Randy's 180G Reef-Photo Journal

[rdmpe]

Hey Fiber - thanks! Right now, since I'm trying to isolate the exact heat effect from the dart on the closed loop, I don't have the sump water circulating into the tank. So the temperature in the stand should not have much impact on the tank temps. But I also have been leaving the doors open, so the temps in there are only maybe 2 deg warmer than the room.

I accidentally left a big window open all night now I AM in Florida, so it wasn't really cold. I have a really good bimetal thermometer sitting on the kitchen counter, and it was reading 71 this morning. The tank was down to 76.7. So it will be interesting to see how the tank warms up as the room warms up.

Jay - so both of your tanks are reported at about the same temperatures? I have a one of these thermometers that I used when brewing beer http://www.bsicontrols.net/store/agora.cgi?product_id=TRE53 and I use it to spot check my other thermometers. Your nano being 12 deg over ambient just doesn't sound reasonable at all. Sounds like you need a good thermometer as a doublecheck.

My bimetal generally reads the lowest. My WON digital heater display runs about 1/2 deg higher than the bimetal, and my ReefKeeper reads about 1 deg higher than the WON.

So how do we calibrate our thermometers?

I think I might buy a good programmable thermostate for our central air/heat. Then maybe I can get a better handle on the house temps. I'd also like to have a thermostat that will control the fan on the house ac/heat so that I can run the fan on a schedule during the day regardless of the ac/heat cycle.

 

[rdmpe]

Jay - one thing to try - dip your digital thermometer sensor in some cold water to bring the sensor temp down well below room temp. Then dry it off good and see what happens. I usually have to let mine sit for an hour or longer for it to stabilize and even then I'm not sure that's long enough. The closer the sensor temp gets to air temp, the slower the equalization goes. But approaching it from the cold end (coming out of the cold water) and from the warm end (coming out of your tank) may give you a better idea of what IT thinks room temp is...

 

[tgunn]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=6255447#post6255447 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by rdmpe
I'm going to have an open top, so I really don't want to have to put a fan up there on the top of the tank. I could put one on the sump though. Do you guys generally use the computer style fans? I think I'm going to pick up a few of those at least to run on the sump. This has really got me bummed out. I didn't expect the dart to heat the water up so much, but it is. With only the dart running, not the tarpon, the temps are running 3 deg. above room temp.

Tomorrow I'm going to run the tarpon sump return and turn off the dart. Going to see how that goes for a while.

I'm also thinking about a different pump for the skimmer. Maybe an eheim running external. Not sure.

Well, an open top will definitely help in not keeping the heat built up around the top of the tank, so that's definitely a good thing.

I think a fan over the sump would work just great. I'm going to use a cheapy clip-on fan in the summer on my sump (from walmart or the likes). If the temps get bad in the summer I can always use the stand fan I have kicking around. :lol:

But I do use 120mm vantec stealth computer fans in my canopy.. Downfall with computer fans is you need a 12v wall wart of an old AT pc power supply, which kinda raises the cost a bit.. Just make sure they're not pulling water off the sump or in a highly turbulent area or the salt spray will rust them out good..

Wow, 71F is cold? It was -4F during the day last week here. I sooooooooooooooooo wish I was in florida right now. :lol:

Tyler

 

[rdmpe]

Yeah, we have the heater running if it's going to get down into the low 60's or colder (brrrrr) :lol: ....

 

[rdmpe]

There are the two types of macro in my refugium. Does anyone know what they are called? I got them with my LR/LS purchase...

 

[jay24k]

Appears to be ulva and chaeto.

 

[rdmpe]

I haven't been able to find any pictures of Ulva or other macro that reallly looks the same as this stuff. The Ulva pictures I found all have a wider leaf shape. Know of any pictures? It doesn't seem to match any of the pictures here very well: http://www.liveplants.gulf-coast.net/macroalgae.htm

 

[tylaw]

Hey it looks liek a verison of caulerpa to me. Heres a link :
http://images.google.com/imgres?img...v=/images?q=caulerpa+lybie&svnum=10&hl=en&lr=
I have the same stuff. My father is a biologist and identified my stuff as a caulerpa definitly. And i believe the stuff you have is the smae thing.
O and your tank looks amazing by the way!

 

[selgado]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=6257942#post6257942 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by rdmpe
I haven't been able to find any pictures of Ulva or other macro that reallly looks the same as this stuff. The Ulva pictures I found all have a wider leaf shape. Know of any pictures? It doesn't seem to match any of the pictures here very well: http://www.liveplants.gulf-coast.net/macroalgae.htm

Pretty sure thats caulerpa prolifera. I have that identical plant in my fuge. It does a fantastic job of nutrient export and grows like mad. I've found that cheato does not like a lot of flow and prolifera does. Take a look at the prolifera section of this link. I'm not sure why they put the first picture under that heading, but the other two are prolifera.

Here's a shot of my prolifera:

 

[rdmpe]

Selgado - Oh yeah - that picture of yours looks exactly like mine if I pull a piece off. That's the stuff for sure. Thanks for the pict and ID...

Now, I thought that cheato liked high flow to the point that it was good to have it tumble around? I was thinking of sticking some in my overflow chamber of the display tank... I think the water pouring over the overflow wall might make it tumble some - although mine is not floating right now. It is sitting on the bottom.

Tylaw - thanks. I sure hope the tank looks better soon, I'm not real thrilled with it right now. It's been exactly a week since I added the sand and it's still very cloudy.

And the real bummer is - I've got a lot of work to do in there, tweaking the nozzles and such, and I'm sure it is going to get cloudy many more times before I get it set up right.

 

[tgunn]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=6258569#post6258569 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by rdmpe
Selgado - Oh yeah - that picture of yours looks exactly like mine if I pull a piece off. That's the stuff for sure. Thanks for the pict and ID...

Now, I thought that cheato liked high flow to the point that it was good to have it tumble around? I was thinking of sticking some in my overflow chamber of the display tank... I think the water pouring over the overflow wall might make it tumble some - although mine is not floating right now. It is sitting on the bottom.

Tylaw - thanks. I sure hope the tank looks better soon, I'm not real thrilled with it right now. It's been exactly a week since I added the sand and it's still very cloudy.

And the real bummer is - I've got a lot of work to do in there, tweaking the nozzles and such, and I'm sure it is going to get cloudy many more times before I get it set up right.

I was under the assumption that chaeto liked to tumble around too..

Did you put sand in your 'fuge? Just using a CF spotlight like melev suggests? I think I should get some macro going in my sump one of these days...

I'm sure it'll clear up soon enough. Are you running your skimmer at this point? It may help pull some of the silt out.. I'm suprised I didn't get any real bad sandstorms in my tank.

I'm sure it'll start to settle out and stay down once you get some microalgae, diatoms or cyano growing on there! :lol:

I'm sure once it all settles down it'll stay down much easier. Everything I've seen about Southdown indicates that the cloudiness is normal... Could always dial back the Dart a bit to ease the overall flow a bit. Dunno.

Tyler

 

[selgado]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=6258569#post6258569 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by rdmpe
Selgado - Oh yeah - that picture of yours looks exactly like mine if I pull a piece off. That's the stuff for sure. Thanks for the pict and ID...

Now, I thought that cheato liked high flow to the point that it was good to have it tumble around? I was thinking of sticking some in my overflow chamber of the display tank... I think the water pouring over the overflow wall might make it tumble some - although mine is not floating right now. It is sitting on the bottom.

I misspoke myself. Cheato doesn't seem to like as much flow as the prolifera does. I added a powerhead to my fuge to help with some spots of cyano and it has caused the cheato to receed, but the prolifera flourishes more than ever.

 

[rdmpe]

Did you put sand in your 'fuge? Just using a CF spotlight like melev suggests? I think I should get some macro going in my sump one of these days...

I did put sand in the fuge. It is a 4" or 5" dsb... I have not ordered one of those spot lights yet. I need to do that. I am ust using a small NO flourescent that I had laying around.

I'm sure it'll clear up soon enough. Are you running your skimmer at this point? It may help pull some of the silt out.. I'm suprised I didn't get any real bad sandstorms in my tank.

I've been holding off on running the skimmer while I try to figure out this heat issue. The tank cooled down a bit last night when I left a window open. Since then it has only come up about half a degree. It's currently running at 77.3. Again, this is all with the Dart on the closed loop and NOTHING else running. The room is not really all that cool, so the dart really hasn't brought the temperature up that much today. So I have decided to get the sump pump going again. I'm going to run the sump pump and closed loop but no skimmer and watch the temperatures for a couple of days.

I'm sure it'll start to settle out and stay down once you get some microalgae, diatoms or cyano growing on there!

Yep, I agree. I wish I had my light hanging in place, that would help get some algae going which would settle the sand down faster. But the heat issue has me proceeding much more slowly with my light.

I think my priorities at this point are to finish tweaking my plumbing and get vent fans installed in the tank stand. Once the stand is vented, I can close the doors and put some fans on the sump to help cool the water.

I still haven't decided what to do about the sump pump and the skimmer pump. I could replace the mag 9.5 with an equal eheim, it would probably run cooler. OR I could replace the Tarpon and Mag 9.5 with a second Dart that runs the skimmer and return. I am going to try this temporarily with my dart at some point. I have started setting up the plumbing so that I'll be able to quickly stick the dart in there and fire it up and see what happens.

Selgato - so if someone wants low flow in their refugium, how do they avoid cyano problems? I am not planning high flow in my fuge. So this may be a problem I'll have to deal with. Any advice for how I can avoid it?

 

[selgado]

<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=6260579#post6260579 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by rdmpe
Selgato - so if someone wants low flow in their refugium, how do they avoid cyano problems? I am not planning high flow in my fuge. So this may be a problem I'll have to deal with. Any advice for how I can avoid it?

I'm not the authority on that yet... In my case, my cyano in the fuge was reduced significantly when I removed the sand bed from it. I'm experimenting to see what takes it completely away. I've heard people say fuges need as much as 10x turnover.

 

[rdmpe]

Well, that is definitely a commonly debated subject. Some like lots of water through the fuge, some like it really slow. I'm not sure what I'll end up with yet. Slow is better for my plumbing setup since water to the fuge is taken off the return line so means less flow into the display. However, I have a feeling that my sump plumbing is going to continue to change. I'm not thrilled with it right now...

I just replumbed the sump pump for the third time... I was having this problem with cavitation at a 3/4->1.5" adaptor. The pump housing is 3/4 FPT outlet. So I had a 3/4" close nipple screwed into the pump. The I had a 3/4 ftp to 1.5" slip bushing screwed onto the nipple. So basically the water comes shooting out of the 3/4" nipple into a 1.5" pipe and the sudden pressure drop was creating cavitation there according to what I was hearing. So I had to dial back a ball valve to raise the pressure in that area to eliminate the cavitation. So I replced that section with all 1" plumbing. That has eliminated the problem.

Here's the OLD piece:

Here's the NEW piece:

 

[rdmpe]

Small update (I often talk to myself). . . Since it is sure to be boring, I'll intersperse it with my first livestock posts - my bristle star! :thumbsup: Hopefully that will add some only slightly boring portions to offset the REALLY boring portions.

Things have been running for a few days now and I'm hoping I will be able to manage the temperature with fans and evaporation rather than a chiller. Only time will tell I guess.

I have been playing with my ReefKeeper a little bit. It's such a slick little gizmo. Some day I can see myself with one of those $500 setups that plug into my laptop and control everything... So I set up the heaters to come on at 78 :lol: I'm not sure if my tank will ever see that temperature again! Right now I only have a single 100W ebo jager in there anyway - under powered to say the least.

I also set up one of the ReefKeeper plugs to run a desk fan. The fan blows in one door of my stand, and there is a door at the other end for the air to exit. Just doing that will lower my temps. I have it set so that the fan turns on at 80.5 and turns off at 80.0. It seems to take much longer for the tank to build up from 80 to 80.5, and just an hour or so for the fan to take the tank back down to 80.0. So I figure if I have some fans blowing on the sump water, and some vent fans pulling air out of the stand, it will help a lot.

I ordered a bunch of 12V fans that are supposedly super quiet. To vent the stand, I ordered two 120mm Yate Loon fans http://www.coolerguys.com/840556021537.html these together should pull about 80 cfm. My stand is only about 30 cubic feet, so pulling out 2x the volume per minute should be plenty I think - and the important thing - quiet. Only bad thing is that cutting a hole in the stand for the fans will allow the skimmer and pump noise out. Not sure if I can do anything about that. Any suggestions?

The Maristar fixtures have somewhat of a reputation for having loud fans, and mine is no exception. So I also bought a couple of low noise 80 mm fans to replace the fixture's fans. The stock fans are 120 vac, so I'll have to stick a 12 vdc transformer in there, but there's plenty of room for it, should be easy (I hope). Just need to keep it away from those hot MH reflectors :eek1: or I'll be dripping molten plastic out of the fixture.

SO I have been wet skimming the last few days as a way to help clear the tank up faster. It really makes a difference in clearing the water for me. I have had the tank so clear that I could actually make out what was on TV through the 24" thickness of water - a big improvement. So I promptly started pushing sand around and now it's nice and cloudy again.

I've been dosing two-part every day on the suggestion of Randy Holmes-Farley http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=725768 to try to get my PH up a little bit. However, it has remained pretty steady at 7.5 to 7.7 Since I don't have any test kits yet, I'm not willing to do anything else. So just going to keep this up until I can test. I guess I could dose a little more of the Alk part than the Ca part, but I don't want to get the water any more out of whack than it already is...

I ordered Salifert AMM, NI, NA, MAG, PHOS, ALK, CAL tests. I have a digital PH meter and a digital Salinity meter. Those digital meters are great - I love them. So I hope the test kits and fans come in by the end of the week...

Well that's about it for now. Maybe some better pictures when the sand clears, even though the aquascaping is not anywhere near complete...

 

[tgunn]

Randy, looking good.

I will probably run a bare bottom fuge simply because I can't really put sand in there the way the baffles are set up (first baffle is an "under", not an over)... How's your chaeto doing? Guess there's not much in the way of nutrients for it to absorb yet..

I like the look of the black plumbing. I'm probably going to do some re-jigging of the back 2 jets on my closed loop (they're practically hot tub jets right now) and I think I'll use some ABS there; the black will match in much nicer...

Good to hear the temps are starting to somewhat work out... To keep the noise inside your stand you could always mount a small piece of plexiglass such that it "covers" the fan vent. Mount it a few inches from the fan and the effect is that the air would basically come in hit the plexi and enter the stand around the edges of the plexi. That may help cut down some sound transmission. It seems to help cut down sound and light out the top of my canopy....

Tyler

 

[Stile2]

Looking really good. I understand about the talking to yourself. Most of the time that is how I feel on my thread.
What kind for star this that?

Why the "no chiller" stance? I do understand the money part, but I have an Arctica 1/10 hp and live near Palm Springs. It gets to about 105 degrees here for a couple of weeks during the summer. And no problems with heat at all!! Something to think about!

Again looking great.

Keith

 

[jay24k]

It gets hot here too but I don't have a chiller here and all is well. Highest my temps ever hit was 85 and that was maybe 3 times. Generally my temps are 81 to 83 max.

 

[rdmpe]

Hey guys - I'm glad you all are keeping an eye on my thread

Tyler,
The Cheato seems to be doing OK - no significant growth that I've noticed, but I think my bioload is very low right now so not surprising. On a related note, my skimmate is barely off white. But probably because I'm skimming pretty wet in order to help clear the cloudiness and because I'm still sort of playing with the skimmer.

The plumbing that shows up in the bristle star photos is probably going to be replaced with something a little less obtrusive. I think I'm going to come up off the buried 1" line into a 3/4" adaptor and to locline. I want to do a 3/4" locline splitter right at the sand level and then have the two nozzles that I can aim wherever. Low priority at the moment though.

I was thinking the same thing with the acrylic over the fan to serve as a sound/light shield. I have some old black acrylic from an old broken overflow wall that I can use :thumbsup:

I'm feeling a little better about the temps, but I know it will be a challenge when I add the lights. But this whole thing is a challenge so I guess I should have expected it!


Stile2, Thanks. I can't wait till the water clears enough for me to get some better pictures. I don't know what kind of star that is exactly. I just keep calling it a Bristle Star. Maybe once I get some good shots of it from the top I'll post an ID request... It's a neat star though and is pretty large. I'd say at least 12" to 14" across if stretched out. There's supposed to be a light colored smaller one in the tank somewhere, but I haven't seen it in a while. I may have accidentally buried it or something :eek1:

I want to avoid a chiller due to the inital $$, the ongoing $$, I feel like it will add a lot of noise and ambient heat to the room unless I can plumb it outside somehow, and it will add that much more complication to the plumbing. If I did go with a chiller, I like the idea of a drop in style. Are they less efficient though? I have plenty of flow near my sump return pump intake so that shouldn't be an issue. So anyway, I am trying not to have to deal with a chiller right now. Hopefully the fans will work for me.

I really really need to get those fans installed in the tank stand so that I can shut the stand doors without creating an oven. My stand is completely closed. I couldn't leave the back open because it is sitting next to a nice leather couch. Since I don't have any vent fans yet, I have to leave two doors open to get some air flow through there...

Jay is giving me inspiration that I will not need a chiller