320 gallons of Serenity, Sea Monsters & Sanctuary

[mvsjrs]

Thanks G~. I will give that some thought as I prototype designs.

Good weekend of progress (i.e.- some progress was made).

To encourage flow of bacterial flock out of the bottom of the LR tank I used a Dremel tool to enlarge the "mega flow" overflow weirs. There was also obviously a lot "cruddation" inside the overflow. I will need to blast it clean since it is probably pure phosphate and nitrate slug. I also added a fourth row of support for the egg crate grate.

On another front, look at the little cutie I found scampering through the grass...

Unfortunately, the little b@$t@rd'$ mother has been ravaging the pond fish. A little chicken and bam! Funniest thing, this was the second largest snapping turtle taken from the pond. The first was taken from the roof with an AR-15 and still managed to crawl to a secluded spot and stink us out for a month.

Thank goodness she wasn't a mutant hitchhiker in some live rock....

 

[Bent]

We have some enormous snapping turtles around here that look like the spawn of satan....

Looks like yours, only spikey and hissey and ultra mean. Tried to move one out of the road once that was blocking the entire lane. It bit a 2x4 in half.

 

[mvsjrs]

Baby steps, but the holes for the overflows are cut. I started just hugging the shape necessary for the bulkheads but just spent time busting my knuckles in the tight space. Then I opened the holes to full size of the corner overflows and the bulkheads went in like bud-a (butter). Sometimes you just outthink yourself.

 

[mvsjrs]

Today the test rock went into the 120 to test the fiberglass rods and egg crate.

 

[mvsjrs]

Water and Circulation!! And in only 6 months!

 

[mvsjrs]

I snuck it in in the last picture, but I broken Rule #1 again. Bought a Reef Octopus Super Skimmer RO-PS-2000INT from a friend getting out of the hobby after many years. Italian, raspy voice: "I'll make you a deal you can't refuse." Our friends at marinedepot.com say the following:

The Reef Octopus RO-PS-2000INT Protein Skimmer offers the very pinnacle of in-sump protein skimmer for aquariums up to a 200 gallons. All the latest skimmer design innovations can be found on this RO-PS-2000INT model.
•For aquariums up to 200 gallons
•Pump: Bubble Blaster HY-2000 pinwheel pump—offers super efficiency and the very best in performance. The Bubble Blaster is designed to enhance filtration by employing the innovative pinwheel impeller which delivers more bubbles in greater volume with low energy consumption and heat emission.
•Footprint: 12.6″ x 8.7″ | Body Diameter: 6″ | Height: 22″
•Installation: Sump
•Bubble Diffusing Chamber and Hybrid Cone Body that naturally reduces and stabilizes the foam production; This means less turbulence in the neck area and more contact time for organics to rise and collect
•Oversized air silencer for quiet operation and airline mount
•Large collection cup with flow directional guide, drain and unit venting
•Precision control with the easy to turn output flow valve
•Max injection venturi air injection system
•Precision water level control output valve
•Output Size: 40mm - Comes with metric to British adapter to 1.25”pvc
•Output Height: 7.5″
•Recommended Sump Water Depth: 6" to 6.5"
•Solid acrylic construction

 

[mvsjrs]

Here is the skimmer output overnight. It took several days of setup...sleep...adjust...work...adjust...to get the skimmer in the right depth and back pressure. I was really thrown off by setting the skimmer and coming back to find it overflowing violently. Now the sump does not have baffles yet so the depth is variable due to evaporation but not 8-12 hours is a little short to throw the skimmer that out of whack. then again, actual experience says differently. D@mn data!

 

[mvsjrs]

Another two snapping turtles again this weekend. If I could sell the meat, it might add up to a couple corals...hum.

Funniest thing...my wife used all 12 shots of a .22 wheel gun and just pi$$ed off the big one to no end. Evidently proof that you cannot be killed by a wife's nagging. Mercifully, The date was ended with a .45.

A little smaller catch must be Misses.

 

[mvsjrs]

This is my detritus and stuff blaster that I have been using to clean my rock. It does a nice job but it is still quite limiting not to be able to siphon the bottom directly.

I've been doing a lot of reading to get caught up on the latest in live rock preparation. It seems to me that there are three terms that are really more specific than normally used. I imagine that this is open to many opinions and nuances. But these are the assumptions behind my decisions.

(1) Cycling - Getting the live rock and getting past a brief ammonia/ammonium rich period. Just like setting up any tank to get the bacterial filtration process started.
(2) Curing - A longer process external to your DT intended to rid the dead material on the LR. Allows the shipping damage and incompatible bio-critters to die off given your water, your routine.
(3) Cooking - A significantly longer version of curing that has two phases. First, tradition curing processes occur. Second, and more importantly for the long term, the bacterial processes are allow to process phosphates that have accumulated in the rock. Dry rock mined from ancient reefs or cultured live rock from lagoons, the phosphates have just lurking in the rock ready to blow away nitrate problems and plunge right into tanks crashing.

Now, all my rock has been pulled from other tanks that people have been selling. My older stuff was a couple years old before the great disaster.The last tank I bought used was a DSB that was literally grey sludge from about 5mm down. In fact, when I got it home and started cleaning, there were inches of the sludge in the bottom of the overflows. So I am willing to guess that any phosphate buffering capability has long since been lost.

 

[mvsjrs]

Detritus removal experimenting time. I used my handy, dandy Mag5 blaster and placed a 1" riser in the back corner of the tank. I then tried blowing the detritus toward the pipe while under full siphon.

The results were less than spectacular. The egg crate dampened the flow through it unless the blaster was almost completely vertical. Further, where I had placed rock to simulate "blow through" flow, the flow was pointless after being deflected in so many directions by the rock. The detritus would be blown away in a circle that could not be directed toward the pipe. The final results after significant time and effort looked like the following:

 

[mvsjrs]

Now I had a little fun while learning about the siphoning technique failure. Specifically, put the end of the siphon through several oil filtering meshes. They fit into a 5 gallon bucket. I have a bucket that I had employed as a type of wet/dry filter. So, while I was learning the futility of my detritus blaster, I ran the drainage through several of the screens stacked vertical so I could get an idea of the size of crud I would be removing from the cooking LR. The filters were 600, 400, 200, 100 and 75μm.

Here is the inflow arrangement.

600μm detritus

400μm detritus

200μm detritus

100μm detritus

75μm detritus

Sub 75μm detritus leftovers in the sink

__________________
Jason

Single system called Pandora Too of three tanks:
• Pandemonium: 92 gal corner Softies/FOWLR on fish overload (office)
• Coral Country: 150X gal LPS (&SPS?) (family room)
• Sanctuary: 120 gal REFUGIUM (50% chaeto/50% all dark bacterial LR) (fish/man cave)
• Filtration: 60 gal sump, 35 gal settling tank?, DSB?

• Serenity: FW105 gal Discus (bedroom)

"Physics is a b!tch. She's always right no matter how sure you were about your plumbing design." Me, standing in a puddle of water...

"You cannot allow [yourself] to avoid the brutal facts. If [you] start living in a dream world, it's going to be bad." General "Mad Dog” Mattis.

 

[mvsjrs]

My highly scientific analysis (eye-o-meter metric colorometry) seems to show dominantly white to dominantly gray/green. Given a combination of silicate sand, crushed coral and oolite sand; I am willing to hazard a guess that they are being filtered out in that order. Also, given the finger texture, color and smell of the smaller stuff; my years of siphoning freshwater planted tanks screams biomaterial for this tiny stuff.

That means that the challenge is 75μm and smaller for getting rid of this detritus. I did save this material and am interested in repeating the experiment after running the detritus in a bucket with a skimmer. Just to see first hand the effectiveness of skimming in a spectrum of particle sizes.

 

[mvsjrs]

Rule #1 seems pointless. Can you "Where's Waldo" this picture of current equipment setup?

SETTLING TANK!!!!

 

[mvsjrs]

A couple days of drying and a couple dime bags (don't go there, it's way too easy a joke...) and I had collected the different sizes of detritus siphoned from the tank earlier this week.

Observations:
- The 600μm is highly uninteresting because it is such range of sizes and junk.
- There is a distinct transition in color from white gray mix (400μm and 200μm) to pure gray (100μm and 75μm).
- There was a large quantity of 200μm. Approximately, 2-3x the 400μm sample.

After I collect more materials, I would like to see what difference the skimmer can make in the different μm sizes.

 

[mvsjrs]

Alright! All the rock is underwater!

Here is 147lbs of Fiji "live" rock long since gone dry. Not so live anymore.

Here is 194lbs of Tonga also long since gone dry.

As yet undetermined amount of Pukani...long since dry. Broken record...

My intent is to continue to the cooking I started earlier but with better water circulation and skimming. I will move the Pukani to the top of the other rock so that it is all in one tank, i.e.- less useless water volume.

 

[mvsjrs]

So it's been about a month, thought I blew my back out moving at this heavy stuff...but...osteoarthritic L4-L5 and 2 degenerative disks...BUT...I did manage to tear my plantar fascia during a "œrelaxed" game of basketball. Now I have a boot to manage hobbling between tanks and up & down step stools.

I have been doing heavy reading on nitrates and phosphates in sand beds and live rock. It started with my intent to cure my rock. I learned that I was really curing rock versus cooking rock. I found minimal detritus developing in the barrel of rock and plentiful algae sprouts (but strangely not "œbushy" growths of larger masses). I was still making limited progress in the harvested detritus and a solid stream of skimmate from the biomass. But then the skimmate just stopped. I tried some fish food, ammonia, vodka"¦ (By the way, BE CAUTIOUS sending the wife to get your ammonia; she went to the grocery store and brought back innocuous looking ammonia...except for the very fine fine-print "œsurfactant" at the bottom. D@mn near turned my skimmers into Saturn V rocket launches!)

SO, a lot of reading and I realized I had heeded the explicit instructions of "œtotal", "œabsolute", "œcomplete" darkness for cooking rather than curing rock. And the unique differences in algal systems versus bacterial systems. Still on shaky ground but it seems to be rectifying the disconnect between FW nitrates issues with plants out completing algae and SW nitrates and phosphates issues.
http://www.thereeftank.com/forums/f164/how-to-cook-your-rock-66551.html
http://www.thereeftank.com/forums/f362/a-note-on-cooking-rock-156977.html
"the organic phosphates...are bound into the dead bacterial cells. ... bacteria are not going to utilize these phosphates, some can not at all. they need inorganic phosphates [which] we can test for with phosphate test kits... Algae and bacteria are fantastic at uptaking inorganic phosphates. animals are not. they need their phosphates organically bound. [Animals] do convert organic phosphates to inorganic phosphates. why manure is so good as a fertilizer. as long as the dead bacterium are moved out of the LR before being utilized by some other organism for food, which would convert them from organically bound phosphates to inorganic phosphates...then there is going to be net drop in phosphates from the LR." - Reefin' Dude.
http://www.thereeftank.com/forums/f77/smithsonian-tank-crash-200199.html

My revised plan is to forgo the refugium. That tank will be used for live rock continuously cooking. The inorganic phosphates should be bound to the live rock. The continuing darkness should keep the LR in a bacterial mode rather than an algal mode. This would allow bacteria to keep cleaving of the inorganic phosphates and converting them to organic. As they undergo their lifecycle the continuous cleaning (syphoning and skimmer) of bacterial flock pushed out of the LR by turgor. This should deal with the massive PO4 from feeding the FOWLR tank and still keep maintenance to one system.
:dance:

 

[mvsjrs]

Gave the boot the boot! So the project is going again.

First, a month ago, I was able to add light blocking on the exposed three sides of the tank. Since I wanted to assure that I was cleaning the material at the bottom of the tank, I made the front easily removable with a hardboard hung using pipe hangers.

 

[mvsjrs]

I have finished gathering detritus. The idea was to see what particle size was the most common. Here is a picture of the filtered bucket next to the filters. You can see some amount of discoloring is still present. The floating debris is from cutting plastic nearby.

The five filter trays looked as follows:
Upper left is 600μm going counterclockwise 400, 200, 100, and 75μm.

400μm detritus

200μm detritus

100μm detritus

75μm detritus

The final analysis weighed in as follows:

That screams 15% silt to get out. Now some comes out with a 200μm because small particles fill the interstitial spaces between larger particles. Some are "key" to those denitrification regions in DSBs (no judgment). To me, those are all particles I don't want accumulating in a long term closed loop system.

 

[mvsjrs]

Next item was to convert an old, small sump into a skimmer compartment. First I enlarged the cut out where the sponge separated the bioballs compartment from the return pump compartment. Did some funky jig work with the dremel to get into the small space. Acrylic is pretty unfamiliar we me.

 

[mvsjrs]

Fired up and pumpin' water: