120 Gallon Disaster Leak and rebuild of new system

[NaasReefer]

Hey guys,
I recently had a disaster in my 120 gallon reef tank. It sprung a leak without warning. Thankfully I was at home at the time otherwise it could have been a whole lot worse. I quickly got my two quarantine tanks and a 55gallon barrel set up in the next room and started to transfer everything over. I decided I would put most of the live rock into the 55 gallon barrel along with all the fish and split all my corals between my two quarantine tanks and set my lights up over them. The whole process of setting up the temporary tanks and transferring everything over took around 4 hours with three people helping me.

I got everything sorted and went to bed that night worried about how I would find things in the morning. To make things worse I came down to find one of my clowns and one bangaii cardinal gasping for air at the top of the barrel. I knew that something was wrong so I took them straight out and placed them into one of the other tanks with the coral. I then went searching for my other fish in the barrel as there was no sign. I had to remove all the rock and eventually found the rest of my fish dead at the bottom of the barrel. I lost one clownfish, one bangaii cardinal, my yellow tang and my foxface rabbitfish. Devastated.

I managed to save the remaining clown and bangaii and still have them now.

So the next thing I had to do was try to get my 120 gallon resealed. After a good bit of research I could not find someone who fixed aquariums professionally. I decided against trying to fix it myself as I did not want to risk having another leak when I was not in the house.

So after a great deal of consideration the decision I came to was to take my two quarantine tanks, drill overflows into them and plumb them into my sump. The video below shows all the plumbing and how it works.



So the setup above is what I will be running for the next year until I save up for a new large tank. Not sure what size or dimensions I'll go for but it'll be at least a 120. Thanks for reading, if you have any questions just ask.