Busy first half of the summer with work travel and family activities not leaving a lot of time for aquarium work. Since the last update:
- Installed 18 Liter Meter dosing pumps
- Finished coral QT wiring
- Plumbed coral QT
- Built and hung light rack for coral QT
Dosing Batallion
Disassembling and rebuilding 18 Liter Meters took a while. 3 dosing pumps per QT: 2 for water changes and 1 for top off duty. 2 more Liter Meters for Alk and Calcium dosing to the main system sump. Each pump had to be disassembled and rebuilt because they come from the manufacturer with the dosing motor rotated 90 degrees from the orientation I wanted for wall mounting. Also had to reposition the neoprene tubing on each pump to provide more slack on the output side; otherwise the output tube angle would prevent mounting.
Debugging Coral QT wiring
This scene is representative of a large amount of my time spent on the coral quarantine tank-- sorting out the bugs in the wiring. As of my last update, I had everything wired up and neatly trimmed out just in time to take photos for the post. From those pics one might have thought ('one' including me) that I was almost done.
Alas, no. First, the aquacontroller main unit wouldn't recognize the EB4 power strip. Resetting the EB4 didn't work, neither did reseating all the USB cables or rebooting the aquacontroller. Finally resolved it by clearing my web browser cache and restarting.
Next up, 1 of the 4 lights wouldn't fire at all, and the dimmer control didn't work for 2 of the lights. This turned out to be a combination of a dead driver and a bit of bad wiring (you do actually need to keep '+' and '-' straight on the light dimmer circuit, btw).
First Water Test
First water test. Not my finest hour for quality of plumbing work. 4 leaks: at the return pump bulkhead where I installed the washer on the wrong side, at the water change drain feed bulkhead, around the threads of the return pump output that I forgot to tape, and at the union ball valve which was missing one of its o-ring seals. Fortunately, all easy fixes.
Light Rack for coral QT
Build light rack using EZTube aluminum tubing and snap-together fittings. EZTube is a clever system, and provides plenty of strength for a light rack application. However, when you use multiple fittings in a row, it does not go together as consistent and straight as I'd hoped. I am not satisfied with how uneven and amateur looking the rack came out. Will fix his by putting a 4" x 1/4" wooden face frame around the rack to hide the wobbly lines of the aluminum sections.