Well its been a month and its all been going well. The mollies are multiplying like nobodies business the water quality is great and the salinity is up to 1.015 by simply replacing the evaporated water with water at 1.050. Water changes I've been doing with water at 1.025ish

I'm not being too fastidious about getting the salinity right on the change water because at the end of the day I want the salinity up quite a bit in my tank and changing 40L in a tank of about 600L only makes a small difference.

Mainly I been using this time to get used to the tank and check everything works.

Problems?
Well algae is rife. I left the lights on for a week and the wife dumped too much food in the tank while I was working late one day. Plus I left the refugium light on for a few weeks with no plants.. that didn 't help!

Baby mollies found their way through the pump and ended up in the overhead sump. No problem there but I had to make sure it was safe for them. Plenty to eat thanks to all that algae!

I've just moved the drain from the overhead sump so its more direct as it was reducing access to the right hand side of the tank quite a bit making water changes hard.

During this I noticed that the flexible pipe from the strainer to the pump had collapsed under suction. This is something I hadn't considered. Stupid really, the pipe is designed to work with the presure of water running down to the pump then the pump pushes the water up the other side. While I am using it to suck the water up to the top the water has to be under low pressure so a non-reinforced flexible pipe is bound to collapse.

While water is still flowing the rate must be reduced so at the weekend I have to replace all the pipe with solid. Unfortunately its a right pain to get to the pump itself but I guess I'll just have to cope.

So a few pitfalls to this idea so far but given the space I've got under the unit to store all the extras I'm still happy.

At the current rate the water should be at sea water strength in about 3 weeks and then I'll be able to add live rock, live sand and that macro algae for the sump that I keep forgetting the name of!

After that some cleaners will move in and eventually the puffer fish shall arrive.

No new photos just at the moment but at the beggining of October expect loads!
For now though I'm going to have to get my plumbing fixed.