A pair of EcoWheel tanks in the making

Brett,
What do you use for clean up crew in your reef? Matt

P.S. Still dealing with heat. It's 100% related to the MHs. I've got fans blowing in the tank and on water, I'm evaporating 4 gallons/day. I've ordered some orion AC fans, hopefully they will arrive soon and I'll have the lights vented completely outside the tank. As it stands now I'm sending room air into the lights, and it vents right near the exhaust port which vents outside. I did discover one potential problem using the bathroom vent setup. I didn't create a vent to bring in air - I read a post where air can be sucked in through the hot water heater exhaust. I'll need to speak to a HVAC person and figure how significant this problem is.

Matt
 
Hi Matt,

At any given time time I keep a couple dozen of each blue and red leg hermits of various sizes.

A few dozen astrea snails, a dozen or so turbos, some nassarius, some bumblebees, and a couple three, four of those big teakwells.

I also have a couple tropical abalone.

2 pincushion urchins

My red and green serpent stars that have been with me since 1996/1997

Several hundred of those tiny snails that we all seem to have, as well as probably a thousand mini brittle stars.

That's about it. Not enough sand to sift in the reef tank so I keep no gobies or the like in that side.

Brett
 
Good quistion, in Putawaywet's pictures there's a snail on the return gate. How about it Putawaywet, ever happen to you?
 
Not the big ones, but those little micro ones that you get all over the tank, those make it into the EcoWheel. Along with the small brittle stars, limpits, aiptasia and an army of pods. However, the pods are all down in the bottom of the filter box, they seem to avoid the wheel itself.

Brett
 
Brett or Caevan,
I'm not running with bioballs, and I'm not thrilled about the bubbles in my tank. The difference between when the pump is off compared to when running is amazing. I'm almost tempted to put some live rock in the base of the eco-wheel chamber. Do you think this will help, or will this cause the same issue as the bioballs leading to nitrate production.

I thought about putting a screen in front of the weir, but I think the bubbles will just go over the top if it impedes flow any.

Did you ever decide on a way to introduce carbon?

Matt.
 
At the beginning of October, I emptied and cleaned the Eco-wheel tank, I was tempted to completely remove the bio balls but in the end I put back a quarter of the original amount. Initially I notices some micro bubbles coming through but now, I can't say there is any differance compared to having the orignal amount.

I should add even with the recommended amount of bio balls I never registered a nitrate reading with my Salifert test kit.
 
I had no access to seeded mats so I basically started of with a bare wheel. I started the tank from scratch so initially there was on ly sand in the tank which I seeded with live sand and a couple of pieces of live rock. After about 4 weeks of running like that I added the live rock.
It would have taked about 6 to 8 weeks to get a good covering of algae.
 
Wow. Mine has a way's to go. I've got 0 nitrates and 0 ammonia, (actually always have been 0 since beginning the tank). But the algea growth on 2/3 of the wheel isn't great. I think I just have too low of a bioload to support algea growth. I started advancing the feed rate and now I've got dinoflagelates on the sandbed. Hard to wait for the system to mature. I purchased a couple crown conch to help the sandbed, but at least one of them has a taste for snails.
 
You will find that about one third of the wheel will alway have much thicker growth than the other 2 thirds . this is because the wheel does not spin at a constant speed. The area of the wheel which is exposed to light at the time it sloes down to almost a stop or even stops will get the most algae growth as much as 2 to 3 time the growth found on the rest of the wheel.

WHen I added the new live rock I had a bit of die of which would have helped incease the nutrients in the tank at the time.
 
I've seen that before. Its an RCSD in a can. I cant believe he got a patent on it!
RCSD power is the basis for the setup I've been working on- using its output to drive various processes at random flow.
 
RCSD in a can
Click to expand...
Thanks for the clue because that was killing me!!! I think I can figure out how it works now, maybe.

I read this yesterday, looked throught the web page, and put it out of my mind. Last night I was re-reading one of the first chapters of Dynamic Aquaria and Adey was describing this very device, or one with equivalent operation!! Now thats some weird serendipity. He went on to talk about adjusting the volume and frequency of the bursts to create a rocking action in the aquaria - like the Tunze Wavebox.

This really gets my juices flowing because I used a large RCSD (>10% tank volume) for a couple of years until we moved the tank to the new house. The RCSD never really impressed me that much for flow dynamic. But the air lift on the tank was plumbed in parallel to the RCSD, and turned off when the RCSD fired and ramped up as the RCSD filled. That created most of the dynamic flow in the tank. This device takes characteristics from both the RCSD and the air lift and combine them. Very, very cool. I don't know why anybody running a coral grow-out farm would use anything but this. Efficiency, dependability, gas exchange, and potential wave action, all in one package.

Theres going to be complications to using something like this in a show tank. My RCSD was on the other side of a wall with an enclosed exhaust, and you could still hear it fire. And that big burst of air/spray has to be dealt with.

But thanks very much for pointing it out!! I had written off air for the tank in this house we just moved into because of some design constraints where the tank will go. This device opens up possibilities I hadn't considered before. I don't usually get this juiced up over a gadget. Maybe this summer I need to embark on another air-device experiment in the backyard!
 
Do it Howard! Your setup has been a great inspiration.

Long ago, at their original website, they showed you step by step how the air and water flowed through the device. Shortly after (and I see they copied the same graphic on the new webpage), they blocked out the detail.

I have been working on some cool RCSD stuff, and when completed, will put it out here. One of which is using the RCSD to drive a RATS (rotating algal turf scrubber) that does not have the pocket in it.

Brett,
Where are the pics from the beginning?
 
Wow! I drop off the grid for a bit and all you closet engineer types are still kicking around the ideas :)

Pics? Well, what's everyones interest? I have the ones from back when the cabinetry was being setup, early plumbing & electrical too. Also a nice pic of the safety loop built into piping that feeds air to the uplift. Speakup and I'll post it if I have it.

Otherwise....

The Sweetwater pump is working like a charm, no more probs with the wheel rotation, and all other mechanical components are still working great.

Except, for my IceCap 660 ballast powering my T5's. I lost that back in November and by the time I got it replaced I had a few more livestock losses. Nothing major, mostly the newer stuff I had picked up a couple months ealier.

On a side note, anyone care to speculate on the spontaneous dissapearance of my aptasia plague? I'm talking about the hundreds of the little buggers that had set up shop in the lower portions of the EcoWheel filter as well as the effluent boxes these last 2 years. They're all gone! Literally, poof! Just up and vanished over a period of a few weeks or so.

My Tunze pumps are doing great also, I set them up so they are right next to the influent boxes and are aimed in the same direction as the water entering the tank. I'm using interval #2 with a 6 hour alternating duration. Meaning, 1 pump pulses on/off for 6 hours, then gives it up to the other which does that same in reverse. When my lights go out the photocell powers down the pumps to like 25% for the night.

Other than that, I should probably admit to being pretty unattentive with the tnak of late. I'm doing some heavy interior redecorating and my time is just stretched crazy thin. I'm literally just scraping the wheel, changing/adding water and walking away. On top of that, I've been feeding every other, or every 3rd day at best. Yet still, everything is holding up so it's proving to be a very forgiving system indeed. Asthetically speaking, it looks like crud, what with the algae on the acrylic sides and the salt creep around the top and such. But things are still growing and swimming.
 
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However, it's time that I break the news and let you all know that I have pretty much made the decision to shut this system down and move on to something else. This is a decision that has weighed heavily on me these last few months and I've have definitely done a lot of soul searching over the pros and cons of all the time/money/effort I currently have invested in this setup.

And please believe me when I say it has absolutely nothing to do with my becoming dissillusioned with my EcoWheel - it is purely a personal choice that I am making which will be coinciding with some other life changes coming down the line in the not so distant future.

One thing I've always regreted is not going bigger on the reef tank and the limitations of the 48" of length has always been nagging at me from the shadows. Also, as much as I enjoy my nice cabinetry, it's a LOT of wood... wood that suddenly isn't working real well with the direction of my remodel. Additionally, I really miss the open top tank I had before this one. The ease of getting your arm in/out of the tank on a tank that has no canopy is really addicting. As it stands now I either have to remove the canopy, or tuff it out and work around my lighting when I need to access the inside the tank.

So call me crazy (because no doubt I probably am) but I've decided that now would be the time if I was really going to do it. And given that the proposed new tank will be a room divider that will literally sit adjacent to the existing one I'll be able to keep this one up unitil the new one is finished. So, that will allow me to casually swap things over from old to new when the time comes. After that, this one will be dismantled and moved to the garage for temporary storage until said time that I can locate a buyer.

I'm still finalizing designs, but so far it's looking to be 300+ gals in a 7 foot open top room divider type setup. I'm even kicking around the idea of going all T5.... lot's, and lot's of T5 :D

Regards, Brett
 
Brett,

That's too bad your going to change systems. I've added a rio 1500 to my tank, I've directed the flow directly against the eco-wheel flow to cause more turbulence in the tank. I'm dealing with dinoflagellates which are a pain. I definitely regret using dry base rock, as I bet my issue wouldn't have been as big a deal if everything was live rock.

Let us know when you start the new system, I would like to follow your efforts as I have been learning alot from you/this thread. Thanks.

Matt
 
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