The inwall 380 starfire reborn
- Thread starter JohnL
- Start date
africangrey
Active member
Tom,
It's good to hear from you from time to time, hopefully you will be active in this board again.
You are always welcome to come by to get some common frags to test and see if your tank is ready for more demanding acros.
Just let me know, would love to see your little one too.
It's good to hear from you from time to time, hopefully you will be active in this board again.
You are always welcome to come by to get some common frags to test and see if your tank is ready for more demanding acros.
Just let me know, would love to see your little one too.
Eileen
Hanging on to the hobby by a thread, but hanging on none the less. Many heartbreaking losses and problems/hurdles, but I am sticking with is (as long as this current ecomony lets me).
Eric
You and me both *sigh*. It seems to have stabilized, but I have not seen any noticeable improvement. I still have a fair bit of cyano. I know that part of it is from the livestock that passed that I never found the bodies, and also a bit from a lack of circulation, although I can't blame that all on our pumps (or lack of.. they are still in for service and I have not heard if they got shipped back out yet or not). I say I can't blame the Vortecs because I have seen cyano thriving in full flow, but I do think that flow helps to prevent pockets of excess nutrients from building up. So I won't be letting them off the hook just yet.
.
Bax
Thank you for the kind words. I hope to eventually have a tank again where I feel worthy of them.
Spencer
Much appreciated. I haven't forgotten your previous offer, but I really want to wait before I add anything else to this tank, even just to "test" it. I want to see positive growth in what we have left first, rather than condemn any new additions to a "not yet ready" tank. We may ring you up in the new year to stop by, but I doubt I will be ready for any new corals by then, so it would be a purely social visit .
As for seeing the little one w/o having to wait until next month, here is one from earlier this month I believe
EDIT : Pictures don't seem to be working from our new webhost. I will try to get the hotlinking fixed later on this afternoon.
Johnathan
Yea, super relaxing
Bryan
Is your new tank setup yet ? I can't wait to see it. Maybe one of these days we will make it back up there and get our familes together. How is your new(er) little one doing ? Should be 2 yrs old or so by now, right ?
Why are you having to "rebuild" ?
On a more general note, I think that maybe our sandbed may be causing us problems. While it was never intentended to be a DSB, our fish have re-landscaped it in areas and created what I suspect may be pockets of deeper than we would have liked sand. I am looking at ways to remove sand from these "deeper" areas, but haven't yet settled on a method (or time/date) to tackle the task. I am leaning towards using a syphon tube and making the sand removal part of a water change,m to minimize releasing any "bad" stuff from the sand and the follow up WC will hopefully help to dilute whatever else may make it into the water column.
Hanging on to the hobby by a thread, but hanging on none the less. Many heartbreaking losses and problems/hurdles, but I am sticking with is (as long as this current ecomony lets me).
Eric
You and me both *sigh*. It seems to have stabilized, but I have not seen any noticeable improvement. I still have a fair bit of cyano. I know that part of it is from the livestock that passed that I never found the bodies, and also a bit from a lack of circulation, although I can't blame that all on our pumps (or lack of.. they are still in for service and I have not heard if they got shipped back out yet or not). I say I can't blame the Vortecs because I have seen cyano thriving in full flow, but I do think that flow helps to prevent pockets of excess nutrients from building up. So I won't be letting them off the hook just yet.
.Bax
Thank you for the kind words. I hope to eventually have a tank again where I feel worthy of them
.Spencer
Much appreciated. I haven't forgotten your previous offer
, but I really want to wait before I add anything else to this tank, even just to "test" it. I want to see positive growth in what we have left first, rather than condemn any new additions to a "not yet ready" tank. We may ring you up in the new year to stop by, but I doubt I will be ready for any new corals by then, so it would be a purely social visit .As for seeing the little one w/o having to wait until next month, here is one from earlier this month I believe
EDIT : Pictures don't seem to be working from our new webhost. I will try to get the hotlinking fixed later on this afternoon.
Johnathan
Yea, super relaxing
Bryan
Is your new tank setup yet ? I can't wait to see it. Maybe one of these days we will make it back up there and get our familes together. How is your new(er) little one doing ? Should be 2 yrs old or so by now, right ?
Why are you having to "rebuild" ?
On a more general note, I think that maybe our sandbed may be causing us problems. While it was never intentended to be a DSB, our fish have re-landscaped it in areas and created what I suspect may be pockets of deeper than we would have liked sand. I am looking at ways to remove sand from these "deeper" areas, but haven't yet settled on a method (or time/date) to tackle the task. I am leaning towards using a syphon tube and making the sand removal part of a water change,m to minimize releasing any "bad" stuff from the sand and the follow up WC will hopefully help to dilute whatever else may make it into the water column.
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fishnerd
Active member
Tom,
The big one was set-up and taken down (sold) total water volume was ~600 and that was way too much work for me at this time so I am going smaller the 200gallon range total. The interior of the house is getting painted so it was good timing.
My Oh My, your little one is not so little anymore and boy are you in trouble in a couple of years !!! yes come by I have a 22000 gallon saltwater tank in the backyard now, the kids can play in it when it gets warmer.
Take care Bryan
The big one was set-up and taken down (sold) total water volume was ~600 and that was way too much work for me at this time so I am going smaller the 200gallon range total. The interior of the house is getting painted so it was good timing.
My Oh My, your little one is not so little anymore and boy are you in trouble in a couple of years !!! yes come by I have a 22000 gallon saltwater tank in the backyard now, the kids can play in it when it gets warmer.
Take care Bryan
Sounds like a plan Bryan . If you need any rocks for your tank we have a few medium to largish rocks left over, just give me a holler.
On the tank front I also was thinking of going more "Japanese style" with the tank (IE: Less is More). I do plan to move at least one more of our rocks (boulders) to open up space for better placement of our pumps, but haven't gotten much further than that in my head. I would not rule out the possibility of removing more rock work from our tank jsut yet either.
. If you need any rocks for your tank we have a few medium to largish rocks left over, just give me a holler.On the tank front I also was thinking of going more "Japanese style" with the tank (IE: Less is More). I do plan to move at least one more of our rocks (boulders) to open up space for better placement of our pumps, but haven't gotten much further than that in my head. I would not rule out the possibility of removing more rock work from our tank jsut yet either.
ReefWaters
Premium Member
Im having trouble seeing the pics? Could it be on my end?
They all show up for me. Since it is a remote web host I don't think it is anything special on my end allowing me to see them (I couldn't see them before I fixed it to allow hot linking, but can see them now). Let me know if the problem still persists, it may have to do with our DNS hosting company not replicating any hosting IP changes to all regions (which happened to us earlier this year).
africangrey
Active member
can anyone see the picture, for me I only see the red x.
DNS is screwed up on the site. I know that the URLs look weird, but I checked them from another PC as well as this one and they work for us. But my office PC has DNS pointing to the wrong IP. I will try to get it resolved later on this morning.
EDIT : It should be fixed now. It may take a short bit for the DNS changes to replicate out, but it is already working from my office now. Let me know if some still have trouble seeing the pictures and thanks for letting me know it was goofed up.
EDIT : It should be fixed now. It may take a short bit for the DNS changes to replicate out, but it is already working from my office now. Let me know if some still have trouble seeing the pictures and thanks for letting me know it was goofed up.
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africangrey
Active member
Oh my god, she is very pretty and has grown up quite considerably since I saw her last time when she was just born, which was about a year ago. Now I understand why your reef has taken the toll, if it's me I would toss the tank and concentrate on raising that little angel.
well, family comes first, so the tank maintenance does take a back seat to her upbringing and care. I expected some losses when I wasn't able to devout adequate time to the tank, but now that we are past some of the more demanding times with her (like cutting her first couple of teeth) I have more time to take care of the tank, but I am not seeing it pull out of the downward slide as I had hoped.
When you talk about raising a little one, I don't remember if I told you or not (maybe one time when we talked ?) but back when we lost our anthias "school" it was when she took ill and we spent pretty much the entire weekend taking care of her (Dr's visits, rotating sleeping shifts to take care of her, pharmacy runs, etc). The fish got fed maybe twice the entire weekend (Fri through Sun) and the anthias just couldn't take it.
On a more focused tank related topic, I got word today that our Vortec pumps should be here tomorrow or Friday, so ahead of my anticipated schedule. Happy news indeed. They had been shipped back last week but the notification apparently got filtered out by our Email so we never recieved the notice.
When you talk about raising a little one, I don't remember if I told you or not (maybe one time when we talked ?) but back when we lost our anthias "school" it was when she took ill and we spent pretty much the entire weekend taking care of her (Dr's visits, rotating sleeping shifts to take care of her, pharmacy runs, etc). The fish got fed maybe twice the entire weekend (Fri through Sun) and the anthias just couldn't take it.
On a more focused tank related topic, I got word today that our Vortec pumps should be here tomorrow or Friday, so ahead of my anticipated schedule. Happy news indeed
. They had been shipped back last week but the notification apparently got filtered out by our Email so we never recieved the notice. short update. The motors arrived from ETM today. I was very surprised to get them, being the holidays and all (between so many packages being shipped taking it's toll on UPS and typical holiday staffing issues that could have been impacting ETM *I know that half of my office is out this week, and many were out last week as well*). So props to ETM for exceeding my expectations 
Since our little one is too young to really understand Christmas, and us adults have chosen to forgoe gift giving this year due to financial constraints/the economy we will be taking Christmas rather low-key this year. So with the extra time I will likely be putting these back into service and working on testing out various placements of these pumps tonight and/or tomorrow afternoon when the little one goes down for her afternoon nap.
I will post updates on how it goes, as time permits, but from my initial testing previously I am pretty happy with how the gyre configturation works out.
Since our little one is too young to really understand Christmas, and us adults have chosen to forgoe gift giving this year due to financial constraints/the economy we will be taking Christmas rather low-key this year. So with the extra time I will likely be putting these back into service and working on testing out various placements of these pumps tonight and/or tomorrow afternoon when the little one goes down for her afternoon nap.
I will post updates on how it goes, as time permits, but from my initial testing previously I am pretty happy with how the gyre configturation works out.
I had rearranged the rockwork and put the new pumps back into service on Wednesday afternoon, but just now got around to having the time to post about the outcome. The new pumps are alot quieter than the old ones.. not what I would call silent yet, but alot better (and I am witholding judgement until they have had a chance to break in and "find their groove", not to mention that the wet ends are recently rebuilt, so it isn't fair to judge the pumps on noise levels yet ). In addition to moving the VTs around I lowered all 4 so that the tops of the wet ends were 6" below the waterline (before we had them 4" - 5" below and had alot of surface aggitation, now we just have lots of water movement, which we wanted ).
I am overall very happy with how the flow has worked out. The fish seem to enjoy it but the livestock that has reacted the strongest is the RBTA pair. They appear to be fuller and out more than they were before.
We have the pumps set up in a gyre formation. Here is our current layout, with the Vortec pump placements. rockwork, returns, etc.
In can you are wondering about what it all stands for, I will explain the numbers next to the V's that indocate the Vortecs and the arrows near the back middle of the tank and next to the RBTA island.
Right now we have it set up that pumps 1 & 3 (V1 and V3) are on while 2 & 4 (V2 and V4) are off (not really "off", but actually @ 10% to keep the fish out). Then it switches to 2 & 4 on while 1 & 3 are off. The duration is 99 seconds right now, but I am thinking about changing it to a longer or shorter duration, but haven't decided yet. Right now I am seeing flow in places I honestly didn't expect to. For example, the arrow at the top of hte picture, which indicates the valley between two large rocks at the middle rear of our tank; that indicates a significant flow area, in the direction of the arrow. I noticed on of the clowns hanging back there just swimming against the current (hanging about 2/3 the way back between the rocks, near the back glass, swimming towards the front of the tank), and not really going anywhere. It reminded me of a bird gliding on a head wind, but staying in place, neither moving forward or backward. There is also a good amount of flow across the RBTA island, regardless of which pair of pumps is running (gotta give ETM credit for the "undertow" they create).
The tank was cloudy from things being stirred up, both from the rocks I moved around and from the new flow patterns picking things up that weren't affected by the flow before. It took it a day to clear back up and is now pretty much crystal clear (but clear water does not == a healthy tank.. it is only part of the equation, and I am still working on/struggling with the other part of it now).
I wholly expected our skimmer to work overtime for a bit after the pumps were re-configured (since I am hoping that alot more particulate matter is getting picked up, suspended and carried out of the tank in the overflows), but to my surprise there wasn't much difference at all in it's output. It is still producing modest amounts of skimmate, but no more or less than before. I can't wait to get the new pump on the skimmer to see what she is capable of
). In addition to moving the VTs around I lowered all 4 so that the tops of the wet ends were 6" below the waterline (before we had them 4" - 5" below and had alot of surface aggitation, now we just have lots of water movement, which we wanted ).I am overall very happy with how the flow has worked out. The fish seem to enjoy it but the livestock that has reacted the strongest is the RBTA pair. They appear to be fuller and out more than they were before.
We have the pumps set up in a gyre formation. Here is our current layout, with the Vortec pump placements. rockwork, returns, etc.
In can you are wondering about what it all stands for, I will explain the numbers next to the V's that indocate the Vortecs and the arrows near the back middle of the tank and next to the RBTA island.
Right now we have it set up that pumps 1 & 3 (V1 and V3) are on while 2 & 4 (V2 and V4) are off (not really "off", but actually @ 10% to keep the fish out). Then it switches to 2 & 4 on while 1 & 3 are off. The duration is 99 seconds right now, but I am thinking about changing it to a longer or shorter duration, but haven't decided yet. Right now I am seeing flow in places I honestly didn't expect to. For example, the arrow at the top of hte picture, which indicates the valley between two large rocks at the middle rear of our tank; that indicates a significant flow area, in the direction of the arrow. I noticed on of the clowns hanging back there just swimming against the current (hanging about 2/3 the way back between the rocks, near the back glass, swimming towards the front of the tank), and not really going anywhere. It reminded me of a bird gliding on a head wind, but staying in place, neither moving forward or backward. There is also a good amount of flow across the RBTA island, regardless of which pair of pumps is running (gotta give ETM credit for the "undertow" they create).
The tank was cloudy from things being stirred up, both from the rocks I moved around and from the new flow patterns picking things up that weren't affected by the flow before. It took it a day to clear back up and is now pretty much crystal clear (but clear water does not == a healthy tank.. it is only part of the equation, and I am still working on/struggling with the other part of it now).
I wholly expected our skimmer to work overtime for a bit after the pumps were re-configured (since I am hoping that alot more particulate matter is getting picked up, suspended and carried out of the tank in the overflows), but to my surprise there wasn't much difference at all in it's output. It is still producing modest amounts of skimmate, but no more or less than before. I can't wait to get the new pump on the skimmer to see what she is capable of
well, time for a short update. The tank seemed to have stabilized more, the cyano was receding, etc. But over the weekend it appears that our skimmer recirc threw it's NW again (it separates the NE disc from the drive shaft), so the output from the skimmer is minimal and the cyano is starting to come back *sigh*. I don't have the time to drain the skimmer to take the pump off to repair it (again) until next weekend. The flow from the Vortecs has been doing great, the fish and livestock seem to like the "washing machine" cycle . And I am still seeing some pretty impressive and unexpected flow patterns from it.
. And I am still seeing some pretty impressive and unexpected flow patterns from it.
