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Zilla III – The story and historical photos
 Zilla II - The Story and historical photos
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 More about Kevin

Zilla III – The Story and historical photos

Zilla III is Kevin’s fourth and latest saltwater tank.   Planned prior to the house being built, Zilla 3 holds about 5000 gallons of water and sits on a  15 foot by 20 foot, 8 inch thick rebar reinforced concrete pad poured over packed gravel as part of the basement floor.  The basement has extra floor drains, a 2.5 ton dedicated Air Conditioner and Honeywell fresh-air exchanger for humidity control, and an extra 100 amp electrical sub panel tied into the optional 400 amp service to power the tank.  Zilla 3 used a similar construction technique to Zilla 2, using Advantech sub floor rather than plywood, and yellow-pine ribs instead of fir.  The glass is iron-free ¾” Diamante (similar to Starphire but ¾: without the need for lamination) and consist of (2) 39” x 39” panes and (1) 75” x 39” pane set in the front of the octagon tank.  Base frame for Zilla III is 12 feet by 16 feet with a height of 4 feet.  Something like 45 gallons of epoxy resin were used in the constructions. 

Preparation for construction started immediately after Kevin moved in on July 10th, 2003, when we placed the first coat of Rustoleum basement epoxy on concrete to protect it from any future salt spills.  By Thanksgiving of that year, Kevin (with lots of help from his generous neighbor, Kevin Pastor, and several others) had finished the basement sufficiently to start construction of the tank proper.  By March of 2004, Zilla III was alive and receiving fish from Zilla II.

Kevin mixes his own saltwater formula, and uses highly filtered water.  That water passes through a 25 micron, 5 micron, 1 micron, 0.2 micron particle filters, then through a cubic foot of activated carbon, and finally through a polyfilter chemical absorption chamber prior to being used for tank water.  This system is in place mostly due to about 35 gallons a day of evaporation.  DI would be very expensive, and RO would both generate way too much waste water, and would filter out a lot of the carbonates and trace elements that are desirable.

Besides the tank proper, Kevin has a 700 gallon mixing tank for making up new saltwater, a 250 gallon isolation tank, a 200 gallon coral grow out tank, and a 480 gallon refugia – all in the work area behind Zilla III. 

Zilla III currently has (2) 1000W Metal Halide fixtures providing basic illumination, with (6) 400W fixtures ready to be hung as soon as he finishes the electrical room, has power ready, and has the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) up and running to control them.  The refugia has a single 1000W Metal Halide and one 400W MH lighting it.  The coral grow out tank simply has (2) shop lamps providing a total of 160 watts of light over it.  Zilla III uses Zilla II’s RK1000 skimmer and associated 1000mg/hr ozonator – and not surprisingly requires that ozonator to be turned up a bit from where Zilla II ran it.

Besides the base live rock from Zilla II, Zilla III has a front Southdown deep sand bed, and a CaribSea aragonite deep sand bed covering the rest of the floor of the tank.  The deep sand conveniently provides enough support that no PVC infrastructure was required to hold up the rock structure.

A very detailed journal of construction and current status is available at here.

In April of 2004, the local St. Louis saltwater club, SEASL, came and visited.  They took some great photos you can see in this thread on ReefCentral.

Photos of Zilla III can be found in the album named the same at the Seaplace.org photo gallery here.

Zilla II - The Story and historical photos

Zilla II was Kevin's third saltwater tank.   Kevin built it July of 1996 from plywood, fir, fiberglass, epoxy, and glass and decommissioned it in March of 2004 when the livestock was moved to Zilla III.  Zilla II was 10 feet wide, 8 feet deep and 4 feet tall externally.  Internally, it was 9 feet by 7 feet by 4 feet.  It was powered by a 1/2 HP Sweetwater regenerative blower originally running a banks of (8) 3" diameter by 4 foot tall air-lift tubes and a RCSD.  When initially using banks of (12) tubes, over 600 gpm of water flow was measured.  Approximately 1600lbs of live rock, most in the 20lb-80lb piece size, was placed on a (mostly) hidden 1" PVC frame.  There was 2200lbs of 1/4 limestone gravel (used for asphalt roads in the Midwest) and several hundred pounds of Geo-Marine gravel in the bottom of the tank.

In September of 1999 the right-hand-side bank of lift tubes was replaced by a Reverse Carlson Surge Device (RCSD).  The left-hand-side remained in service with the tank running in a cycle of Lift Tube (LT), LT & RCSD, RCSD, LT & RCSD, LT alone, switching every 3 hours between states for two complete cycles per day until Zilla 2 was decommissioned.

Livestock consisted primarily of various species of Tangs, including (6) Yellow, (7) Hippo, (1) Naso, (1) Mimic, and (1) Sailfin.  Additionally, a mated pair of Flame Angels, two Bangai Cardinals, a lawnmower blenny, a Coral Beauty, and a few damsels lived in Zilla II.  Unfortunately, so did a Banded Branquillo.  For what its worth, the Branquillo loved to eat Peppermint Shrimp and picks on most small blennies and gobies.  Oh, Kevin has also had a cleaner wrasse for quite some time.  Apparently this tank is large enough to support one.

Corals include various species including Acropora micropthelma, Porites ?cylindrica?, and several unknown hard corals as well as leathers (including one BIG one), star polyps, mushroom corals, and an occasional large-polyp stony coral.

Click here to see photos. Look in the Zilla 2 folder.
10/17/99 Narrated 40mb MPEG of Zilla 2

More about Kevin

 

Kevin Neal Carpenter was born in late November, 1958, in Southern California.  He was raised there until his parents moved to the St. Louis, Missouri, USA as part of the McDonnell & Douglas Aircraft merger (now merged with Boeing) in 1970.

Kevin started working for a plant nursery when 14 years old.  Around 1975 he discovered computers, using a teletype at his High School to interface to an HP-2000E computer.  By 1976 he was hooked, and started his career in computers that year.  Since then, he has been a help desk person, 370 Assembler coder, PL/1 coder, VM and DOS/VSE Systems person, UNIX Systems Admin, SAP Infrastructure support manager, UNIX team manager, Director of Technical Services responsible for all NT, UNIX, and Mail systems across North America for his employer, and currently the Senior Technical Architect for the same company he has been at for about 20 years..  He has been involved with the Internet since the days when it was primarily a UUCP connected network.  Yes, he remembers when Gopher servers were REALLY cool and FORTRAN compilers required TWO! 360KB Floppies.

Kevin entered the salt-water aquarium hobby in 1981 with a 135g fish-only tank. That tank was converted to a mini-reef in 1992. The following year Kevin built his first large tank, a 720g monster called Zilla by his friends. A persistent leak (1 quart a day) combined with a desire to have a more efficient water movement system and a need for easier maintenance convinced Kevin to demolish Zilla and make room for Zilla II.

In November of 2002, Kevin started the process of having a new house build in a St. Louis suburb known as O’Fallon.  Of course, the house has a few minor modifications for the then planned Zilla III!  Shortly after moving in during July of 2003, Kevin started preparing for his largest tank to date:  Zilla III – a 5000 gallon monster.

Kevin is a fairly avid PC gamer, enjoying games like Wing Commander, SimCity, Civilization III, Dungeon Keeper II, Diablo II and the like.

Information about this Server

Www.seaplace.org is a dual PIII 650 MHz based computer on a MSI 694D Motherboard with 768mb of PC133 Cas 2 memory and 80GB of software mirrored IDE disk space running Gentoo Linux.   Apache serves as the web serving software.  The computer is currently connected to the Internet via a broadband cable connection.