Mountains of sawdust (360g plywood, LED, Arduino build)

I feel like I've just finished a marathon... Your thread is 40 pages!
I laughed... I cried... I cheered but most of the time I stressed.
I feel a deep understanding of OCD tendencies (living day to day with just tweak-it-itis can be heck on the nerves!)

I was deeply saddened at the news of the crack and the family illness.
It was wonderful to see you have at it again after a pause. Then almost Hollywood style you hit me with the loss of your first anemone(nearly started meds for that one). Night vigils...Been there done that!

I eagerly await a more realistic view of a reef.
IT'S SO NICE to read from someone who UNDERSTANDS from a DIVER'S perspective what a reef looks like.
The Borneman quote runs in my head viewing so many of my own tanks and visits to tanks in the past.

I have great expectations for your tank and approach.

As far as turf scrubbing... the mesh will eventually catch what it needs to maybe just leaving it to progress through ecological development sort of like the stair step of cycling....
As far as seeding it actively... I don't think it can be helped. It'll happen despite you.
Someone will bring something in with them as you add them to the tank. Remember it only needs to be one spore stuck to one bit of fish slime a weansy little rise in phos and there you go... hair in places you never saw before. (We'll talk about things growing and swelling when you get some of that white fuzz and fluff to float around in the water of your tank.)

The skimmer- I always felt the work they did resembled the foam that washes up on the shore to be nuked by the sun and then poured back in as the tide rose again. I mean we are shredding protein to get used again as something else. Are we missing a link by wet skimming or dumping?
Maybe we should just expose the skimmate to drying and return it to the turfed tank.

For the sump... Does anyone think me crazy for wanting to suggest a laminar flow project and some plankton to make it truly a closed ocean-ific system? I know it might sound nutty but there must be some way to keep corals feeding and photosynthesizing enough to catch up with the crazy weed growth rates we see in the tropics.

Happy reefing. Excited about the next update.
 
Glad you enjoyed the thread. I do intend to post updates for the life of the tank, whatever that turns out to be.

Let me throw this little nugget out for all you readers. When I finally did put the reasonably-sized skimmer on there, POOF! the scrubber took off. It is now growing a small but expanding patch of the turf-like algae you see on most scrubbers instead of the unusual white/yellow slime it produced for nearly a year. And while that very slime is still growing all over the rockwork it is not as prevalent as it used to be. I can't explain this but it is a satisfying change.
 
And for everyone's viewing pleasure, a low quality cell phone pic taken live at this very moment:

20120929_203616.jpg


Lights in the room are all off and the LEDs are down to their last few percent before they switch off for the night. There's not much light present for this tiny little camera sensor to capture. But I hope what it does capture is the late-evening glow and at least a hint of the beginnings of maturity as some of the corals "grow up" a bit.
 
THERE IT IS! Strange how the hair algae was associated with the Skimmer installation.
I wonder if it has something to do with the competitive edge you gave by removing easily available protein that the slime might have lived on. The slime ended up moving closer to the protein source CORAL SLIME... My fear is that as the reef develops that slime will lay the foundation and progress to hair as it did on your scrubber.:hmm2:
The whole ecological development of reefs can require some pretty ugly steps to get to the pretty coral only growth! I wonder if there might be a faster way. I'm certain we are missing something by our fiddling with micro molar nutrient concentrations. I'm really thinking this skimmate drying and return might hold the key.
 
I am clearly not a biologist but I do recall reading about some types life that may make up this "slime" essentially being able to directly utilize dissolved organics, so it would make sense why they were out-competing the algae, which can only directly utilize inorganic nutrients. The slime uses the nutrients before they break down to the point that they are available to the algae?

At any rate I'm basically considering the details a rhetorical matter at this point since as far as I am concerned the function of the system has improved and that's good enough for me.
 
So one of the things my wife decided recently was that she doesn't like the exposed plumbing for the closed loop now that it is starting to grow coralline. I agree, thanks to my OCD. The solution we thought up was to build MMLR "covers" a-la the Tunze deco rocks sell (or, used to at least) to cover the older style tunze stream pumps.

Problem is, the plumbing is down at the bottom of the tank, I can't exactly mold the new LR right over it to get a good fit.

Anyone have a creative idea? I'm thinking I will build mock-ups of the plumbing outside of the tank and then mold the rock over those.
 
Yes a model. That sounds good. Your cover doesn't have to be exact. It can be a little larger and you could actually make several of them. Make it in a bunch of pieces that overlap in a random way so it looks like some giant worm casting or something. Something organic.
 
Of course, this rock project raises a bigger "problem" to solve. By design, none of these areas get direct illumination and they're very dim (thank you, LED technology, for being so flexible!). If I put rock there to keep me from staring at the plumbing, I don't exactly want to stare at the rocks either. What do I do? Add more LEDs? Or be all crazy-like and stuff a bunch of azooxanthellate corals in there? :D
 
I'm treating the change in rockscape like bonsai work. One small change at a time, then let it settle in. I moved a rock from the back stack to the island on the right - pictures as soon as I remember to take them.

Also, got a boatload of new corals (or, to be more correct, two 5-gallon buckets full. And when I say full, I mean like there was barely room for water in them.) And I'm babysitting some really amazing fish for a friend - a purple tang, foxface, and hippo tang. Oh, and I bought a bonded pair of bluethroat triggers. Lotsa changes this past month!
 
I haven't done anything with the rockwork to cover the plumbing. Been too busy with holidays and other commitments. I do have a boatload more corals now and a few more fish. I'll take some photos next time the camera's out!

The exciting thing is I'm finally having to think carefully about coral placement due to... overcrowding in a few areas! I even had my first example of coral warfare - in that junky cell phone pic above you can see a bright green trumpet dead center and a green hammer above and to the right - they grew to the point that they were touching so I moved the trumpet to what has become known as "anemone island" - the smaller separate rock to the right with the gorgs on top (which have also been moved, to make way for the three BTAs I now have).

Also there's a giant chunk of green star polyps on the bottom right in the middle, and most of the SPS that died off in the crash over the summer have been replaced, this time with slightly less fussy species (I think I have montipora in just about every commonly available form now). I've also been lucky enough to pick up a few oddballs from my dream coral bucket list - a green pagoda cup coral, a few heads of sun coral, stuff like that.

Still interesting to see the LED effect on some of these corals. Most show no change but some are drastically different in this tank. I have several chunks of that super-super-common orange montipora cap, and it's changed to this really odd pinkish-blue color. Happy and growing like a weed though. Everyone that sees it in person asks what it is and notes that they've never seen a cap that color before. :lol:
 
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