Help Needed. Thank you

[Culliix]

Good Evening All

I consider myself to be a super amatuer in this hobbie. I have had two tanks previously and unfortunately, i guess i tried to run before i could walk and they didnt work out for whatever reason. I have just purchased and set up a new red sea reefer 200 xl. This time i have gone for more "mechanical" filtration and have tried to purchase additional items which will hopefully reduce the maintenance down. One of the things that put me off before was spending 2 hours an evening tweeking stuff and then finding out the next day i made it worse. Before buying this tank i put the obligatory 100 hours of youtube in which as expected confused me even more as everyone in this hobbie has a strong but different opinion.

So that leads us to today. I have the 200 XL as above. I have it set up with a red sea reef mat and a red sea skimmer below. I have removed the sock comaprtment and am running a Jebao 2500 pump in the return section. When i initially filled the tank it was happy days was nice and quiet.
However i then installed the reef matt and had huge issues with splashing and running water from under the reefmat. So i raised the water level in the sump and this began to fix the issue. I have been ticking around with the main drain diaphragm for days now. I get it silent and then all of a sudden its either to high and falling down the emergancy again or it decides to massively drop.
I havent adjusted the baffles and I have a even level of water across the whole sump. No sepeartion in water height between sections.

Is this just new tank stuff and its a case of the tank and pipes settling in? Do i just need to ride this out? I have no fish in yet of course and am in no rush to do so until i get things dialed in i guess. So does this just need dialing in? I know i will re see these issues when i put the skimmer on but didnt see the point in running the skimmer until i have fish in? Is that correct?

I should mentioned i also have the reef ato from red sea and this is working perfect so it wont be down to evap. The only other thing i think could be the issue is.. I am now not sure that the return pump is man enough for the job or is dropping power every now and agian.. thoughts and advice greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

 

[OrionN]

Most of us don’t use Red Sea and have no idea what you are talking about.

 

[Genetics]

That’s a lot of questions. I have a Jebao return pump and it’s been pretty consistent with water return. If you can control the return pump you could set the Red Sea return and then dial in the pump instead of the other way around.

Their reef mat seems like a good system. Do you have too much flow through the sump? What kind of water turnover are we talking?

For reference I have a Jebao-6000 dialed in at 28w on my little Red Sea nano. From what I can tell the 2500 only does 28w and you may want to think of upgrading.

 

[Timfish]

Red Seas are notorious for having a brake in period for their plumbing initially and having to frequently tweak the valve to adjust the flow in the main drain line. I know a lot of aquarists like baffles but I never use them and found it's more forgiving on days there's high evaprotion. It shouldn't need adjustment as frequent in a while. If it helps, water changes are the only way to remove the labile DOC that can cause issues with corals and I would urge you to be doing 20% to 30% monthly.


FWIW I stopped using skimmers decades ago and don't bother with mechanical filtration anymore either. In light of the mountain of research showing disrupted microbiomes can have acute to chonic issues for ecosystems or individual organisms skimming seems a bad idea to me as it's arbitrarily reducing diversity removing a subset of the microbiomes in reef ssytems.

I realize the links I'm posting represents a data bomb and initially only will add to yuor confusion but the information is the result of work done by researchers trying to figure out what is happening on reefs and not some aquarists opinion. It's important to understand there's a lot going on in a reef tank we just cannot quantify or test for. Also, unfortunately, even though a healthy coral can be colorfull in reality neither growth or color can be used as indicators of a helathy coral. A piece of advice I was given a long time ago "Don't do something! Just sit there!" often applies. Knowing when to be patient and not fiddle with things is a difficult lesson.

"Coral Reefs in the Microbial Seas" This video compliments Rohwer's book of the same title (Paper back is ~$20, Kindle is ~$10), both deal with the conflicting roles of the different types of DOC in reef ecosystems. While there is overlap bewteen his book and the video both have information not covered by the other and together give a broader view of the complex relationships found in reef ecosystems

Changing Seas - Mysterious Microbes

Microbial view of Coral Decline

Nitrogen cycling in hte coral holobiont

BActeria and Sponges

Maintenance of Coral Reef Health (refferences at the end)
Maintenance of Coral Reef Health

Optical Feedback Loop in Colorful Coral Bleaching
Optical Feedback Loop in Colorful Coral Bleaching / Curr. Biol., May 21, 2020 (Vol. 30, Issue 13)

DNA Sequencing and the Reef Tank Microbiome
Aquabiomics: DNA Sequencing and the Reef Tank Microbiome

Richard Ross What's up with phosphate"
What's up with phosphate? by Richard Ross | MACNA 2014

 

[mtnbike101]

Welcome to ReefCentral!

Regarding the diaphragm, you could change it out to a gate valve and remedy the issue.

 

[Genetics]

Problem with that is the change out costs as much as just upgrading the pump.