Lyle's 150H in-wall build (with pics)

[jlylec]

happily my ammonia was still 0 last night and my nitrates/trites fell in half in a day. I'm like a click or two away from 0 on those now. The corals still look good with decent extension. I moved the rics to the floor last night too so hopefully they'll plump up a bit today. They are very cool under the blue LEDs. They turn orange which I've never seen before since I've always just had them under T5s! I can't wait to get some of my good coral pieces in here to see how they look. My plan is to move a couple next week after I've had my CUC and grunge stuff in there for a week (it's due in tomorrow). Then the following week maybe a couple fish.

 

[jlylec]

I got my Garf-loot this morning. Post office called me at 6:25am to come and get it...one of the boxes was leaking!

Float acclimation for the hermits and snails is all they recommend.

No chance this is going in the DT!

Thank god I didn't put this grunge in the DT!

So the tank has seen better days, but the paperwork says everything will clear and settle in a day. I find that hard to believe, but I know it will settle and clear up. There is certainly a LOT of life in this stuff. I've already seen tiny shrimp and stars and worms. I've always heard if you see 1 you have 100 or something like that, so that's promising. I have no doubt that this won't be detrimental to my tank long term. I am a bit worried the grunge is a bit sandier than I wanted my fuge to be. I don't want to turn it into a nitrate factory as I've read sand-filled fuges become. Most likely I'll have to dredge that out in a year, but that's OK. Garf recommends no skimmer for at least a day and to only keep the return off for 10minutes. I'm leaving my return off for at least an hour. Look how nasty the sump is!

And here are the new inhabitants. Nothing special really, but it is nice to have life.

The nassarius snail I got with the live sand from the LFS is still alive too...saw him poke up last night. I love nassarius snails!

 

[jlylec]

Got an interesting unwanted hitchhiker with Garf order. got lucky in finding him cause he'll be easy to remove!

Tiny aptasia in a tiny snail shell.

Fuge is now full of rubble and grunge. Does this look like a potential problem for any reason? I'm worried about deadspots in the bottom of the rubble.

 

[jlylec]

tank seems to be stabilizing nicely. ammonia is 0 for a week now and trates/trites are just a click above zero now. between my garf grunge, CUC, and macro from garf and hunter I have a lot of life in there now too. the coral frags i brought home last night are all doing well and extending a ton to feed. so that's a good sign. plus they have much better color in the new tank then they do in my nano. i'm hoping all my SPS color up a lot when I take them home.

I'm lopping this big piece and taking it home tonight. Will be the next big test. I'm going to lop it off at the very bottom where it's white and I hope to not break it at all in the process. The whole colony is about 6-8" high and starting to table (hard to tell in this pic). I'm not even sure what it is.

My plan is to move one big piece like this a day until I have them all over. I'm going to save the nicest pieces for the last in case I screw something up! I may take the frogspawn home tonight too as he's looking a little worse for wear these days with minimal light due to the tabling SPS shading out the floor of the tank.

The fish will be last to move. This guy is going to be a PITA to catch!

 

[jlylec]

here are some update pics of the algae growing in the tank and my first SPS piece starting to green up.

updated FTS...water is crystal clear now. I'm trying to slow add stuff so as to not throw anything off. I have some peppermint shrimp, emerald crabs, and nassarius snails coming tomorrow. Fish coming next weekend!

 

[jlylec]

I ordered some serpent stars, peppermint shrimp, emerald crabs, and nassarius snails from reefs2go which were due to be delivered yesterday. Come 9pm FedEx had still not shown up. I was heading to bed around midnight and glanced out on the porch and there they were! I couldn't believe it. Delivered at 10:57pm. I figured they were dead since it was 100 degrees here yesterday and they had been on a FedEx truck for 14hrs. Luckily they were very well packed by reefs2go and everybody was alive! So I ended up staying up until 2am acclimating them and getting them in the tank. I didn't get any pics but they are all very cool and seemed OK this morning so hopefully they will last!

 

[jlylec]

how bad is this?

I need to get my pH up i think before i add fish. What do you guys think is the best short term fix and long term solution to this? Drip dosing? Dosing pumps? Two-part in the ATO reservoir? I know there are many opinions out there on this, but I'd love to hear them. Mind you I need to automate this process as much as possible as I travel frequently. thanks in advance!

 

[shaggss]

yr pH is fine. anything below 7.7 and I would start to worry.

Have you:

Check & calibrated your probe?
Opened a window?

cheers

 

[Greenmaster]

As long as your Cal Mag, and KH are fine then your PH is fine.

 

[jlylec]

yr pH is fine. anything below 7.7 and I would start to worry.

Have you:

Check & calibrated your probe?
Opened a window?

cheers

Thanks man. I bought calibration fluid today online so hope to do that early next week. The tank is an inwall in the basement and the fish room behind it has no windows! I am waiting for my builder to come drill a 6" hole to the outside so I can hook up a new in line exhaust fan I bought. Maybe that will help?

 

[jlylec]

As long as your Cal Mag, and KH are fine then your PH is fine.

Yeah I need to test these things. I only have a cal test kit of these three right now. I never test on my nano and it's 6yrs strong almost. Am thinking I'll have to test more regularly on this tank though. Probably got a bit lucky with the nano!

 

[Greenmaster]

Yeah I need to test these things. I only have a cal test kit of these three right now. I never test on my nano and it's 6yrs strong almost. Am thinking I'll have to test more regularly on this tank though. Probably got a bit lucky with the nano!

With frequent, higher percentage water changes, with a decent salt, you can get away with no dosing and so there really isn't a "need" to test... but when you get into larger tanks and smaller/less frequent water changes dosing in most tanks becomes a necessity, and the only way to figure out how much you need to dose is to test on a regular basis. Once you have a dosing schedule you can get away with testing less frequently just to verify that the needs of the tank haven't changed. If you change feeding/maintenance schedules or add more livestock then you will probably have to re-assess dosing levels again.

 

[jlylec]

A couple more update pics. I realized I haven't uploaded any recent pics of the complete set up from the fishroom side in a long while. It came together really well I think.

I installed this light so this hobby has now turned me into an electrician too!

Here's the sump all up and running.

Here's the algae that only took on the koralia's for whatever reason. You think a tang or something will eat this?

And here's a FTS from the back with the blue LEDs near complete sundown and the whites turned on. With the white light there appears to be a very fine yellow algae all over everything. Who knows.

 

[jlylec]

I got my exhaust fan all hooked up last night. I needed a very quiet fan since it's in my workshop and fully exposed. The panasonic routinely had the best recommendation for noise. Then I found a great price on them on Amazon so went with it. I went ahead and connected it to the Apex. It works great and I think will make a huge difference and is hopefully the last bit of hardware I have to buy!

It's thankfully smaller than I thought it would be and this thing really is quiet. You can barely hear the fan over the low noise of airflow.

The return just barely fit up in this corner. I'm going to put a grate on the other side of the doored off fishroom to pull the air across and over the tank.

 

[jlylec]

So I ran all the test I have on my water last night. For whatever reason I can't get NO2 and NO3 to hit 0 but they're still just above it. Ammonia remains at 0. My phosphate has come back up from 0.00 to 0.07 in a week. I think it may be because I'm overfeeding? I feel like I need to throw food in there for the snails, hermits, crabs, shrimp, and brittle stars. Am I wrong in thinking this? I just figured the tank is so new and sterile and I didn't want them eating each other or starving to death. I know it will take a few months to get everything dialed in and stable so I'm not losing sleep over it, but if anybody has any advice on what NOT to do to make things worse I'm open to it!

 

[jlylec]

Finally!

So we got some fish yesterday! We ended up coming home with a Hippo Tang, Purple Dottyback, pair of Gold Head Gobies, and 3 Bartlett Anthias'. My daughter picked the Dottyback and her name is now Swirly. The rest we're still coming up with names for.

Now on to the frustrating part. This morning the Hippo is covered in Ich! This is very frustrating to me since I was told Ich has never been an issue (I did take this with a grain of salt, but was hopeful). My tank is brand new and has never seen a fish before so clearly it came home with the fish. There was no sign at the store, so I guess she was just a carrier and the stress brought it out. Does this mean my tank is now permanently riddled with Ich? I feel like that's what I've read and just couldn't be more ****ed now. I'll be even more ****ed if she doesn't make it. Clearly hindsight is 20/20 but I really do wish I had just bit the bullet and brought my nano home, moved those fish in first, and set up that tank as a QT and avoided all this. But who knows...maybe the ich was in the garf grunge or something and any fish I put in would have gotten it? Only the Hippo and Swirly are showing any signs of ich though. The gobies and anthias' look great. And everybody's eating so hopefully they pull through fine and I just have to worry about any fish I put in from here on out getting ich...great.

I went out today and bought some garlic and I also got some pH buffer because ever since I calibrated my probe last week it hasn't gotten above 8.06 or so. I'm not sure if I didn't do the calibration right or what. But after adding the buffer it's sitting at 8.22. I'm wondering if it's really 8.4 now. I'm going to try and calibrate the probe again tonight and I'm going to figure out what to do with my kalkwasser vs buffer problem. The LFS owner told me I'd be better off with pH buffer instead of kalkwasser as it can cause a lot of problems. I know there are as many opinions as hobbiest's, but he's clearly doing something right! I just need to figure out what works best for me and my situation.

Either way I'm very happy to finally have fish in the tank. I just wish I could have avoided ich on my FIRST FISH somehow!

 

[Greenmaster]

That sucks... The only thing I have heard of for getting rid of Ich is to keep the tank fish free for 6 weeks... but that may not be 100% either.
I currently have Ich and have seen an improvement I am doing a few things to battle it but I'll know for sure if it's gone by Friday the 24th.

 

[jlylec]

That sucks... The only thing I have heard of for getting rid of Ich is to keep the tank fish free for 6 weeks... but that may not be 100% either.
I currently have Ich and have seen an improvement I am doing a few things to battle it but I'll know for sure if it's gone by Friday the 24th.

Yeah I've just read that too. And I have no idea how that's possible for me to do without buying another tank (not going to happen) or risk infecting the fish in my nano and ruining that too (also not going to happen). So I guess my brand new tank that I've spent months and thousands of dollars on is in jeopardy of being screwed forever or I just kill or get rid of a few hundred dollars worth of fish I just got?! Seriously?! Wow. Just wow.

I would take the fish that aren't showing any signs of ich to my nano tomorrow but I'm worried that they are infected now and just not showing signs so I can't risk it. So I just sit around and watch my new fish die I guess. This is the best feeling I've had in a long time!

 

[Greenmaster]

They will take Ich with them... or at least that's the approach I would take. They can carry it even if they have no sign of it.
If I were in your position I would go buy some skunk cleaner shrimp... like 3-6 of them.
Also just because you have Ich I wouldn't say screwed forever... My 320g tank has Ich... and I'm taking it in stride.

 

[jlylec]

They will take Ich with them... or at least that's the approach I would take. They can carry it even if they have no sign of it.
If I were in your position I would go buy some skunk cleaner shrimp... like 3-6 of them.
Also just because you have Ich I wouldn't say screwed forever... My 320g tank has Ich... and I'm taking it in stride.

Yeah I hear you...I'm normally very laid back and take everything in stride I'm just so ****ed at myself for letting this happen even though I knew the risks I can't stand it. I'd really like to nip this in the bud if it's at all possible. I don't want to introduce other new fish into an ich filled tank if I can help it.

Thanks for the advice on the skunk cleaner shrimp. I'll look into getting some of them. I'll probably have to buy them online. They can't transmit ich can they? What about other inverts?