OK! Enough chat...Starting a 1000g+ Reef

[dhnguyen]

10 sounds fine. What kind of beer did you want me to pick up? No guarantee that I can get some of your brands J. :lol:

Oh yeah if you guys want to do the DIY rocks you will probably have to bring the white portland cement bag you have. I have some aragonite sand around we can use but can also pick up some rock salt as well.

Either you or Sherm have any crushed corals? We can throw that into the mix as well.

 

[jnarowe]

I have bags of crushed coral in 3 sizes. I'll talk to Sherman about it. See ya!

 

[sherm71tank]

Stop the BS'ing! I wanna know what's up with the Eco (wireless you guys can't wait to see what we are up to,) Ohh it's gonna wet my frickin pants WHOOHOO and then some whatever wireless controller thingy thats out now????? Jonathan, you know I have been waiting for their act to get together for a long time now. I want o buy, but I'm not until I get your approval.

Should I bring salad to Don's?

 

[jnarowe]

tossed salad? :lol:

I guess I'll bring the beer, but really, salad?

 

[jnarowe]

And now for my screwup report:

Yes, AGAIN, I have screwed up my RO/DI system so now not only am I running wothout the booster pump, but now I am down to just one membrane. I just want to poke my eyes!

So this is what happened:

1. My outgoing TDS got up to 1 ppm;
2. I changed out all the resin in the Kent unit;
3. My outgoing TDS went up to 12 ppm. Sometimes higher;
4. I checked and re-checked the install of the resin cartridges;
5. Noticed pressure down by 10 psi to teh Kent membrane;
6. Tested membrane effluent at 16 ppm!!! (should be 2 or 3 ppm)

Anyone have ANY idea what the hell is going on? This is exactly what happened before and at the time Marc suggested I check the cartridges and he was correct, they were in wrong, but now they are definitely not...maybe some kind of back pressure? I don't see how that could be if water is flowing, and I didn't touch anything but the two resin cartridges.

My Lord, anone have any suggestions?

I am going to bed!

 

[melev]

When does your booster pump arrive?

I read your 6 points above, but it doesn't quite make sense to me.

If your TDS was 1, what's wrong with that? I know 0 is ideal, but 1 is still fine. I don't even sweat it until I get a reading of 7 TDS, or change my filters because someone came over and I figured I'd show them how easy it is.

But now you have new resin in there, and the TDS rose to 12? Perhaps the reading is false, or perhaps the resin was dried out (it should remain moist at all times)

The membrane's output is 16 TDS, correct? A little higher than we'd probably like, but again the DI should be able to take it down to 0 or 1. The higher the TDS out of the membrane, the more quickly the DI will be expended.

 

[cbui2]

just thinking out loud not too loud... maybe could be restrictions between the membrane or carbon. could you removed first resin then test water and try the others? mine at 5 coming out and will change soon.

 

[jnarowe]

I always change when I get any reading above 0 TDS. Reading is not false as I measured with two different hand-helds. Resin was moist as always, double bagged from SpectraPure.

It's not the resin, because when I run just the Water General unit through it, I get 0 TDS effluent. It's just when I run the Kent Hi-S that there is a problem, and the reading from the membrane should not be higher than 3TDS as my incoming is only 85TDS.

Can't figure out where the restriction could be, but that does give me an idea to check out.

 

[jnarowe]

So I did some tests and also think I figured out the RO/DI system issue. First the tests:

Tank New Water

Nitrite: 0 ppm

Nitrate: 0 ppm

Salinity: 1.025 1.027

Calcium: 440 ppm 390 ppm

Alkalinity: 12.0 dKh 8.8 dKh

Temp: 79.9F 72F

Magnesium: 1460 ppm 1550 ppm

Phosphate: 0.000 - 0.004 ppm

ORP: 292

pH: 8.32

Hard to tell with the phosphate test kit but I may be getting a very slight reading.

Tank Conditions:

I am still experiencing a brown algae/cyano outbreak that is threatening some corals. The tank looks tough right now although some corals appear to be unphased. Since the nitrate/nitrite levels are zero, I will begin removing the sand from the display and hopefully as much of the brown algae and cyano as I can. Of course, we all know it comes back, so at the same time, I will be lowering the Vortechs to provide more flow under the rocks and keep as much in suspension as possible. And I will swap out the filter media, carbon, etc. again.

RO/DI Issue:

Well, Sherman came over and we talked abou the system and he didn't see anything wrong with it either, so I started with the trouble-shooting advice offered on the SpectraPure web site. What I honed in on was the possibility that the restrictor was damaged.

I started by removing it and installing another one, which did not improve things, but I noticed a fairly high flow coming out of my drain line when I removed the one-way valve to check its function. What I found was that the valve is OK, but I could not successfully blow through the waste water line going out to my storage drums.

Both RO/DI units' waste water lines join at a "Y" and then the single line goes to the one-way valve, and then out to my storage drums.

So my estimation is that the drain line is plugged or kinked, and that one RO/DI unit was over-powering the other and back-washing waste water into the other unit's membrane, and this of course fouled it.

When I disconnected the waste water lines and ran them into the sink, the readings from the fouled membrane improved from 14 TDS to 6 TDS, so I guess that's a nearly brand new membrane I will have to round-file. When I place my next order, I will get a second 1/4" one-way valve and place those on each unit's waste line before the "Y". I had considered this before, but figured they would both be pushing out and that it wouldn't be a problem.

So hopefully I have finally figured this out! At least with the extra resin I run, my purified water is still at 0 TDS.

Booster pump is on the way, as well as 5 lbs. of resin to get me by until I do my upgrade. I looked back in my records and found that the last order of resin was in January and was 6 lbs. so at 200g+ per week, I think that is actually very good resin efficiency.

 

[pcostanzo]

Nicely done Jonathan. You would make a fine detective.

 

[Hopeful Reefer]

I still like how you recycle your waste water...the high nutrient concentration definitely would do wonders for my garden...oh wait, I don't have a garden anymore with all of this heat/lack of rain...I just have a patch of dirt with a bunch of dried up, browned-out plants!! :lol:

 

[jnarowe]

Well Paul, as you well know, there's no way to really drill down causitive affects in a reef system, but at least with the water maker I can try to isolate issues. That is one benefit to running two in parallel, in that I am able to shut one down if I get be-fuddled by it.

Yeah Jason, I think it's smart, but quite frankly I won't even go into MY backyard. The grass is so high I can't even see the vegetable garden. I just can't keep up with yard maintainance, reef maintainance, house maintainance, business, and my health. The last three yard keepers I have contacted have never even shown up for the initial meeting, all with excuses about too much work or whatever.

If you look at it another way, we all wish our lawns would die back in the Summer, so we wouldn't have to mow! Before my brain incident, I had a real lawn, had beaten back the forest and basically gotten my yard under control. Now it's going back to its wild state.

 

[Atomikk]

Jonathan, I saw your build through your website, and I am pleasently impressed. Chuck has nothing on you, in many many ways.

You know what it would be awesome, if you had a small school of Powder Blue Tangs. Like 3 or 5.

Also, if you mind a suggestion, I would aquascape the rockwork in a canyon format, with high and steep 'mountains'. Then you can plug your corals at different levels of these mountains, so when they grow out, they will plate beautifuly.

 

[jnarowe]

Neck Turd...

Neck Turd...

Another side note of my back being screwed up is that I haven't been able to clean my skimmer neck for over a month. Finally got to it today.

This is what I call a "Neck Turd". Taken from inside the display skimmer neck while it was producing 1g/day of nog.

This is just one of many samples taken today exactly like this and in fact, no exaggeration, the upper 10 - 12 inches of the skimmer neck was coated 3/8" of turd all the way around. So while the skimmer ain't pretty, and I don't have the skill sets of Hahn, SPAZZ, or Marc, et. al. this is certainly evidence that anyone can build a skimmer that is robust enough to run well for between 1/3 and 1/4 of the cost of buying a commercially made one. In my case, maybe even less since buying a good quality skimmer from the pros would probably cost about $5K...and burn more electricity.

And no offense meant to any of you guys out there making these things for a living! You all know a lot more about the subject than I, and since I built this thing while drooling on myself, I think I more or less just got lucky, right? It has its faults, as have been documented in this thread, and I have plans for an upgrade, but it still makes me happy I built it myself!

 

[jnarowe]

Atomikk: I got a lot of advice from some master reefers and built my aquascape based on their suggestions. I have since decided to re-aquascape to lift the rock up a bit off the tank floor, and to create more of a pleasing structure on the right side. Unfortunately, since I installed the tank the "normal" way, a canyon per se won't work very well.

My original plan, and still future plan, was to have a reef ridge on the left, with the Vortechs pulsing to make a wave crash on it. Then the curving semi-canyon going from front left to back right. And the right half of the tank is(was) to be sloping away from the reef side to create an acropora forest, like you would see while diving on a real reef.

Of course it takes time to realize such a plan, and I have run into trouble with the female maroon clown, since she dislikes most corals in "her area". That area being a little over 1/3 of the tank, and of course, that's where I want to grow the corals. She hates digitata so much, she will bite off pieces and spit it all over the place. Hence i now have multiple colonies all over the tank.

So the battle goes on, but soon I will make some changes to make it more interesting for the present time, and then slowly morph back to my original plan as I get corals to grow out more.

Oh, and you're suggesting I get more tangs??? :lol: Sorry dude, I am a bit more conservative in the way I stock my tank. Some of these fish will get very large, and so will their turds!

I am looking more into a large school of very small fish like red spot cardinalfish.

 

[mrcrab]

For fifty bucks I know a guy named Vinny that will take care of that clown for you. :blown:

 

[jnarowe]

Vinny wouldn't touch it for less than a grand. Said it looked mean and asked if it would bite. What a wussy! :lol:

 

[dhnguyen]

After next week I should be able to look to do some custom DIY rocks. Then we'll see what's possible for J's tank.


Did you see this J?

http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1188352

Pretty cool

 

[dhnguyen]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10620754#post10620754 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by jnarowe
Vinny wouldn't touch it for less than a grand. Said it looked mean and asked if it would bite. What a wussy! :lol:

Time to call Joey the fish Pesci

Fuggetaboutit.

 

[jnarowe]

Nice thread. That's a lot like what I did for my FW planted tank. You can see pics of that in my gallery...I would have to say though, that making the rock like you are planning and forming it in place like he used the foam would probably be better for the system's health.