Once again it's time for an update. I've been extremely busy, making steady progress with the aquarium and things are changing every week. These updates go back a month or so and I'll start with the oldest ones first.
The ecosystem is still young despite the TBS rock and its going through its various cycles. I had a small amount of hair algae only on about 3 rocks, which were the Walt Smith 2.1 rocks. Once I added the fish from my 120g the algae was gone in literally one day. Then came the dino phase. I think that phase is ending now (God I hope so). I battled dinos and cyano in my 120g so knew a little about how to control it. I have no cyano at this time. Fingers crossed. Last time I had to use Chemiclean which worked well.
I had started dosing KZ ZEObak from day one with this system in order to get a good microfauna foundation. However I was also dosing Spongepower because I wanted to keep the sponges on the TBS rock alive, and once I added the coral from the 120g I started dosing KZ Aminos as well as 2 part. I think the Spongepower and/or Aminos gave the dinos enough of what it needed. I've since stopped the Spongepower and Aminos.
I cut the light back to 5 hours for MH and 7 for T5. I had 1 MP60 on the front left, 1 MP40 on the front right, and two MP40s in the back. I don't think the MP40s provide enough flow even at 100% so I added another MP60 for the front right. The added flow is helping a lot. I plan on putting the MP40 in the back middle. I believe flow is critical in controlling dinos and cyano. I'll share what I'm doing with the ZEObak a little later.
I trimmed down the skirt a little over an inch bringing it 1.5" above the bottom of the tank. There is internal eurobracing on the bottom that's about 1/2" high so the sand around the walls of the tank comes about even or just over the skirt. I secured the skirt to the steel frame by tapping holes in the steel beams and using L brackets. The skirt is now flush to the steel frame.
I finished off the stand with some themed knobs.
This board is under the tank. It's changed already as I've moved all the Vortech controllers to the left and plan on sawing off about a foot of the right side in order to put some shelving to the right.
I made some progress on the manifold. I recently added a ZEOvit reactor, which means I pulled the GFO out of my BRS reactor that I never mounted. You can see it sitting next to the sump. According to the ZEOvit system the ROX carbon I'm running in the reactor is too much and too fast so I'll be pulling the BRS reactor offline and putting in some passive carbon. You can't see the ZEOvit reactor in this picture. It's an Avast Vibe. I'm also in the process of adding a used Tunze AT-5000 chiller I just picked up this Friday. Hopefully it still works well. I've got some of the plumbing done. Because it has decent threaded in/ouputs I decided to hard plumb as much as possible.
The LifeReef skimmer with Vectra M1 is doing its job, and because my drains are so loud the venturi on this skimmer is no longer the loudest thing in my system.
Here's a shot of the Genesis Renew AWC and Avast ATO. The Avast has been working fine. Even though I've freed up my Spectrapure UPLC I think I'm going to keep the Avast in line for now.
