45 Galllon Cube. My dream tank...only smaller!

[chrishayes]

Now ill give you a sneak peek at my new light mount. Still have to let the touch up paint dry for a few days to avoid chips.

Using this

I did this

I used a gromet that I got from the auto store to keep the wire from chafing but the wire itself is called SO cord and its very thick and durable insulation. I still think its gotta have some protection from the metal edge. I used a plastic bushing for the bottom of the conduit.

Now this is against NEC code, you cannot run this type of wire through conduit, nor are you allowed to use romex through conduit. But, shhhhh I wont tell if you dont! THe issue is that if the live conductor were to somehow touch the metal conduit there is no equipment ground on the conduit so it would be electrified instead of being a dead short. Its a concern but I do know the strength of the SO cord after watching bulldozers drive back and forth over it repeatedly on every jobsite ive ever been on. Thats my disclaimer.

 

[chrishayes]

Hey Bro,

Read thru your whole thread....and amazed at your DIY skills....

thanks for posting the link on my thread and i appreciate your comments on my build thread...do keep following.

And you do have an impressive workshop there...
I can imagine your sense of pride when ya build things on your own and they turn out spectacular...

Your rock work i like that...very similar to what i like to do, a balance of Esthetics and natural....


For your tank capacity balling should be done with precise control, so do invest on a good quality dosing pump. Balling works to its best potential when fully automated.

Keep us posted...

And i welcome all your suggestions on my thread...your a veteran reefer and master DIY-er :lol2:

:beer:

I wouldnt say master...come on have you seen some of the builds on here?:beachbum:

Yeah, I have a full auto dosing setup, if youd read the thread like you said you did then youd know that!:wavehand: Still im not convinced that adding extra trace elements to a standard cal/alk/mg solution is a good thing to do...I mean, how do you know youre actually depleting those elements or if it even matters to the corals we grow?

 

[Reef_Noob]

I wouldnt say master...come on have you seen some of the builds on here?:beachbum:

Yeah, I have a full auto dosing setup, if youd read the thread like you said you did then youd know that!:wavehand: Still im not convinced that adding extra trace elements to a standard cal/alk/mg solution is a good thing to do...I mean, how do you know youre actually depleting those elements or if it even matters to the corals we grow?

Hiya Chris
I had seen that ur using dosing pumps
What I meant to say was if ur planning on the balling method it's more better getting a 3 pump doser like the profilux or fauna Marin
These pumps are configurable for accurate control.
Yes the balling technique is quite debatable. Iv known people for whom balling had done wonders and to some nothing special happened.
If u ask me I just wanted to try that and see how it goes for me.
It's like trying the European cuisine :strange:
Variety is the spice of life , right!

 

[marrstarr]

cool build

 

[chrishayes]

So, it freakin happened again. Let me preface all this by saying, a toms aqualifter costs $14 and should not be a relied upon piece of equipment, even in a temporary situation such as mine. Im an idiot, please dont follow me over the cliff!

Every night before I go to bed since my livestock has been in a temp rubbermaid, I use a 1gal jug filled with full strength kalk with a aqualifter pump sucking the mixture out and up to the awaurium for topoff. This is not my normal way of adding cal. I use a dosing pump and 2 part hooked to an rkl because its much safer and controlled so I am taken out of the equation.

ANyhow, I always plug the auqalifter in then go set the timer on the stove for how ever long I need to let it run for then go unplug or reset the timer for more topoff. Well, last night the auqalifter decided to RADICALLY change the amount it added from a dribble to a firehose! Of course I didnt know it was doing it cause I was watchin tv waiting for the timer to go off. When it did, I went to the tank and heard that wonderfull sound of a pump running dry. It was the aqualifter, it added the entire gallon of kalk in 5 minutes instead of maybe half a liter that it normally does.

White tank, coral bleached, unhappy owner. I swear I think my livestock would be better off dealing with .25ppm of ammonia in the new tank than relying on me to manually care for them. Im not sure how much of a loss ill end up with from this event but really all things considered im just amazed some of the corals are still alive at all. I did about a 75% waterchange last night immediately following the od and this morning, this is what it looks like.

Believe it or not, the hardest hit looks to be my oldest coral, the hammerspawn. With poccis and pavona/porites being close behind. The acros look terrible but they still have slight PE and have only paled in color not fully bleached like the porites. My clump of cheato looks like my grandmas hair...ill tell ya, if you want to bind up phosphate real quick and kill and type of hair algae, try this!

God help me.

 

[chrishayes]

Boy, as if things in the temp tank werent bad enough, the new tank has byropsis. I noticed one of the rocks that I bought from a local reefer had started to grow some hair algae on it a week or so ago but just shrugged it off as typical with all the eleveated nutes from the cycle. Well, no I have little ferns growing all over the glass in the fuge along with slightly less in number in the main tank. Awesome.

I yanked the suspect rock and spent over an hour with a razor blade and airline siphon trying to get every last strand out before it gets outta hand but I know all to well that this is impossible. I mean its growing in the main tank with no light but the ambient through the sliding door. I dont know if I should try a total blackout for a week as all I have is cheato and ulva in the fuge and nothing in the main. Its that or tech m.

So far this tanks not starting out so well! Ehhh take the good with the bad in this hobby. I just seem to get a WHOLE lot more of the bad...

 

[Dana42078]

That sucks!! I def feel your pain! Keep positive. There's always set backs in this hobby.

 

[chrishayes]

That sucks!! I def feel your pain! Keep positive. There's always set backs in this hobby.

Yep, thats how I look at it too. Ive had everything bad that can happen aside from aefw in my history so this is nothing new. However, I thought I was going to be able to limit issues this time around by going with mostly dead rock and seeding it with fully cooked rock from a local reefers stock. Oh well, it happens.

I will be leaving lights out on the whole system along with raising mg with tech m along with MB7 loading over the next few weeks. I tested a little under .25ppm of ammonia and I am now seeing nitrates of around 10ppm so the cycle is nearing its end. THis is with continued addition of 6-10 sinking pellet food per every couple days. A decent water change will be done today with siphoning of all the little specs of byropsis I missed the last time.

Wish me luck.

 

[chrishayes]

I recieved most of the last items on my purchase list as far as equipment and additives. The stunner strip reflectors along with extra po4 reagents for the hanna meter were backorderd so I dont know when ill see those. Below are the things ive recieved.

Mb7 for bacterial system and kent tech m for the byropsis

Hanna 713 po4 chlorimeter

mogul mount EXTREMELY bright moonlight. May be too bright honestly but ill only be using it for an hour or so after lights out just to help fish and coral slowly shut down to avoid jumping from the stress.

Rio stainless coral clippers. Ive been having to remove coral to cut them as ive been using carbon steel dikes to cut them to avoid adding any metal to the tank. These will alow me to take cuttings intank.

2 453nm 12" stunner strips for actinic/dawn dusk lighting and power supply

2 75w eheim/jager heaters. I prefer using two heaters to one in case one fails the other can take up the slack until I can get a replacement. Theyll both be controlled by the rkl along with having an alarm for just slightly under set temp so that I know if one is not working. I will have the dials set to 80 degrees but the rkl will be set to 77.5 that way if the rkl fails the heaters will still work on their own.

 

[chrishayes]

And as an electrician that has been hospitalized twice for 277V electrocution, this is a must have item imo. I also have the tanks power plugged into a GFCI except for the mj1200 in the tank so that if the gfci trips I will still have at least some water movement. This is plugged into a seperate circuit also protected by a gfci.

 

[chrishayes]

Got a bunch of things goin right now so I guess ill start with the groung probe. My career as an electrician stemmed from being shocked by my first reef tank back when I was 17. I somehow got ahold of some slick brand new to market, pc lights. Only prob was that they were in pieces. So I slapped a bunch of wires together with ductape(god, couldnt even use electrical tape...) and double sided taped the ballasts to a wooden hinged top hood. Well, everytime I opened the hood and stuck my arm in the tank id get zapped! I just got sick of it so I sent letters(yeah, im only 30 years old and it just seems so arcaic to say) actual snail mail letters to the manufacturers for wiring diagrams. Got those and realized that all the symbols on it were no better than if they were written in french. So I got a job as an electrical apprentice and enrolled in IEC trade school and the rest is history! Still kick myself for getting this job for the summer break from college. Needless to say I made double what I was paid at the lfs and that made it difficult to justify going back to school in the fall along with the degrade in pay. Oh well.

Anyways, I dont think ive ever had a tank that didnt shock me. Even my current tank got me in a strange way. When I was up on a stepstool measuring my light hanger, my chest hit the top rim in the corner and I kept getting a slight shock. So, I took out the meter to check it out. For anyone that doesnt know how to do this, ill explain.

First, set your meter to VAC 200

Youll need to have test leads for this.

Insert the black probe into a ground thats either the wall plug or a power strip like here. Make sure your probe tip is contacting the metal bands inside.

Then youll need to insert the red lead into the tank water while everything is running, do this while holding the black lead in the ground.

Give the meter a few minutes to settle. If you have anymore than .01 or so volts, you need to find the problem. Do this by unplugging one thing at a time until you find the thing that is leaking voltage into the tank. For me, it was a hydor heater.

I pulled the heater and replaced it with the two eheim/jager 75watt heaters.

Once I did this the meter read .04 which is pretty normal as a meter does have an error range and its not much to worry about honestly. However, I wanted to make sure that even in the event of equipment failure that doesnt trip the gfci, I would be protected along with my livestock. So I installed a ground probe. Once this was installed, my meter read 0.00. Perfect!

 

[chrishayes]

Here are some photos and a bit of a description of the probe install. Its very straight forward but for me it is an area with little access so that made it more difficult. So sorry for the picture quality.

Install is as simple as removing a coverplate screw from your receptacle, adding the ground ring from the probe, tightening the screw back down then inserting the probe in the water somewhere. I do reccomend that you remove the coverplate and make sure that you in fact have a true grounded receptacle and that the wire is tight on the ground screw before continuing.

 

[chrishayes]

I picked these up as well. They are true surge protectors, not power strips. We get a lot of fast power flashes here along with outages plus our fair share of lightning storms so this is another form of cheap protection since there is a substantial amount of financial investment plugged into them. Also, they are black so they match the other items under the stand much better.

 

[chrishayes]

Well, photobucket is down so ill have to finish the updates tomorrow. Sorry.

 

[chrishayes]

This is what I chose for moonlighting. Its a reefbrite supposedly universal mogul mount...yeah right. Definitaly not made for lumenmax fixtures but thats not gonna stop a man with tools! Here is the finshed product but I will detail the mods I had to make as long as photobucket allows.

 

[chrishayes]

In this photo you can see the structure to the left has two slots in it. These are meant to allow the moonlight to be sandwiched in between the mogul itself and the base that its mounted to.

With the lumenmax2 that I have, this does not work. SO, I had to cut this bracket down in order to mount it. I used the lip of the mogul endcap portion of the fixture to mount it to. I first checked to make sure the lumenmax was made of aluminum and it was. If it werent I wouldve chose a different route due to the oxidation electrolisis that occurs between al and carbon steel. I first made the cut to the proper height to give me a mounting tab that I could put screws through.

I predrilled the holes even though the screws I used have self tapping ends. This is so that the screw doesnt drill out the al so much that there are no thread cut. Doing it this way you have threads all the way through the al and the fixture itself.

I used this product on the screws before attaching them. I did this because im not sure what metal the screws are made of. If they are in fact carbon steel, putting them in al without a antioxidizing agent such as nolox or this antisieze, it will corrode quickly not to mention be frozen in place.

 

[chrishayes]

Ok photobuckets back up.

ANyhow, after mounting the light to the endcap, there was interference with the reflector material.

After whipping out the ol dremel, I cut and deburred enough material out to allow the led to not deform the reflector.

Put it back together and viola!

In the photos none of the screws were tight so it looks crooked. Its not once finished. Turned out nice and like I said, this thing may indeed be TOO bright. Time will tell.

 

[chrishayes]

Now its on to the main actinics ill be using. I chose stunner strips because they are very slim, have available reflectors and the price was right at 2 for $50 at a recent lfs sale. I had to order the power supply seperately because the lfs wanted $40 for it and I needed some other items from an online vendor so I got it for $17. The reflectors were an additional $6.99 a piece. Unfortunatly, they were backordered which make mock up difficult as I dont know how they will affect mounting.

I am attaching these to my lumenmax's sides but dont want to block the light spread so im attaching them outboard of the footprint. I can only use one of the mounting screw holes because of the way they are on alternate side on the stunners. I will be using the supplied 3M doublesided tape after cutting a portion off so you dont see it from above. I will likely add more tape the whole length of the stunner for good measure. They dont weight much and are fully waterproof so if they do fall off its no big deal.

Here I have removed the stickers from the back along with cutting and removing a good bit of the 3M tape to make it look cleaner once installed.

The bottom one is pre modded. It also had a sticker right in the middle that was like a barcode but I removed it as well. I used goo gone to remove the adhesive film that was left. The top one is the finished product. Ill add a stip of extra double sided tape the whole length and will be using one screw for attaching. The wires will all be ran inside of the lumenmax for a clean install. Ill post results later on if I get it finished.

 

[chrishayes]

First, Id like to post some photos of my QT setup.

It is a standard aga 10 gallon with a hang on back filter that I filled with two different sponges. One is coarse weave and the other is a medium weave. This has been running on the new tank since it was setup and has been seeded with MB7 multiple times. I also have a maxijet 400 pointed straight up to increase gas exchange and provide a little more random flow. There is a 50watt stealth heater along with a glass thermo for easy bleaching between QT's. The hood is one that came with the "kit" from wallyworld that uses two standard A style lamps(the little long round incandecent type) that I changed out for 18w 6200k pc twisties.

Its nothing fancy nor should it be. It came in handy today when the lfs got in a new shipment of corals and were still running their 1/2 off sale. I picked up an acro that unless it changes from its current state, is a garf bonsai colored wild collected coral. I know this because of what the dip revealed(see below). And, I also picked up a sunset monty. Could be a rainbow but its hard to tell when under crappy lighting.

I also have all my zoa covered live rocks from the old tank that ive tried getting rid of but cant seem to find a taker. The lfs will only take them as "donations" pffffhhh yeah, ok. Anyhow, ill keep them hangin around til someone wants them.

 

[chrishayes]

Now, on to the tricky stuff. I have a few things that I need help id'ing. The first is a type of caulerpa.

It was told to me by the guy I got it from that it was a variety that a guy who gave a presentation for our local club suggested to use in place a cheato as it uptakes nutrients faster than it. Its definately doing that in my fuge! Its growing by the minute it seems. I asked if it was as invasive as other forms of caulerpa and was told that it wasnt. Im not real sure about that as it does have fairly strong holdfasts.

Next is a crab/shrimp that came off the acro I got today when I was doing its dip before the QT tank.

Now, I believe for 99% that this one is a typical acro crab that shouldnt cause any harm but It did not let go during the iodine bath and I only noticed it once it was in the QT(this alone proves that dipping is not enough in our hobby). I dip hard too!