The disaster that is my in-wall aquarium

I have a large aquarium.  When I say large, I mean, mistakes were made large.  800 Gallons, saltwater, reef.  It took me a very long time to get this thing running, and it was looking fairly decent.

It wasn't perfect, but it started to look good, and I was relatively happy with it.

There were however, some demons lurking in there...

One such monster was the plumbing, and the sumps.  I went with a DIY attitude, and was trying to save money, because as it turns out, setting up an 800g aquarium is way more expensive than 6x a 120g aquarium...

The tubs would overflow occasionally, in spite of having 2 2" pipes connecting them.  The pump, a big dolphin 3000, started rusting and leaking.  Yay.




And then we have the lights.  Actually, I'm pretty proud of the lights, right up to the heatsink. A big vertical computer heatsink can absolutely hold down the temperature of a 100w COB/SMD LED run at 140 watts of power.  No problem.  Right until the fan dies. Then poof, instantly.

That's fixable though.  What happened next, was not.

A little tiny solenoid, with a murloc push fitting, shattered.  This push fitting, was what held back the mains water to my RO/DI unit.

This bad design resulted in a massive, and I mean massive flood of my house.  The resulting damage destroyed tons of equipment, drywall, electrical stuff, etc. Many things did not survive this, including my will to keep working on the whole aquarium at all.

So it sat idle. For a long time.  I kept the machinery running, but kind of ignored it.  Later this bit me, as alot of the random things I plumbed in to keep everything alive, were done with extension cords and bits of stupid.  Then one day, a few weeks ago, a big zap sound was heard in the room.  Luckily I was home, and found a bit of water dripping on an extension code, and a pump cord that was obviously burnt to a crisp.

Well that took out the last of my support equipment.  Now I had a real problem on my hands.  A giant aquarium, all pumps down, nothing works, fiasco everywhere, and it's a fire hazard to boot...