Thanks everyone for the comments and filter sock advice. Those of you with heart conditions should look away now as this is in fact my second update in less than a month. I'm excited because. . .
Coral D-Day Set!
Feb 11th is the date for first installation of corals to the display tank.
Farmer Ty and another local reefer have graciously offered to do the diving/wading and gluing honors for this first batch. I will post pictures and/or video shortly thereafter.
Moving on to other updates:
Nitrates
After the last post I upped vodka dosing to 300mL/day for a couple of weeks to try and push past the plateau of 8-12ppm nitrates that the system seemed to be stuck at. This worked after about 10 days and Nitrates dropped to between 2 and 4ppm. Since I'm targeting 5ppm, I reduced dosing to 240mL last week. Concurrent with the reduced dosing, I broke down and ordered another Liter Meter to automate vodka dosing (bringing me up to 20 channels of dosing now).
Filter Socks
Using vineger rather than bleach to wash the filter socks was not sufficient to flush the jelly-like bacteria that was clogging the socks every 36 hours: vinegar-washed socks would clog within 12 hours.
While waiting for the 400-micron socks and Amquel to arrive, I started double and triple washing the old socks using only water for the later cycles. Even with a triple wash/double rinse, the socks still had a faint odor of bleach 24 hours after washing. I suspect the front-load washer just isn't using enough water to thoroughly flush the socks. On the encouraging side, I noted with a sock held back from rotation that the bleach smell dissipates completely by the beginning of the 3rd day of drying. Not that my nose is the ultimate chlorine detector, but still encouraging.
Next up: 400 micron socks. These didn't clog at all. However, pore size is too large to filter out the finer detritus.
At this point it seemed the best course would be to order an additional 18 of the 200-micron filter socks. This would allow 3 full days for a batch of socks to dry and release any bleach.
End of the jelly slime bacteria?
I haven't ordered the additional filter socks yet, though, because the jelly-like bacteria that was clogging them seems to have gone away. I have a few hypotheses for this. The first, and the one I hope is true, is that other bacteria have developed enough to outcompete the jelly slime. Another possibility is that the switch from manually dosing 100mL of vodka three times per day to dosing continuously caused the jelly slime to go away; perhaps it required the higher carbon levels of bulk dosing to get established whereas as the continuous smaller doses allow other organisms to consume the carbon first.
Whatever the cause, I am hugely relieved that I'm now on day 4 of the same filter socks with no perceptible clogging as of yet.
Titanium/Teflon Film Algae Progress
Last update I mentioned the new-to-me film algae that is so impossibly tough, completely impervious to the tools that work against calcareous algae. I remove much of it using metal scrapers prior to a holiday party, at the expense of adding numerous scratches to the viewing pane glass. 3 weekends ago, I decided to go after the algae with plastic acrylic-safe implements. 1 hour in with my 5-foot scraper pole and plastic Kent scraper blades I had cleared off about 3% of the algae, and strained a shoulder muscle as a bonus. Getting sufficient leverage to remove the algae was requiring 30+ pounds of force delivered with almost no leverage. This was not going to work.
I then created an extension arm for the scraper to take it to 8' of length. "What?", you say, "8' scraper for a tank only 5 and a half feet deep?" Yes. I took advantage of the resilience of schedule 80 PVC to warp the extension arm into nearly a 90-degree arc, resulting in immensely effective pressure at the scraper blade against glass. The warped extension arm is braced against a towel over the aquarium frame and then agitated vertically to scrape the opposite viewing pane with substantial force. Still took a while, but 8 hours later, the primary viewing panes are 95% clear of the nasty film algae. The only major trouble spot remaining is the narrow pane at the end of the tank, where there is no opposite frame to use as leverage for warping the scraper extension.
Fortunately,
Farmer Ty has volunteered to hand scrape the remaining trouble spots while he is in the tank with it 20% drained.
And finally, questions. . .
Thanks,
fairyman58!
I went with "option 2" as described in post
#276. There are two 2" holes in the bottom of the tank at opposite ends. The one closest to the overflow is the intake, the one at the far end is an output. The output runs through a custom manifold box that splits it into four 3/4" loc-line outputs, shown in post
#494. The plumbing underneath the tank is as simple as can be since there is nothing else under there to complicate things. The intake bulkhead connects to a ball valve, then 2" flex PVC runs along the bottom middle of the drain shower pan to the intake of the Abyzz 420. The output of the Abyzz goes directly into a ball valve, followed by bulkhead then the custom manifold.
Hi
OzIA, thanks for the pointer. I love the design concept of the roller mat and did consider it a few years ago when designing the system, but a few issues led me away from it: #1, a bad experience when evaluating their Dialyseas unit 12 years ago for the 750; and #2 my system would have required 8 of their largest units at the time. Now, I see I could get away with 2 of their 55gpm units, which is reasonable, but the bad experience with Dialyseas still leaves me inclined to stay away from them.
One of the main things I noted at the time of the 750 setup still applies today, which is that they seem to be a fish-only oriented company. In 1995, they had zero demo systems with live corals, showing only fish systems with fake plastic corals; today, they have 1 and it is almost as unimpressive as my current system.
The other thing that stood out to me at the time was that it appeared they had no consideration of ongoing maintenance time or cost. Basically, they seemed to assume daily dedicated maintenance service and zero cost sensitivity, neither of which worked for me. Even with the relatively generous budget standards of this system I considered them unreasonably expensive. They wanted on the order of 500k for a 300 gallon system that would then have ongoing $1500/month maintenance cost. And maybe not fair to judge the whole company by, the but sales person I spoke with came across as a stereotypical high-pressure used-car salesman.
