jpg IMG_20160406_103055.jpg
 

njtiger24 aquariums

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@trio91 looking good. can't wait to see it up and running. To bad I wasn't on this site about 6 months or so ago when I was trying to sell my 36g Bow front tank. I had no takers so I broke down and made it a low tech tropical tank.
 

Trio91

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so when Karen gave me this tank, she also gave me a bag of goodies, with it. in this bag in particular, there were 2 pump upgrade kits. assuming, (I am not the only person who had a big question mark on his head when he saw the 2 pump thing), RS offered upgrade kits to the D series. in this kit was a much larger pump, hose, a larger output nozzle and a plug.

IMG_20160406_105115.jpg

IMG_20160406_105438.jpg
 

Trio91

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so, with the one damaged pump, I decided to install 1 upgraded pump with the new fix-ins.

IMG_20160406_102934.jpg IMG_20160406_103006.jpg IMG_20160406_110425.jpg IMG_20160406_110532.jpg

now as you can see from the 3rd pic there is absolutely no wiggle room for this pump in that chamber. my biggest concern is that the pump may rattle against the glass and either break it or just make a noise that will drive me insane. once it's filled up with water, I'll know for sure, I can have smaller pumps lying around that I can swap out if I need to + the old stock pump.
 

Trio91

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now the skimmer, pretty straight forward on this. it just has an awkward design. if you saw the video in the earlier post, you'll see that it has almost a 45' angle on it which turn, takes up a ton of valuable real-estate in that rear chamber.

IMG_20160406_064456.jpg IMG_20160406_111834.jpg

its impossible to clean given its shape so I did what I could, I plugged the pump in, it turned on and that's that for now. if I don't like the skimmer, I may look into maybe one of those ghost skimmers (I dunno)
 

Trio91

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now to the problem, the lights

when I plugged in the lights, the fixture was making this horrible sound, almost like a stuck motor. so I decided to open up the hood and see what's inside. I think I have narrowed it down 2 one of 2 things. either the ballast or the fans. (this unit has 3 cooling fans in total that come stock, one to cool the water {which I haven't even gotten to yet} and apparently 2 for the compact, t5 light fixture incased in the hood.

I had to remove these tabs to get under the hood. which is were I discovered these 2 hidden fans IMG_20160406_085815.jpg IMG_20160406_085826.jpg

here is the ballast and the 2 fansIMG_20160406_091256.jpg IMG_20160406_091322.jpg IMG_20160406_091335.jpg IMG_20160406_091417.jpg IMG_20160406_091438.jpg
 

Trio91

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so now here the dilemma, one thing I forgot to mention is that there is also a light timer tied into this system. with all this stuff going on under the hood, is it worth replacing? I can tell you now that these fans are shot which is what I think was making that noise (I have not plugged it back in yet), if not its the ballast which with all these wires, I wouldn't know how to replace
 
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