My reef experience of 2 years

Reef experience of 2 years. This is my reef experience for the last 2 years.
In this video, I will be sharing with you my experience since I set up this aquarium 2 years ago.
As a reminder, I was an inexperienced reefer back then and I am still now although I know now what should I not do and what I should pay more attention to.
So let me start with the question why did I go for this size?
There are really two main reasons
No 1 is that it will look really cool
No 2 is that it will be more forgiving if I made a mistake with for example dosing. That was actually researched by me and made sense but at the same time I think this was just a very convenient argument to back up the first one lol
The process
Well, probably if I had all finances in place ready and had enough time on my hand to do everything at once I would probably think twice should I really proceed with this project BUT that was not the case…
There were many things I didn’t know at the time and I would strongly suggest to anyone to actually make a list of equipment prior to even planning the aquarium. The final price may persuade you to downsize the tank, perhaps lol
reef experience
Again, I didn’t do it and so what I did was the following 
Firstly I decided that 4 meters actually fit on my wall where I wanted. That was enough for me to make a decision about the size.
The next thing I needed was the frame. I didn’t really check for any frames on the markets as I knew I can just weld one myself. That was one of my first mistakes and it was to have a steel frame rather than aluminium but anyway…
Once I build the frame I had to bring it upstairs. That was already a challenge and at this stage, I knew to bring the aquarium the same way it would be impossible. So the next step was the aquarium. The guys from ND Aquatics told me they will have to build this aquarium in situ. That also meant that I will never be able to take this aquarium away. Anyway, I got it to build along with the sumps and when I look at this setup only there I realised that I will need some additional support underneath. The whole setup can take over 2000 l of water + the frame + the glass So there I have an unexpected cost for me.
I managed to get a good price for a few steel beams so I could make a construction underneath the mezzanine floor and have the whole weight support. As I work in the building industry I asked one of my structural engineers to come around and just double-check my genius work 
reef experience
The next thing was to get plumbing and all other equipment This actually hit me a little bit price-wise. It was a little more than a few hundreds I expected or should I say not expected coz I didn’t really have any pricing prepared 
While that was on the way I got to the point that I will need water and the water not only have to be mixed with the salt but also it needs to be properly filtrated.I then decided to buy an RO unit and the reservoir. When I was selecting a reservoir I have seen some videos where people had two tanks for mixed of water and the RO water but also I had to have a top-up tank.I had an advised to have a top-up tank no more than 10% of the total water volume in the system and that tank will have to be top-up manually. That was actually a very good idea. Why? Because in the unlike event where the auto top-up pump gets stock pumping water in I will only get 250 l of RO water into the aquarium. This will obviously not prevent the system to overflow but it will prevent diluting the salinity too much and that is very important.
I ended up getting two 1000 l reservoirs and one 250 l for an auto top-up.
reef experience
The RO unit I bought was a 7 stage RO water for drinking water. I got rid of 3 other stages with minerals and left it just one 5 micron filter, two carbon filters and one membrane.
That managed to give me 0 tds for the first few litres of water and then started to go up.
Long story short I had to modify my RO unit for 9 stages including two DIs.You can check them in the video up there
In my mechanical filtration, I used roller filters and I think these are not really as good as they say. Remember I only speak from my own experience so I don't want to discredit something someone else may consider a good item but I noticed not right now I can not really see the difference between the roller filters and the socks. One of the problems with roller filters I had was that they were not really sealed tight. They were leaking on the sides so the water was basically bypassing the filter. I know you will never get 100% filtration but I don't think you should have water bypassing the filter media. In any case, it was just too much hassle, rolls were relatively expensive considering I had 3 and they were going fairly quickly.I made a video about them a few months ago so if you want to watch it just click the card in the corner.
reef experience