DIY Rimless Starphire and Stainless Kiddy Pool (PICS!)

Amazing build Luke, look forward to following its progress. I seem to remember that you mentioned at the PSAS meeting with Bob Fenner that you ran your system without water changes, just wondering if you were still following this practice and if that could have been a factor in your SPS losses, what with the change in water chemistry and all. Let me know when you are ready for some frags.

Regards, Joe
 
Good to hear from you Joe,
It certianly could have been related. I'm sure there was quite a difference in water chemistry. Did we talk at Fenner's presentation? I'm having trouble putting a face with the name. I haven't been keeping up with many PSAS meetings after getting banned at RF, and now banned again on an account that never posted :P Fortunately, from browseing, it doesn't appear I've been missing anything. Signal to noise ratio is off the charts, which makes me sad when I remember how deep things used to be.

I think I had two factors from the move that really hosed me. First, when I bought the plastic storage tubs to be used for moving the corals, I figured I was buying more than I would need. As it turned out, they filled up much faster than I expected, and I ended up really overloading each container with corals stacked on corals. I should really know not to do this by now... Second, I had a full extra hour of sitting in the containers in the back of a pickup than I expected. Water temps dropped down to around the low 70 deg mark, and i had been keeping them around 81deg. Neither of these things could have possibily been good for the corals...

I setup an Ro-Di setup and a plastic barrel and a pump for mixing to do waterchanges easily if needed, but I don't plan to do any unless there is a problem. I might do an annual 50% change or something if I think I it's time to hit the water chemistry reset button. After measureing my TDS at around 20 total, I feel a little silly for buying the Ro-Di, but I guess at least I know I will never need to change the media/membrane.

It will be nice when the new tank syndrome passes and the eco system stabilizes and begins to get a stronger macrofauna population. I rely on macrofauna helping feed macroalgae extensively for my ecosystem method to work, and it's quite concerning to look into the fuge's and see nothing swimming or climbing around. I may make a little trip to the Tacoma waterfront with a fine net to help get things seeded again. It's amazing to me that I could go from tanks that had every surface crawling with macrofauna at night into this tank that looks bare of life at night. I guess it doesn't transfer with the rock nearly as well as I had expected :(.

I appreciate the kind frag offers, and I will gladly accept once the ecosystem grows strong again. I may just have too little of a bioload to have adquate waste production to support the large macrofauna population that I desire. Perhaps now will be as good of time as any to get started with the "goby/shrimp combos of the world" theme that I wish to have. The large amount of bottom area will come in handy with my plans to have around 30 different pistol shrimp/goby dugouts going on in the display. It has around 6 pairs right now, but I see pleanty of room for more. I'm just a sucker for watching the social habbits of large groups of goby/pistol pairs. Such fun little guys to observe!

Other than the goby-shrimp combos, my goal is to have mated pairs of everything I put in the tank. I have mated lemon-peel angel pair that doesn't nip corals, a pair of pure black and white clowns that live in the same seabae with a pair of normal colored false percs that I've had for around 5 years. No fighting, just constant 4-some clownfish cuddle sessions in the seabae. There is a pair of Randel's gobys living with a pair of tiger pistols, and a pair of blue spot gobys living with a pair of candystripe pistols, a mated regularly spawning pair of coral banded shrimp and a pair of zanzibar shrimp that occasionally tussle, but seem to stay friends. I think aquarium animals are happier when they have a mate, though I've learned some species just absolutely do not accept having another of the same species in the tank. I've been trying to find a mate for my lawnmower that I've had for years, but anytime I introduce someone for him, he rapidly makes it known that he wants them out. Perhaps if I replaced him with a very young pair with a known gender difference...

As soon as I find the right price on a camera I will give you guys some livestock photos of the meger corals that survived. If nothing else it will make a good "before" picture for a compairison later.

The VFD wavemaking equipment is all functioning silent, cool running and powerful as usual. The fish are very dissapointed about that :P I hooked up a very clever design of thin squirl-cage type blower against the wall that blows across the top of the water surface when the temperature reaches 82F. I did an experiment where I activated both HPS and both heaters to stay on to get the temperature up. When the thin squirl-cage blower kicked on, the temperature essentially stopped climbing and held solid around 82.2F This made me happy to see :D Gotta love having a huge amount of water surface on a shallow tank to enable massive energy removal though latent heat of vaporization. Just needs a little amount of airflow to ensure a non humidity saturated boundry layer and temperature control becomes very easy. Sadly, during the winter time it will likely require regular heater activation :( Unless I find a creative way to use the waste energy from the lighting... Hmm... HDPE tubing array hidden away under the back covers of the T5HO lighting assemblys with a pump on a low temperature activated circut perhaps?

As far as pictures of the new little lady, I just need to get a new camera and I will have her pose for you guys with the aquarium. She is a thrilling little tiger Grrrrr! :D It's a small wonder I have time for any updates at all :P

Best Wishes and thank you for all the kind words,
-Luke
 
Luke,

I have been experimenting with tangential fans for evaporative cooling. As you metnioned they do a wonderful job of renewing the air at the air/water boundry.

Most folks point fans AT the water instead of over the water.

I keep my ~150 gallon system at 80-81 with only a few watts of airflow. Without the fans, the tank temperature rises to 90 within 7 hours. I evap 4-6 gallons a day.
 
Killer thread you have going there Boomer. I only got to read up to page 3, but when I get time I will finish. Excellent read. That thread talking about the bacteria types in a DSB reminded me of something I've been doing with all my DSB's for a while now. I flow water up through them rapidly.

I first used normal undergravel filter plates running backwords, and I loved how my sandbed always stayed clean.
I used to make plates with eggcrate and fiberglass mesh that stood off the bottom of the tank on 1/2" pvc grid drilled with hundreds of holes and pressurized by a pump from the sump to keep flow blasting up through the DSB.

With this tank, I'm simply using 25ft of 1" vinal tubing connected to a bulkhead in the bottom with a Tee fitting. Both ends of the tube are plugged off on either side of the Tee, and I drilled a few hundred 1/8" holes through the tube fairly randomly through the full legnth of it. The tube was then siliconed down to the bottom of the tank in a long curvy 'S' pattern roughly covering the whole bottom of the tank. The 4-5" of course crushed coral were dumped in over the top to cover it from sight.

The tube ensures that the DSB will always have pleanty of oxygen for macro and microfauna looking for a place to live. I think keeping the sandbed full of oxygen was how my previous reefs always had such increadible populations of visible macrofauna covering everything at night, as the whole sandbed served as a sort of in-tank-refugium. I always loved to watch the LPS capture live mysid shrimp and other corals obviously feeding on the critters that were misfortunate enough to walk into the wrong places.

I'm hoping that the buried tube without the open benithic space will give me a similar effect for this reef.

Another special thing I don't think I mentioned about this tank is the radical bubble generators I have in the sump right before the inlet to the return. I have 3 powerful microbubble generators on a switch. Whenever I want to give the full system a bubble bath, I can turn all the water in the dispay, fuge, and sump white with foam. I set that system up after hearing Bob Fenner talk about how corals liked an occasional bubble bath to scrub all of the mucus and dead tissue away from them. I've only activated it a couple of times so far, and it certianly does trigger the corals to shed large amounts of mucus that are floated to the surface and dumped down the overflow into the fuge. I know mucus is a crucial feeding tool for the corals, so I don't think it should be done very often. If anyone has any deeper inputs on what time of day, what duration, and how often corals should get bubble baths, I would love to know.

Best Wishes,
-Luke
 
Awesome thread Luke, i'm very impressed. You guys across the Atlantic seem to grasp the DIY side of the hobby much more than the English!

I love the VFD idea, this is something i've thought about in the past but had never seen in action - you may have prompted me into some more research!! - albeit with a single phase 240V Sequence..

Oh, and a big thumbs up for the little Datsun/S2000 hybrid - it must be a handful! I'm in the process of swapping a D16 (or ZC as you guys know it) into a JDM D15 auto CRX..

Reefs and Hondas - two of my favourite things also!
 
Aerobic DSB

Aerobic DSB

Hi Luke, It's funny how some abandoned methods keep reappearing, the reverse flow DSB would function like a reverse flow undergravel, with the down side of smaller grained substrate leading to issues of channeling and anaerobic pockets, not to mention the fact that this would be a great nitrate factory, (not unlike the wet/dries that have all but been abandoned for reef systems, they are about due to be rediscovered I suppose...) after all, that's what aerobes do. An awesome colony of aerobic orgs would flourish leading to lots of aerobic biomass, it would boggle your mind though to see how fast that colony would die if there were a power/pump failure, think of the small volume of oxygenated water amongst the dense small grained substrate in the typical DSB sandbed depth of 4 to 6 inches relative to the enormous surface area available for the growth of an aerobic population, it's easy to understand that the bed could go anaerobic in minutes with a circulatory failure, how long it would take for this to result in the death of this aerobic biomass I can't say, but it does seem like a potential for a tank meltdown. Using larger gravel size than typically seen in a DSB presumably would increase the length of the meltdown time, but we are drifting into the area of opinion rather than science there, too many variables...

The other thing of note is that the primary purpose of a DSB I think we can all agree is the benefit of denitrification, to pump O2 into it you lose this and as mentioned increase Nitrate production, I don't know how this would stand up particularly if you were running a system with no protein skimming and minimal water changes. I have tried running without a skimmer using a chaeto fuge and live rock to remove nitrates, for my system I would have needed a fuge volume at least as large as the tank volume to accomplish this though. Anyway, I'd like to learn more about this, I'll try to find the thread you referred to, I may just be a victim of reef tank dogma after all,or perhaps this is one of those things that work great and seems really cool in the short run, but leads to disaster in the long term, best regards, Joe

PS I bet that bubble bath will help control those nasty sponges....
 
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Luke, Weatherson might have more to say about your radical bubbles, as he's doing that with his 240g reef.
 
I do not use my DSB for the purpose of denitrofication, nor do I believe that a DSB ever gets to release any substantial amount of N2. It's pretty complex and counter to normal thought, and I would rather leave it to those who better understand it to explain.

I have a DSB because I like to have animals which enjoy having a DSB to play in. I also never liked the look of the tanks which I used BB with, and they never seemed to work out well with the non-skimming method I use. I believe the areobic nitrate factory sandbed is a crucial part in an unskimmed tank, as it keeps N in the water where the macroalgae can incorporate it into biomass along with P (at roughly a 12:1 ratio for chaetomorpha). I also add the calcium reactor effulent right into the chaetomorpha growing area to keep an important carbon source available for maximum growth rates.

I've never had any trouble keeping N down to undectable levels with my tanks, even when I do some pretty crazy overfeeding. Keep in mind, the algae is able to capture and store N in the form of ammonia straight out of the fish's body, where as a skimmer must always let the ammonia be broken down into different states, then bound into some sort of biomass state until it reaches a point where it increases surface tension on a bubble before it can be removed.

Seems a little counter to normal thought, and I would be delighted if you or anyone else would like to stop by with some testing equipment of higher precision that the sailifert low-range NO3 test that I use to get some measurements to compare with heavily skimmed tanks.

I love sponges, and I hope the bubbles don't kill them. I know that moving them when stuck to the rocks transfered dry didn't appear to hurt them much. I think it may only be certian species of sponge which are perticularly vonerable to having air trapped in them, or at least I'm hopeing, sponges are the best filters :).

PeelyUK, this picture is to make your day. This job made building the tank look like a walk in the park. It uses the S2000 cluster as well. Driving it is a hard thing to explain in text. I supose brutal overkill would be a start.
xDSCF1478.sized.jpg


In reguards to the size of the fuge needing to be as big as the tank, I go with the idea that it just needs to be big enough to ballance what I add to the tank. If I add perhaps 0.5g of N and 0.03g of P in each daily feeding, I had better be able to grow at least about 20g (wet) of chaetomorpha algae each day. If I do, then I am ballanceing what I put in the tank with what I take out. In my primative testing, it is not difficult to match what I put into the tank in feeding with what I remove in Chaetomorpha biomass.

It only gets goofy if you get things out of the redfield ballance limits for your algae and need to dose nitrate to complete binding the P. Choosing your food to match the redfield ratio of your algae makes this rarely become a problem. I love knowing if my P ever becomes dectable, I can simply drip in a bit of potasium nitrate solution into the fuge and watch the P drop back to undectable by the next day. Even dripping Potasium Nitrate, I still can't get the N levels dectable with hungry macroalgae being properly lit.

The real reason I don't skim however has nothing to do with any of this. I feel that phytoplankton is the backbone of any reef/ocean/marine anything. I think stripping it from the water with skimming makes for an excellent nutrient removal method, but at the cost of pulling out the foundation at the base of the pyrimid of life in a marine system.

This is just my own silly methods and thoughts on marine systems. I have no credentials or any specialized background, just my own experiences and my own $0.02.

I may actually install a very very low water flow rate (think dribble here) gravity fed surface drawn ultra high contact time recirculation or air pump driven skimmer to serve as something like a continious water change sort of cleaning effect without effecting the population of phytoplankton due to the low flow rate. I'm just concerned about effecting the ballance of organic compounds that stick to bubbles vs doesn't stick to bubbles, and also a little worried that I may need waterchanges to correct waterchemistry from whatever elements get targeted and removed in the skimmate.

If anyone knows of such a skimmer optimized for a dribble of flow to move through it with crazy powerful recirculation bubbles, I would be interested in checking it out.

Best Wishes,
-Luke
 
Hey Luke, That's the cool thing about the reefkeeping world, There are so many ways to accomplish the same goal, neat that we have forums where we can beat around different ideas. One thing that occured to me is that you would possibly get faster dissolution rates on oolitic substrate, gotta be a good thing. Seems like a fluidized sand filter with oolitic might almost replace a reactor, know anything about that? I was kidding about the bubbles, anything sensitive enough to be bothered would never have survived the trip into your tank, The encrusting sponges are very resistant to air exposure from what I've seen, those types seem to be what I usually see appear on my LR..
 
Melev- I didn't mean to blow you off. I will search for and check out this Weatherson fellows tank and see if he has any deeper insight towards the effective use of bubbles. Any links would be appreciated.

Best Wishes,
-Luke
 
Luke: as for a skimmer if you wanted one, you could go as simple as an off the shelf recirc NW skimmer...just run it out of your overflow with a very slow flow...like 50-100gph. you could even put a DIY wetneck on it and feed it solely through the wet neck :)
 
lemme know when your ready to come in an talk skimmers with me luke...:) anytime on the weekends im at barrier.
im the one who talked joe into getting the bk for his system...lol
(well, im sure i had some help from jason)
fwiw, i ran lee eng and other similar "natural style" tanks for years and enjoyed them....until i got into sps that is, now i have to combine methodology to get long term stable results.
there's also a couple skimmers that claim to be plankton friendly, but they dont really explain too well how that is, and it is debateable (like my spelling). but my own thoughts and observsations over the years is that there is still lots of phyto and zoe that is still in the substrate, surfaces, and rock that it never gets skimmed out, diminished, im certain, but not eradicated. soo sooo many good phyto/zoe products to augment with these days too compared to a couple years ago.
 
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10588776#post10588776 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by liveforphysics
I do not use my DSB for the purpose of denitrofication, nor do I believe that a DSB ever gets to release any substantial amount of N2. It's pretty complex and counter to normal thought, and I would rather leave it to those who better understand it to explain.
Click to expand...

Does anyone care to explain? When I first read that, I thought that you meant that it's too complex for us to understand and you'd only explain it to those who would. :eek:

I now have a DSB in my tank which had previously always been plagued with high nitrates (100's and then down to the 40s, but no lower) and since it was installed about 8 months ago, it's consistently down <10ppm. (I only do about 10G water changes/week on my 120G.)

Thanks,
Jason
 
Very interesting build Luke. Glad you PM'd me. So many counter-culture things going on in this system it's hard to digest them all at one time. :)

I am curious if you swap out a portion of the sand at any interval, or whether you just leave it permanently? I suppose that with the upflow you describe, detritus can't saturate the bed right? But then since you don't skim, and the detritus would be in suspension, how is that removed from the system, or is it?

Any mechanical filtration used?
 
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