Nope no silicone on the starboard. It is starting to curl very slightly on the edges were the rock is far away but no big deal.
Colby (the copperband butterfly) is now in the main tank. I kept heim in hypo for 3.5 weeks then raised the salinity up over 3 days and put him in the display yesterday. He's doing well. Still a little hesitent about eating but definitly eating mysis when I blend it with mussel or when I trick him and put it in a mussel shell. If it's floating though he doesn't look at it. I'll continue to work with him as I'm at least seeing progress.
I did have 3 real small mejano's found on the giant rock and he took them out yesterday
At least he's eating the bad stuff!
I put a couple tester acro frags in there also over the weekend. They seem to be doing well. Nice polyp extension, etc. The water is rock solid. I also did my first water change yesterday. ~60G or 10%. All went smooth and the system with plumbing worked great. It really is a peice of cake that took about 15 minutes with no worries of spilling, etc.
Speaking of I guess I'll start there.
Here is a pic of my water setup. The top container is for RODI. It has float valves connected to the RODI unit. I created a setup where it doesn't cycle often at all! (More on that in a minute)
OK so how does the water get to the sump? Here is a pic of the bottom of the top container.
The left is just a half inch bulkhead with a short length of pipe and a ball valve. It's how I fill the bottom container. On the right is a 1/4" tubing that leads to a solenoid (more in a sec) that is activated when the float switch in the sump is on.
Here is the solinoids. I have 2 for redundancy. If both failed open that would be major disaster! I've never heard of one failing open (only closed) but I'm not taking the chance!
From there it goes to the sump.
You can see my media reactors and then the calcium reactor in and out also. All the reactors (including the calcium) are fed by a single maxi 900.
The float valves are simply double for redundancy. One is ~1" higher then the other in case the first fails. I simply built a PVC support rather then worry about dtilling the sump of coming up with some over the side thing.
Ok so how does the water get to the top container in the first place. Well I have 2 solinoids on the input of the RODI then the output of the RODI goes here.
(Sorry for the crappy pic)
If you read back on page 2 I mention copying a design from TOTM to minimize the on/off cycles with your RODI. This does exactly that. The water enters the PVC through the blue ball valve. When the water level in the rubbermaid is low the water dissipates out through the holes near the bottom. When the water level is rising the air is forced out of the 2 check valves in the PVC. When the water level falls however no air can get in so while outside the water level goes down, inside the PVC the water level stays constent. Eventually when the outside water level falls below the holes the air enters (or more appropraitly the water falls out) and the float switch kick on and it fills back up to the level of the float switch. Works awesome! Now It only kicks on every couple days for about 3 hours ratehr then several times daily!
