Carl_in_Florida
Active member
pclausen said:
I sometimes wonder about that statement. My tank (and life) would be much simplier right now.
Carl
400g system from scratch pictorial
- Thread starter pclausen
- Start date
I sometimes wonder about that statement. My tank (and life) would be much simplier right now.
Carl
Snake~eyes
New member
wow very nice keep the pics coming! 
pclausen
New member
Thanks guys. At this point I have about 350 gallons of RO/DI water in the system. I finally completed the fishroom plumbing, so I'll show some pics detailing it. In this 1st shot, you see the upper and lower RO/DI holding tanks. The upper one gravity feeds the gate valve to the utility sink so I have easy access to RO/DI water.
Btw, my TDS meter is showing my tap water contains 25 ppm, which is nice and low, and inserting the TDS probe into the tank just now gives a perfect 0 ppm reading, so I think I did a good job cleaning the tank and various storage containers before I began the filling process.
Here is a shot of the upper storage tank, showing the stand pipe that drains into the lower tank when the circulation pump between the 2 tanks is running.
This third pic show shows the sw mixing container. That upper pipe supplies RO/DI water via gravity from the holding tank. The 4 ball valves near the sw mix tank allows me to:
1. Gravity fill the sw mix tank.
2. Run sw mix pump in CL for mixing.
3. Pump mixed sw into sump.
As mentioned previously, one of my Mag 9.5 pumps leaked when used externally, so I went ahead and mounted it internally in my sw mix tank. A nice bonus is that doing so allows me to pump more water out of the BRUTE due to the raised center hump.
The ASM G6 has been mounted in the sump. Here you see the gate valve mod and the fact that the pumps are plumbed for recirc. This shot also shows the 1/4" line coming off the RO/DI line. It will feed my dosing pump for the kalk reactor for the auto top-off. Once I determine my ideal sump water height, that IO bucket will be raised and mounted under those 4 1.5" drain pipes to prevent micro bubbles from getting sucked into the return pump inlet. Right now with fw I have zero bubbles, but I suspect that will change once I add my salt.
Another shot of the skimmer showing the overflow from the tank feeding directly into the skimmer body.
And here is the fuge in action. The outlets on the left are from the overflows and will handle whatever water volume I don't send through the skimmer. The outlets on the right are from the sump return pump. This gives me a lot of flexibility as far as how much flow I want through my fuge. Finally, you see the dial drains near the center of the fuge to dump back into the sump. I'm hoping this setup will allow me to have a ball of macro tumbling in there.
And finally a shot of the tank itself with the CL pump and return pump both running.
With all the pumps running and the MH lights on, the water temp is around 77 degrees. Once I have another 75 gallons of water in the fishroom, I suspect the temp will drop a little. I left the A/C off in the house on purpose yesterday, and the temp in the living room got up to about 76 degrees, but the water temp never got above 78. And that was with very little water volume in the fishroom in the basement. I don't think I'll end up needing a chiller.
Once I reach my goal of around 400-420 gallons of total system volume (should be around noon today), I'll be adding my salt and then add my pH and ORP probes. The exhaust fan in the fishroom is able to reduce the relative humidity to about 50%, so I'm leaving the dehumidistat at 55% so that the fan doesn't run all the time.
200# of MI rock is on schedule for me to pick up early Wednesday morning.
A couple of questions:
1. Should I add any sand to the fuge so that the curing of the rocks will seed the sand somewhat (I got Southdown from HD)? Or would I be better off to not add anything else to the system until the curing process is done?
2. For the curing, I'll definitely be putting the rocks on a PVC rack in the display. However, I'm not sure if I should then leave the rack in the tank when I add my sand. The reason being that I don't have any jets/circulation on the bottom of my tank, so I'm worried about being able to clean out in the space between the bottom of the rocks and the top of the sand if I use a rack.
I was thinking that perhaps I'll make the rack so that it raises the rock about 4" and then have a 6" sand bend. This way, at least the lower 4" of the rock isn't buried under the sand, and will prevent any empty pockets that I won't be able to keep clean.
Btw, my TDS meter is showing my tap water contains 25 ppm, which is nice and low, and inserting the TDS probe into the tank just now gives a perfect 0 ppm reading, so I think I did a good job cleaning the tank and various storage containers before I began the filling process.
Here is a shot of the upper storage tank, showing the stand pipe that drains into the lower tank when the circulation pump between the 2 tanks is running.
This third pic show shows the sw mixing container. That upper pipe supplies RO/DI water via gravity from the holding tank. The 4 ball valves near the sw mix tank allows me to:
1. Gravity fill the sw mix tank.
2. Run sw mix pump in CL for mixing.
3. Pump mixed sw into sump.
As mentioned previously, one of my Mag 9.5 pumps leaked when used externally, so I went ahead and mounted it internally in my sw mix tank. A nice bonus is that doing so allows me to pump more water out of the BRUTE due to the raised center hump.
The ASM G6 has been mounted in the sump. Here you see the gate valve mod and the fact that the pumps are plumbed for recirc. This shot also shows the 1/4" line coming off the RO/DI line. It will feed my dosing pump for the kalk reactor for the auto top-off. Once I determine my ideal sump water height, that IO bucket will be raised and mounted under those 4 1.5" drain pipes to prevent micro bubbles from getting sucked into the return pump inlet. Right now with fw I have zero bubbles, but I suspect that will change once I add my salt.
Another shot of the skimmer showing the overflow from the tank feeding directly into the skimmer body.
And here is the fuge in action. The outlets on the left are from the overflows and will handle whatever water volume I don't send through the skimmer. The outlets on the right are from the sump return pump. This gives me a lot of flexibility as far as how much flow I want through my fuge. Finally, you see the dial drains near the center of the fuge to dump back into the sump. I'm hoping this setup will allow me to have a ball of macro tumbling in there.
And finally a shot of the tank itself with the CL pump and return pump both running.
With all the pumps running and the MH lights on, the water temp is around 77 degrees. Once I have another 75 gallons of water in the fishroom, I suspect the temp will drop a little. I left the A/C off in the house on purpose yesterday, and the temp in the living room got up to about 76 degrees, but the water temp never got above 78. And that was with very little water volume in the fishroom in the basement. I don't think I'll end up needing a chiller.
Once I reach my goal of around 400-420 gallons of total system volume (should be around noon today), I'll be adding my salt and then add my pH and ORP probes. The exhaust fan in the fishroom is able to reduce the relative humidity to about 50%, so I'm leaving the dehumidistat at 55% so that the fan doesn't run all the time.
200# of MI rock is on schedule for me to pick up early Wednesday morning.
A couple of questions:
1. Should I add any sand to the fuge so that the curing of the rocks will seed the sand somewhat (I got Southdown from HD)? Or would I be better off to not add anything else to the system until the curing process is done?
2. For the curing, I'll definitely be putting the rocks on a PVC rack in the display. However, I'm not sure if I should then leave the rack in the tank when I add my sand. The reason being that I don't have any jets/circulation on the bottom of my tank, so I'm worried about being able to clean out in the space between the bottom of the rocks and the top of the sand if I use a rack.
I was thinking that perhaps I'll make the rack so that it raises the rock about 4" and then have a 6" sand bend. This way, at least the lower 4" of the rock isn't buried under the sand, and will prevent any empty pockets that I won't be able to keep clean.
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Carl_in_Florida
Active member
I know you probrably thought of this but just in case, don't forget about the water that will be displaced by the live rock.
Great thread. keep up the good work.
Carl
Great thread. keep up the good work.
Carl
keefsama2003
In Memoriam
i would add the sand now and then cure the rock in the tank with the sand. this should help seed the sand as well as get the rock going.
pclausen
New member
xtrstangx said:Couldn't you always pump that out into storage vats and later use it for water changes? Thats what I was going to do when I got my rock.
I don't see why not. The key is to pump out the water before adding the rock, otherwise the water in storage wouldn't be clean.
I plan to pump out 44g and store it in the mixing vat. I also have another 44g BRUTE that isn't plumbed into the system. I'll pump sw into it as well if necessary and be sure to return it first to the system again. I'm not sure exactly how much water 200# of light rock like MI will displace, but I don't see it being more than 88g.
I think adding sand to the display tank before the rock has cured is going to make cleanup difficult. However, I would like to add a 6" bed to the fuge as water from the overflow will dump directly into it, which should help seed it I would think. And it will be a lot easier to clean there since nothing is on top of it. When the time comes to add sand to the display, I can move some from the fuge up to it.
FWIW, I am also starting up a 180 and added sand,salt, rock on the same day....Looks like clam chowder....Hopefully will clear up in a couple of days.
Albert
Check out my thread:
http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=533699
Regards
Albert
Check out my thread:
http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=533699
Regards
pclausen
New member
That sure does look a little on the murky side Albert!
I went ahead and added salt this afternoon. I went w/ 2.5 buckets of IO, each good for 160 gallons. So that works out to right at 400g worth. I'll let is mix overnight and check the specific gravity in the morning. Also got the skimmer going and it already pulled out some stuff. Guess it must have been in the salt...
I also rigged a very temporary auto top-off until I get my dosing pump and kalk reactor. You can see it on the extreme left in this image. My attempt at micro bubble control is on the right.
I also went to HD to pick up the sand that I put in a request to have xferred from another store a while back. Well, they still don't have it but it should be in by the end of the week. I guess that means the rock will be curing with no sand for now.
I went ahead and added salt this afternoon. I went w/ 2.5 buckets of IO, each good for 160 gallons. So that works out to right at 400g worth. I'll let is mix overnight and check the specific gravity in the morning. Also got the skimmer going and it already pulled out some stuff. Guess it must have been in the salt...
I also rigged a very temporary auto top-off until I get my dosing pump and kalk reactor. You can see it on the extreme left in this image. My attempt at micro bubble control is on the right.
I also went to HD to pick up the sand that I put in a request to have xferred from another store a while back. Well, they still don't have it but it should be in by the end of the week. I guess that means the rock will be curing with no sand for now.
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Not sure if anyone mentioned this or not, but you could do an oceanmotions or two, though running two would require a pump with alot of headpressure, or two seperate pumps, and my tank is a 480 and I only have 8 bulkheads drilled in the bottom in various locations which will then have my rockwork built around them with 1" bulkheads reduced to 3\4" loclines, the oceansmotions come in either a 4 or 8 1" outputs from which the water will flow from either 2 or 4 at a time, and it automatically rotates the gates inside the drum about every 90 seconds or something.
I will be taking pictures when I start setting my new tank up in about a month when the basement at our house has been waterproofed and the sump pump installed, then I will begin setting up the aquarium and will take pictures for all to see, and then once its done I am going to partially finish the lower level around the tank lol.
Nice tank and lots of good info, thanks much, and good luck with your reefs.
Frank
I will be taking pictures when I start setting my new tank up in about a month when the basement at our house has been waterproofed and the sump pump installed, then I will begin setting up the aquarium and will take pictures for all to see, and then once its done I am going to partially finish the lower level around the tank lol.
Nice tank and lots of good info, thanks much, and good luck with your reefs.
Frank
pclausen
New member
I tested the specific gravity last night and again this morning. It was 1.026 according to my refractometer on both occasions. So I got pretty lucky with the amount of salt I added.
My water temp has been rising now that the skimmer is running all the time. Those 3 Sedra 9000 pumps have added a couple of degrees to the water temp. It rose overnight to 79.6 degrees by 7 am according to the ACII logs. And the temp in the living room was 66 degrees at that time. Now with the MH lights on and the room temp slowly increasing, the water temp is already up to 80.3 degrees. I was really hoping to avoid having to add a chiller. I'll try having a fan blow over the fuge and/or sump to see if that will help lower the temp a little.
There are a lot of micro bubbles in the tank, so I might need to do something other than a salt bucket for a sump baffle. They are making the CL system very loud as the bubbles are causing snapping sounds in the return plumbing to the manifold. I had the same when I was running just RO/DI water, but the sound disappeared after a few hours. I've had the salt in there for over 12 hours now and its just as loud now as right after the salt was added. I read here that it might take a couple of days for slime to build up, so I'll wait it out. Maybe adding the live rock tomorrow will really "slime" things up and quiet things down.
Will it be a problem to cure the rock in water that is warmer than 80 degrees in case I can't cool it down by running a couple of fans?
My water temp has been rising now that the skimmer is running all the time. Those 3 Sedra 9000 pumps have added a couple of degrees to the water temp. It rose overnight to 79.6 degrees by 7 am according to the ACII logs. And the temp in the living room was 66 degrees at that time. Now with the MH lights on and the room temp slowly increasing, the water temp is already up to 80.3 degrees. I was really hoping to avoid having to add a chiller. I'll try having a fan blow over the fuge and/or sump to see if that will help lower the temp a little.
There are a lot of micro bubbles in the tank, so I might need to do something other than a salt bucket for a sump baffle. They are making the CL system very loud as the bubbles are causing snapping sounds in the return plumbing to the manifold. I had the same when I was running just RO/DI water, but the sound disappeared after a few hours. I've had the salt in there for over 12 hours now and its just as loud now as right after the salt was added. I read here that it might take a couple of days for slime to build up, so I'll wait it out. Maybe adding the live rock tomorrow will really "slime" things up and quiet things down.
Will it be a problem to cure the rock in water that is warmer than 80 degrees in case I can't cool it down by running a couple of fans?
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scotty1234
New member
pclausen said:
No.
pclausen
New member
Evaporative cooling
Evaporative cooling
Ok, my water temp is now at 82.2 degrees and rising. In looking at my temperature log entries in AquaNotes, the temp was holding steady at around 79.5 degrees until the MH lights came on at 7 this morning. The temp has been increasing at a steady rate of 0.4 degrees/hour since then. In addition to the MH being on, the temp in the living room has been increasing as well (since I'm at the office, I can't tell just how much but I would guess it has gone from 65 to around 75 or so by now), so I'm beginning to realize that I'm going to need some sort of supplemental cooling to maintain a constant temperature. I was hoping having the fishroom in a cool basement would mean that I only had to worry about heating the water, not cooling it as well.
That skimmer of mine with 3 90w submerged pumps are messing up my plans. They appear to be acting just like a 270w heater would that is stuck on all the time. Before turning the skimmer on, the ACII kept the water steady between 77.7 and 78.0 degrees.
Soo, since I already have an ACII and a temp probe, and the ability to turn an electrical device on and off based on water temp, why not try evaporative cooling to deal with my heat issue? I got auto top-off already up and running, so I can deal with evaporation losses.
I stopped by HD and picked up a 20" box fan for like 10 bucks. That sucker can really move some air. My thinking is to plug it into an X10 relay and have the ACII turn it on when the temp goes above, say 78.3 degrees and turn it back off when the temp drops to 78.0 degrees. The ACII is already programmed to turn the heater on when the temp drops to 77.7 and back off at 78.0.
I'm thinking of mounting the box fan to blow over my 100g fuge as it already has a lot of water movement across the surface. I'm curious if others are controlling heat in this manner and how much additional humidity I'm going to create in my fishroom. As it stands, I don't notice any difference in humidity when I enter the room and I'd like to keep it that way.
I'm wondering if there is a catch to this $10 approach vs. spending hundreds of dollars on a real chiller? Assuming I can deal with the evaporation and additional humidity, this approach will cost a lot less, both in up front cost and ongoing energy consumption.
Evaporative cooling
Ok, my water temp is now at 82.2 degrees and rising. In looking at my temperature log entries in AquaNotes, the temp was holding steady at around 79.5 degrees until the MH lights came on at 7 this morning. The temp has been increasing at a steady rate of 0.4 degrees/hour since then. In addition to the MH being on, the temp in the living room has been increasing as well (since I'm at the office, I can't tell just how much but I would guess it has gone from 65 to around 75 or so by now), so I'm beginning to realize that I'm going to need some sort of supplemental cooling to maintain a constant temperature. I was hoping having the fishroom in a cool basement would mean that I only had to worry about heating the water, not cooling it as well.
That skimmer of mine with 3 90w submerged pumps are messing up my plans. They appear to be acting just like a 270w heater would that is stuck on all the time. Before turning the skimmer on, the ACII kept the water steady between 77.7 and 78.0 degrees.
Soo, since I already have an ACII and a temp probe, and the ability to turn an electrical device on and off based on water temp, why not try evaporative cooling to deal with my heat issue? I got auto top-off already up and running, so I can deal with evaporation losses.
I stopped by HD and picked up a 20" box fan for like 10 bucks. That sucker can really move some air. My thinking is to plug it into an X10 relay and have the ACII turn it on when the temp goes above, say 78.3 degrees and turn it back off when the temp drops to 78.0 degrees. The ACII is already programmed to turn the heater on when the temp drops to 77.7 and back off at 78.0.
I'm thinking of mounting the box fan to blow over my 100g fuge as it already has a lot of water movement across the surface. I'm curious if others are controlling heat in this manner and how much additional humidity I'm going to create in my fishroom. As it stands, I don't notice any difference in humidity when I enter the room and I'd like to keep it that way.
I'm wondering if there is a catch to this $10 approach vs. spending hundreds of dollars on a real chiller? Assuming I can deal with the evaporation and additional humidity, this approach will cost a lot less, both in up front cost and ongoing energy consumption.
How bout this fan, its what I use and is much smaller plus I think moves just as much air if not more than the box fan you got.
http://www.livingincomfort.com/sthiveblfan6.html
I got ours from walmart for 40 bucks but could not find a link to a picture from thier site, but im sure they have them still in the store, and its like a mini furnace blower lol, it works great, no chiller and our tank never gets over 80 and usually is below with us running 3 250watt halides within 7-8 inches over the waters surface on a 125 gallon tank.
Check it out, and good luck with your reefs.
Frank
http://www.livingincomfort.com/sthiveblfan6.html
I got ours from walmart for 40 bucks but could not find a link to a picture from thier site, but im sure they have them still in the store, and its like a mini furnace blower lol, it works great, no chiller and our tank never gets over 80 and usually is below with us running 3 250watt halides within 7-8 inches over the waters surface on a 125 gallon tank.
Check it out, and good luck with your reefs.
Frank
pclausen
New member
Thanks for the link Frank. So a more concentrated flow of air directly over the surface is what its about vs. a large volume of air spread out over a larger area? I guess one would have to watch to make sure the airflow isn't so strong as to cause the actual water to blow out!
I'll stop by Wal-Mart on my way home and have a look at what they have. This is the 11th hour before the rock goes in the tank, so I want to be as prepared as possible!
I'll stop by Wal-Mart on my way home and have a look at what they have. This is the 11th hour before the rock goes in the tank, so I want to be as prepared as possible!
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