01-23-06
Update.....
Wow...been pretty busy and havent had a chance to do much with the tank, or pretty much anything else lately. Oddly enough, its been two months to the day since my last update.
Anyway, things have been good news/bad news lately.
I wanted another anemone for the tank, but wanted another LTA, (M.doreensis) since I'd had one before and knew they were pretty hardy.
www.phishybusiness.com had several in that looked gorgeous in the pictures, so I went ahead and ordered one.
It came in cold and not looking well at all, and didnt survive 3 days.
I called Serdar, the owner, and explained what happened. He graciously offered to either replace the anemone with another one, or give me store credit for the anemone. I was concerned about how poorly the other one had shipped so I decided to go with frags from his store.
They arrived in great shape, and packed to withstand whatever Fed-ex could dish out. I'm not kidding when I say PhishyBusiness packs their livestock better than anyone else I've ever seen. Its really just amazing. Most of the frags were huge, 2.5-3.5 inches in height with multiple corallites on most of them, the two smallest were only 1.5 inches in height. Serdar also included a tube of superglue gel and liverock rubble to mount the frags on.
I treated all the frags with interceptor and introduced them into the tank.
One frag wound up RTN'ing, (really pretty blue mille...I was bummed) but the others looked fantastic.
I started having flow problems with the tank. The OM started clicking again indicating that it was binding up. Had to dissassemble that whole thing again and sand it down. This time I used the dremel I received for Xmas and got the drum and the inside of the housing it rotates in. Paul also talked me through the whole thing, since he was not happy with what it was doing. We discovered that the pump, (Iwaki 55 RLT) is pushing the drum against one side more than another, (I have the version 1 drum...one port open at a time), causing the drum to bind and click. If I closed the ball valve between the OM and Iwaki, and slowly opened it up all the way, the drum was no longer blown against the housing and wouldnt bind up anymore.
Then my return pumps quit working on me. I came downstairs one morning and heard something horrible........silence. No water movement from the overflow to the sump. I quickly ran over to the tank and saw everything in the tank was fine, (OM unit and Iwaki on closed loop was fine), but my two return pumps had quit for unknown reasons. I took them out and dissassembled them both, and discovered the Mag 7 had stopped due to calcium buildup. I cleaned it and was able to get it started again immediately. The Iwaki 40 RLT running to my chiller started up when I turned the switch off and on...so I didnt realize what the problem was there.
A week after that, my Iwaki 55 RLT, (Closed loop) quit working. At this point I was ****ed and beginning to loose my temper. Fortunately, I had a spare Iwaki 55RLT I had bought used form someone here on the board. I was able to slap that one in place and take the other one offline. When I disassembled it, it didnt look all that custed up with calcium deposits, and the motor still turned when I plugged it in with the impeller assembly removed....so I'm soaking that in vinager right now.
Important lessons you should take from this:
1...Dripping Kalk will clog up your pumps reletively quickly, (Under a year in my case). If you drip kalk, you should soak your pumps in vinager for 24-48 hours, at least once every 6 months.
2...If at all possible, plan for redundancy and back ups to your system so that mechanical failures become an annoyance instead of a lifethreat to your system. If I'd had a spare for every pump on my system that crapped out, I would have taken 10 minutes to swap them out, and been able to disassemble, diagnose, clean and or repair whatever had caused the pumps to quit working.
. A Canon 10D camera is a great camera, I looked at one, then i saw the price and i turned away before the impulse fully kicked in...
