So the tank and stand are here, but I'm still waiting for pretty much everything else to be delivered. Salt and misc supplies from Fosters & Smith should arrive today, as will the elos osmoscontroller from Marine Depot, but I'm not sure just when the LED fixture + moonlight will be showing up. Those were being dropshipped direct from Elos. Hopefully they'll make an appearance in the next few days. My hope is to have all the hardware here this week and get it all set up on the aquarium this weekend. Then I'd fill the tank and arrange for a live rock order to be delivered the weekend following. Once all the hardware is here I'll take a series of photos of all the bits, as well.
The Elos stand is interesting. The top shelf only extends over the front 3/4ths of the tank footprint, with the last quarter being completely open to accomodate the plumbing. The back 1/4th of the tank is only supported by the sides of the stand, which gave me a bit of pause, but I checked with Jesse at Elos USA and he says that's how it's supposed to be. The door is in their wenge finish... doesn't show up well at all in the photo, but there is a dark wood grain to the finish.
The sump is well made from a quality standpoint, but really very tight on space and it has some questionable design choices which likely contribute to the microbubble issues some owners have reported. Interestingly it has removeable top and bottom trim itself.
The NS-100 skimmer is a strange beast. It's state of the art... for 1996. A simple venturi injector design, complicated by two different adjustment valved (one on the air intake line, and one on the outflow for adjusting water column height in the skimmer body). I'm curious to see just how it performs. I suspect that just based on it's size (it's substantial) it will do an adequete job on a tank this small. If not there's plenty of room in the sump to replace it with a 9010 tunze.
I'd originally planned on using a black background on this tank but now I'm leaning towards leaving it bare. I can route the power cords from the lights behind the overflow so no cables show behind the tank. If I added a
vortech I think I'd have to add the background though... wouldn't be a good way to hide that cord without one. Going to see how well the flow from just the return works and I'll make a final decision on the vortech from there. If I remember correctly the return pump is rated at just below 600 gph; considering the tank is just 20 gallons and will contain almost exclusively softies, it may be sufficient even with the head loss.
Overflow was a bit noisier than I would have liked, but they included a flow reducing inset that I made use of and now it's virtually silent. Tonight I'll add salt. I'm hoping to be able to arrange for rock and sand to be delivered next saturday.
