700 gallon tank, or how i spent my daughters inheritance

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i am running carbon and ozone along with the skimmer. i don't think the water is really yellow. which picture are you judging that from?

i am thinking of taking the skimmer off the tank while the infauna matures.

i am only feeding the tank about 2 grams per day of food. not enough to need even the skimmer i have.

i do have a big skimmer for later when i can have a real sump. although i still believe that if the infauna and other exporting mechanisms are in place and mature it will process the waste in the tank.

my 260 has not had a skimmer for about 2 years. and i have sps corals in there along with lots of sponge life, etc. see earlier pix.

i do have a few corals in the tank now.

still only the one lawnmower blenny.

corals are growing.

i just found out some bad news though.

MONTI EATING NUDI'S

look what i found after i thought i had QT'd. Actually it was Steve Garrett of Garrett's Acropolis who saw them in the new tank within 30 seconds. i am so grateful he came by. i know he saved me a lot of grief. thank you Steve.

i found a couple of my other frags with a couple Nudi's that i got rid of and i put the once infected frags in a diffent tank.

how long can they live without a host?

what is the lifecycle?

are they Hermaphroditic?

do they have any known predators?

how far can they travel? i had one frag that i found yesterday in my main tank with the mother colonies that was infected with quite a few mature nudi's and eggs also. i destroyed that frag. it was on eggcrate on the side of the tank. could the babies make their way down the tank and up the rockwork to the mother colony?
montieatingNudi.jpg


i have looked at the remaining frags under a magnifying glass until i was blurry eyed and found no more Nudi's. i have sequestered them iin the tank on the side on eggcrate far from the rockwork.

i will also remove them at least once a week and look at them with the magnifying glass again.
IMG_5584.jpg


the algae is being eaten by the urchins and blenny. still quite a bit though.
IMG_5561.jpg


IMG_5575.jpg


i hope to get some more LR in the tank soon. i have to still drill it out for my mounting system.
 
a thought about the yellow color you think you are seeing. that is only sunlight on the tank, 6500K. people are used to a more blue light from halides. could that be it?

Carl
 
update-

i got a couple more nudi's off the qt Monti's ten days ago, none spotted in the main tank so far. i hope i dodged that bullet. thank you Steve Gerrett.

i got some new additions to the tank. a reefer that had to break down his tank. no additions in three years. i examined all closely and added them to the display tank.

soon there after i noticed a new pile of sand next to the new Platygyra. then i saw the three inch white crab with black claws. damn. the picture is very bad. hopefully i can get a better one later if i can catch it. the previous owner told me there has not been any coral eating. he only had a few fish and occasionally one would disappear and he just put it down to "a fish just disappearing".

i looked right at it while examining the Platygyra and did not see it. it is big enough that it must have been in plain sight too!!! it is under the rock just to the right.
sorry again about the photo but this is freaking me a out a bit.
crab6-08.jpg


another little problem.
acrortn1.jpg


acrortn2.jpg

the acro had been in the tank for a couple of weeks and within one day RTN's and was gone. i think maybe it was in a lower flow area. all other corals are fine
there is still quite a lot of short algae on much of the rockwork. i think i need some more herbivores. these are not keeping up
IMG_5561.jpg


lawmowerblenny6-08.jpg
 
I used a tailspot blennie and a cherub angel in my tank. Not near as big as your system by any means, but they never bothered corals or clams.
 
OMG! That clam is HUGE!!!! If you have fish disappearing, I'd suspect that monster! Keep all small children away from it too.
 
i forget my chemistry. maybe someone out there knows the calculations for the latent heat of vaporization.

i want to set up an evapoative cooler for my tank. my tank is 700 gallons including rock, etc. really just a fan blowing across a wet towel suspended over the sump and wicking water from the sump.

how much water do i need to evaporate to lower the temp 1 degree F?

right now i am evaporating about ten gallons per day. i just set up a fan on my sump and it does seem to be helping. we are having some of the hottest days of the year right now. it is 84 outside and inside my house at 3pm.

the tank is 85-87 depending on which themometer i want to believe.

i have cut off the sun to the tank.

i need to get the sump etc set up in the garage which is below grade on two sides.

Carl
 
it's way too late for a ground loop. i read the threads i could find but never found anyone that had successfully used one. one thread went on for many many pages but seemingly all theory and no reality.

my 1200 gallon in ground tank is for NSW storage from UCSB. i could possibly run a heat exchanger through it with one of the return lines to the tank. i have a heat exchanger on a closed loop with a tankless water heater for heating my koi pond.


Steve Garrett of http://www.garretts-acropolis.com only uses fans to cool his setup which is outside in SoCal and he is more inland than i am. he thinks i will be fine once i get the sump setup with some fans. if i have to i can close up the house and run the AC. haven't done that yet.

there are not many days as hot as today.
 
I don't think a heat exchanger will work well with the NSW storage tank because it will lose it ability to cool rather quickly. I know ground loops work and I thought I had posted links for you in the past but water under the bridge I guess.

I currently cool my tank with fans so I know it can be done, and if you build the cooling tower, it will be even more efficient. The plus side isthat te more you evap., the more you can supplement with kalkwasser.
 
my 20,000 gallon koi pond can be heated by the heat exchanger. i think the tank could be cooled in a similar manner but i think fans will do it.

the water that returns to the tank always passed through the heat exchanger which only turns on the pump that circulates the water through the underground tank when cooling is needed.

here is a crummy picture of the hidden crab.
crab6-08closeup.jpg


i haven't seen it again since the first day. it is about 3-3.5 ".

it is all white except the claw tips.

Carl
 
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=12795027#post12795027 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Reefski's
my 20,000 gallon koi pond can be heated by the heat exchanger. i think the tank could be cooled in a similar manner but i think fans will do it.

the water that returns to the tank always passed through the heat exchanger which only turns on the pump that circulates the water through the underground tank when cooling is needed.

here is a crummy picture of the hidden crab.
crab6-08closeup.jpg


i haven't seen it again since the first day. it is about 3-3.5 ".

it is all white except the claw tips.

Carl
Click to expand...
that is a very destructive Crab!!! I had one and it ate my RBTA,
ripped apart zoo's and picked the bejeus out of the bases of several of my acros!
use a bottle trap and bait it witha cube of frozen food
get rid of it!!!
 
the crab you have looks like this crab that i used to have. the one in my photograph looks to be more grey than yours, but when its in the tank under different lighting it goes through a shade shift and looks much lighter in color than it actually is. i actually had 2 of these things in my 10g and never had any problems with them untill i took out the sand bed. i think they may have been feeding off worms and large amphipods i had swarming the sandbed. they would have made an easy meal for a scavenging crab, but i eventually pulled the sandbed for a switch to bare bottom. after that i think they lost thier easy food source and i found them eating montipora digitata. i literally caught them in the branches digging into the coral. i wish i would have gotten a picture of it! one day i found a frag broken off of the mother colony, and one of the crabs was wrapped around the frag...

DSC04386.jpg
 
I've had a simillar crab. He made a great addition to my sump. I put him in a section where he could eat all the incomming detritus & food scraps , he did a wonderfull job ... called him Boris.
 
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