The most of 2012 update....
Mar 11, 2012
Tank seems to be coping with the new inhabitants well. Inhabitants seem to be coping well too. The bleached anemone that I inherited has hauled its ass around the rock work a bit and seems to have settled. Not sure I can do much for it, but it seems to be hanging in there.
Today I moved over Benny the Blenny from my nano (hah, didn't even need to dismantle the entire tank to catch him). His favourite hidy-hole had a leather on the top, with a large ric that was actually growing on the side of the leather. The ric's foot was sort of on the leather, and on about two pieces of rock. Managed to separate it off the leather and split the rock between them and migrated them across. Been meaning to do this for ages, but never quite been game.
Apr 13, 2012
So, at Synodontis request, here's my hammer at the moment:
That was the one that was in a bad state last year
Apr 14, 2012
Changed the LEDs around a little today. Stuck in 4 violets and 2 reds from MagicJ
Also stuck a couple of whites back into the mix along the front row as it was a little too blue.
Sadly, it's now a little too white :D With some forethought, I shoved most of the whites, violets and reds on one channel, so once the light cycle starts this arvo, I might play with winding it back a bit to take the edge off it.
Haven't touched the third row of LEDs yet - they need to loose some whites. Fourth row still hasn't been built. As soon as I can afford another ELN-60-48P and a few more LEDs, I'll get it built, then I might actually get the lighting finished :D
Apr 14, 2012
Latest FTS (a bit lousy, I did this handheld):
Looks a little blue just to the left of centre; it isn't quite that blue when you're in front of it. Excuse the mess on the back glass, I really need some snails, so I'm letting those eggs grow :D
I didn't think that the reds made much difference until I stuck my finger over one and actually saw the difference.
Apr 22, 2012
Playing around with one of dad's macro lenses yesterday - was a 50-70mm, though one of these is recording it was shot at 105mm, which doesn't make a lot of sense. Played around with white balancing and worked out how to get a closer to acceptable result with the D70. His D200 is a lot more functional for this, but I managed to actually see coralline in its true colours without a flash.
Neither image has been modified, both shot at 1/60th second.
There were a stack of pics taken with the d200 as well, of which I don't have. Dad wants to have a play with them. He even managed to get some shots of my CBS, but they're hardly post worthy as there was no where near enough light. His photos were a lot better than mine, though it was his first experience shooting completely through glass, water and under this type of lighting.
May 27, 2012
Latest FTS:
You really can't tell from the pic, but the rock on the right has been moved back into the corner (plenty of room for water to get round though), and I pulled about 8kg of rock out. It doubled the usable space on the sandbed which was my objective. The move was only made a couple of hours ago, so a few corals haven't quite gotten over that just yet.
Getting close to getting the lighting finished. I'm working on trying to raise the LED runs a bit higher. Hoping to have a dosing pump in soon as this tank is chewing alk and calc.
I'll post pics of the frags from yesterdays meet once they start to recover.
May 29, 2012
I dumped the excess rock into the sump.. no room in the rock section, so theres some in the return and some in the skimmer section. That caused some changes to how much water sits in the weir.. it had been noisy as there was never much in it, and the bunnings ball valve is hard to tune. This change seems to have pushed the volume in the weir up dramatically. It's still below overflow. If I add more water to the sump, it just winds up increasing the overflow height.
Not too worried - the flow seems to be about right, but at least it's shut the damn gargling noise up that was happening every few minutes :p
Jun 3, 2012
My latest additions. Think I'll call them Jack & Jill. Only because calling them Ken & Jen occurred to me after I named them :D *ducks for cover*
They've been in since late last night. They came out of different tanks when I bought them, so I figured I'd release them at opposite sides of the tank. First thing Jack did was swim over to Jill, and they've been hanging around each other ever since.
Photo is shit. Hard to focus in the dark lol.
Jun 3, 2012
Picked these up yesterday from Bunarong along with the clowns...
Jun 18, 2012
New FTS
Excuse the angle - taken from above shooting down.
Added a fourth row of LEDs at the weekend, and mixed some of the blues and royal blues up. Every LED row now has all 5 LED channels running across it. A little extra wiring, but a lot easier for me to make changes later. Took around 10 hours to rebuild it. Wired in a plug and socket set up so I can easily disconnect the whole build and remove it from the tank.
Still to do: put some ali strips across the runs so they all become one whole unit. Stops me from moving individual rows when I need space, but at least I'll be able to just pick the whole thing up and get it out of the way. Also waiting on some angled pieces so I can mount the runs up higher than they are.
Next on the list: Frag tank. Waiting on pricing.
Jul 12, 2012
A couple of people already know, but most don't. I've caught the frag tank bug - mostly because I'm sick of frags vanishing down to the back of the tank where I can't get them!
So:
3x1x1 frag tank to be hooked into this system. It will sit on the bottom shelf of an adjacent tank stand with the plumbing running back over to the sump. They're quite close, and it's not up very high so it shouldn't be an issue. This size should fit the space I have for it quite well. It's probably overkill, but I'm wanting to focus on establishing colonies of things like zoas before I put them into the DT. Locally, no one sells coral either, so perhaps there might be some market down there later on for local trades or making a few bucks to cover the cost....
The tank has been ordered. Going for pretty straight forward approach. Ideally, I want to have it two tiered - basically sand base with egg crate in it, Back half of tank will have a shelf that'll be about 15cm or so up. Under it I'll have some broken up live rock and a heater back there. Hard to explain, will make more sense when it's done :p
Ideally, it'll be something that I can isolate and run as an independent (though sump and skimmerless) system if necessary. The live rock hidden under the back shelf will help with that, and will let me get rid of some of the excess out of the sump. Will also be a good ready source for rock to grow things on.
The idea of the heater at the back is to assist with reducing heat loss. The room is typically cold, and the main tank heaters run off a single controller. This way the system will have an independent heater as well.
Plumbing: I've ordered hansen bulk heads, ball valve and some elbows. I prefer to avoid 90deg, but I won't have a lot of space behind this tank, so 90deg it is. These should be here tomorrow. The rest of it will be stuff either laying around or will be bought from Bunnings.
Return: I have a spare Hailea 1000l pump kicking around. Used to use it on the nano, and it managed to maintain some pretty decent head when it had to push over 6 foot up, so it should do the job. Only 2 foot of head on this, so should be fine.
Lighting: Just built a 24 LED Aquastyleonline job - 10 x 10000k whites, 10x royal blue, 2x red, 2 xUV, 2 x meanwell drivers. Mounted on the old heatsink from my nano LED build and currently using a RapidLED controller. Ordered from them Saturday. FedEx tried to deliver to me Monday, so can't complain about turn around time.
Flow: NFI yet. I have a spare JVP kicking around. Probably way too much flow in a tank with 100l~ water, but anyway. I have a smaller one in the DT that I may swap it over for if it's a problem.
Jul 28, 2012
Synodontis dropped off my new frag tank Friday morning - 900x300x300mm built out of 6mm glass. No bracing.
Friday night I messed around with bulkheads, which I ultimately had to shorten and install in reverse to fit into the small overflow box. The black mesh that was around the overflox box managed to get ripped out in the process.
Put black contact on back of tank, which managed to take an inordinate amount of time, and isn't perfect but it beats looking at the pipe behind it.
This morning (started at 5): worked on plumbing to get it across to my sump (it's to the left in a cupboard). After a fair bit of rooting around, and removing the tank more than once to get the bulkheads to reseal an elbow, I managed to get it mostly functional. Then spent some time loading the sand, making the shelving (the top shelf is just sitting there, which is why it's crooked), finding small enough bits of live rock out of the sump, then finally getting it wet.
The overflow box is a bit too high for my liking - when I first turned on the 1000/l return, the overflow pipes couldn't keep up. Initially I had intended to have a main pipe and an emergency. The lack of height doesn't leave enough room for an emergency to have time to do much, so I decided to change things around so both pipes can share the load.
The pipes needed some modification (they are running horizontally before they drop and one bend was up too high). I then shoved a hansen ball valve into the return piping to slow the flow down a bit.
After some tinkering, and blocking each of the overflow pipes for a few minutes, I finally convinced myself that each pipe could survive if one is blocked. The return pipe on the right is a fair way down - further than I'd like, however if the pump is turned on, it tends to bubble and fart a fair bit, and if I didn't have it down that far, it blows water all over the walls around it. My sump should be big enough to cope if the power cuts and it syphons back at the same time as the DT. Haven't tested this yet, but I know I can fit over 50l extra in there, so it should be fine.
Other points worth mentioning: this is sitting under my cichlid tank. The lights are attached to its base, and as can be seen in the photo, the drivers are up near the light - I really have no where else to fit them, but they're out of the way up there. You may make out a fan to the right of the light. When I tested the lights up there, the heatsink was too hot too touch when running at 100%. I rigged an old PC power supply fan up to hang next to it, and found that at the other end of the heatsink I was getting a 10C drop in temp - enough to make it comfortable to grab hold of again. I attached the fan to an old computer I/O slot cover, screwed it up there, and wired the fan to the power supply that also drives the RapidLED controller that is currently running the lights.
Live rock - I wanted to throw in some live rock so the tank could be used stand alone if I need to. It's out of the way, and most of those pieces are long thin bits that I might like to grow things on one day. I may at some point put a heater in this tank as well.
Next: get some more flow in the tank (probably a couple of smaller cheapo little power heads at this stage), and bring on the Vic LFS crawl. I need to stock this puppy up.
Aug 4, 2012
A week in, and the algae is starting to get a showing in the frag tank- just brown powdery looking stuff. I've wound the lights back as I suspect they're just a little too much - like I forgot that they were at 100% lol.
Re-balanced the colouring a bit too to give the blues a bit of an edge to help get the colours to pop. A little dark in there right now, but until the algae settles, I might just go with it.
Made a few mods last night to increase the flow back to the sump. Can't be doing too badly for flow back to the sump though, the frag tank doesn't have it's own heater, and it's maintaining the system temperature in a room that's about 6 or 7 degrees cooler.
Tomorrow during the water change, I'm going to rip out one of the wavemakers from the DT and stick it in the frag tank and see what happens.
Aug 11, 2012
So after all these months, looks like someone has found a new home....
Aug 26, 2012
The morning after the night before.... lol
Spent an absolute fortune on coral, and came home with 2 1/2 boxes full. Some were in cheapo tanks that will require some TLC, and others were just random buys.
I'll need to do two sets of photos, as the stuff in the DT is still sitting in the dark until this arvo, and rooting around with the Typhon to turn the lights on early is too much effort lol.
Some of this stuff I had already, a lot of it is new...
Aug 26, 2012
FTS time...
Sep 23, 2012
Long overdue update (without pics.. sorry).
Tis the time of year where I need to leave the tank in the capable hands of a non-reefer to come by every couple of days to throw in a little food, top up the ATO containers and feed my cat while I venture off to Mt Panorama. Another week before I leave so still time to finish getting organised.
- Doubled the ATO holding tank volume from 25 to 50litres (last time I did this a float valve failed).
- Bought an IP based web cam with IR so I can see the tank in the dark over the internet.
- Just had the IBC filled for the 3rd time since I got it in December.
- Decided I needed more space next to the sump. All of the LED drivers are all on a board in the cupboard under the DT, so I decided to change the layout slightly, swing the board around so all the electronics are out of the way, and managed to salvage an extra 3 inches of space beside of the sump. 3 inches that will let me fit 3l containers of randy's home brew neatly. Amazing what a 10 minute change does for reclaiming space.
Sump is a bit of a mess. Have a filter sock coming sometime this week. Only going to put it on the pipe from the DT, but won't do that until I return from Bathurst. Not a big fan of big changes before I leave the house for a week. I used some filter wool for a while when the tank was first started, but stopped after I needed to change it every 2 days to avoid slowing the flowrate.
Working on sorting out a dosing pump soon to get my calc and alk a little more stable. Might even look at a chiller once we get to summer; it won't get much use here, but it will give me some piece of mind if I go away for a few days and it does get hot. Will need to think about that more when I have the money for it :p
Not much else to say really. I have frags overflowing from the frag tank into the DT - at least all the one and two polyp ones that will take a while to grow out. Made a 3 foot long, one tile wide holder out of egg crate and a magnet and attached that to the back wall of the DT. Probably looks a little too DIY, but the utility of it is far more useful than the aesthetic of it at the moment.
I have a stack of fragging I need to do still, but that will need to wait a few weeks I think. :D
Sep 23, 2012
I wasn't going to, but bugger it.. here's the DT
Tank seems to be coping with the new inhabitants well. Inhabitants seem to be coping well too. The bleached anemone that I inherited has hauled its ass around the rock work a bit and seems to have settled. Not sure I can do much for it, but it seems to be hanging in there.
Today I moved over Benny the Blenny from my nano (hah, didn't even need to dismantle the entire tank to catch him). His favourite hidy-hole had a leather on the top, with a large ric that was actually growing on the side of the leather. The ric's foot was sort of on the leather, and on about two pieces of rock. Managed to separate it off the leather and split the rock between them and migrated them across. Been meaning to do this for ages, but never quite been game.
Apr 13, 2012
So, at Synodontis request, here's my hammer at the moment:
That was the one that was in a bad state last year
Apr 14, 2012
Changed the LEDs around a little today. Stuck in 4 violets and 2 reds from MagicJ
Also stuck a couple of whites back into the mix along the front row as it was a little too blue.
Sadly, it's now a little too white :D With some forethought, I shoved most of the whites, violets and reds on one channel, so once the light cycle starts this arvo, I might play with winding it back a bit to take the edge off it.
Haven't touched the third row of LEDs yet - they need to loose some whites. Fourth row still hasn't been built. As soon as I can afford another ELN-60-48P and a few more LEDs, I'll get it built, then I might actually get the lighting finished :D
Apr 14, 2012
Latest FTS (a bit lousy, I did this handheld):
Looks a little blue just to the left of centre; it isn't quite that blue when you're in front of it. Excuse the mess on the back glass, I really need some snails, so I'm letting those eggs grow :D
I didn't think that the reds made much difference until I stuck my finger over one and actually saw the difference.
Apr 22, 2012
Playing around with one of dad's macro lenses yesterday - was a 50-70mm, though one of these is recording it was shot at 105mm, which doesn't make a lot of sense. Played around with white balancing and worked out how to get a closer to acceptable result with the D70. His D200 is a lot more functional for this, but I managed to actually see coralline in its true colours without a flash.
Neither image has been modified, both shot at 1/60th second.
There were a stack of pics taken with the d200 as well, of which I don't have. Dad wants to have a play with them. He even managed to get some shots of my CBS, but they're hardly post worthy as there was no where near enough light. His photos were a lot better than mine, though it was his first experience shooting completely through glass, water and under this type of lighting.
May 27, 2012
Latest FTS:
You really can't tell from the pic, but the rock on the right has been moved back into the corner (plenty of room for water to get round though), and I pulled about 8kg of rock out. It doubled the usable space on the sandbed which was my objective. The move was only made a couple of hours ago, so a few corals haven't quite gotten over that just yet.
Getting close to getting the lighting finished. I'm working on trying to raise the LED runs a bit higher. Hoping to have a dosing pump in soon as this tank is chewing alk and calc.
I'll post pics of the frags from yesterdays meet once they start to recover.
May 29, 2012
I dumped the excess rock into the sump.. no room in the rock section, so theres some in the return and some in the skimmer section. That caused some changes to how much water sits in the weir.. it had been noisy as there was never much in it, and the bunnings ball valve is hard to tune. This change seems to have pushed the volume in the weir up dramatically. It's still below overflow. If I add more water to the sump, it just winds up increasing the overflow height.
Not too worried - the flow seems to be about right, but at least it's shut the damn gargling noise up that was happening every few minutes :p
Jun 3, 2012
My latest additions. Think I'll call them Jack & Jill. Only because calling them Ken & Jen occurred to me after I named them :D *ducks for cover*
They've been in since late last night. They came out of different tanks when I bought them, so I figured I'd release them at opposite sides of the tank. First thing Jack did was swim over to Jill, and they've been hanging around each other ever since.
Photo is shit. Hard to focus in the dark lol.
Jun 3, 2012
Picked these up yesterday from Bunarong along with the clowns...
Jun 18, 2012
New FTS
Excuse the angle - taken from above shooting down.
Added a fourth row of LEDs at the weekend, and mixed some of the blues and royal blues up. Every LED row now has all 5 LED channels running across it. A little extra wiring, but a lot easier for me to make changes later. Took around 10 hours to rebuild it. Wired in a plug and socket set up so I can easily disconnect the whole build and remove it from the tank.
Still to do: put some ali strips across the runs so they all become one whole unit. Stops me from moving individual rows when I need space, but at least I'll be able to just pick the whole thing up and get it out of the way. Also waiting on some angled pieces so I can mount the runs up higher than they are.
Next on the list: Frag tank. Waiting on pricing.
Jul 12, 2012
A couple of people already know, but most don't. I've caught the frag tank bug - mostly because I'm sick of frags vanishing down to the back of the tank where I can't get them!
So:
3x1x1 frag tank to be hooked into this system. It will sit on the bottom shelf of an adjacent tank stand with the plumbing running back over to the sump. They're quite close, and it's not up very high so it shouldn't be an issue. This size should fit the space I have for it quite well. It's probably overkill, but I'm wanting to focus on establishing colonies of things like zoas before I put them into the DT. Locally, no one sells coral either, so perhaps there might be some market down there later on for local trades or making a few bucks to cover the cost....
The tank has been ordered. Going for pretty straight forward approach. Ideally, I want to have it two tiered - basically sand base with egg crate in it, Back half of tank will have a shelf that'll be about 15cm or so up. Under it I'll have some broken up live rock and a heater back there. Hard to explain, will make more sense when it's done :p
Ideally, it'll be something that I can isolate and run as an independent (though sump and skimmerless) system if necessary. The live rock hidden under the back shelf will help with that, and will let me get rid of some of the excess out of the sump. Will also be a good ready source for rock to grow things on.
The idea of the heater at the back is to assist with reducing heat loss. The room is typically cold, and the main tank heaters run off a single controller. This way the system will have an independent heater as well.
Plumbing: I've ordered hansen bulk heads, ball valve and some elbows. I prefer to avoid 90deg, but I won't have a lot of space behind this tank, so 90deg it is. These should be here tomorrow. The rest of it will be stuff either laying around or will be bought from Bunnings.
Return: I have a spare Hailea 1000l pump kicking around. Used to use it on the nano, and it managed to maintain some pretty decent head when it had to push over 6 foot up, so it should do the job. Only 2 foot of head on this, so should be fine.
Lighting: Just built a 24 LED Aquastyleonline job - 10 x 10000k whites, 10x royal blue, 2x red, 2 xUV, 2 x meanwell drivers. Mounted on the old heatsink from my nano LED build and currently using a RapidLED controller. Ordered from them Saturday. FedEx tried to deliver to me Monday, so can't complain about turn around time.
Flow: NFI yet. I have a spare JVP kicking around. Probably way too much flow in a tank with 100l~ water, but anyway. I have a smaller one in the DT that I may swap it over for if it's a problem.
Jul 28, 2012
Synodontis dropped off my new frag tank Friday morning - 900x300x300mm built out of 6mm glass. No bracing.
Friday night I messed around with bulkheads, which I ultimately had to shorten and install in reverse to fit into the small overflow box. The black mesh that was around the overflox box managed to get ripped out in the process.
Put black contact on back of tank, which managed to take an inordinate amount of time, and isn't perfect but it beats looking at the pipe behind it.
This morning (started at 5): worked on plumbing to get it across to my sump (it's to the left in a cupboard). After a fair bit of rooting around, and removing the tank more than once to get the bulkheads to reseal an elbow, I managed to get it mostly functional. Then spent some time loading the sand, making the shelving (the top shelf is just sitting there, which is why it's crooked), finding small enough bits of live rock out of the sump, then finally getting it wet.
The overflow box is a bit too high for my liking - when I first turned on the 1000/l return, the overflow pipes couldn't keep up. Initially I had intended to have a main pipe and an emergency. The lack of height doesn't leave enough room for an emergency to have time to do much, so I decided to change things around so both pipes can share the load.
The pipes needed some modification (they are running horizontally before they drop and one bend was up too high). I then shoved a hansen ball valve into the return piping to slow the flow down a bit.
After some tinkering, and blocking each of the overflow pipes for a few minutes, I finally convinced myself that each pipe could survive if one is blocked. The return pipe on the right is a fair way down - further than I'd like, however if the pump is turned on, it tends to bubble and fart a fair bit, and if I didn't have it down that far, it blows water all over the walls around it. My sump should be big enough to cope if the power cuts and it syphons back at the same time as the DT. Haven't tested this yet, but I know I can fit over 50l extra in there, so it should be fine.
Other points worth mentioning: this is sitting under my cichlid tank. The lights are attached to its base, and as can be seen in the photo, the drivers are up near the light - I really have no where else to fit them, but they're out of the way up there. You may make out a fan to the right of the light. When I tested the lights up there, the heatsink was too hot too touch when running at 100%. I rigged an old PC power supply fan up to hang next to it, and found that at the other end of the heatsink I was getting a 10C drop in temp - enough to make it comfortable to grab hold of again. I attached the fan to an old computer I/O slot cover, screwed it up there, and wired the fan to the power supply that also drives the RapidLED controller that is currently running the lights.
Live rock - I wanted to throw in some live rock so the tank could be used stand alone if I need to. It's out of the way, and most of those pieces are long thin bits that I might like to grow things on one day. I may at some point put a heater in this tank as well.
Next: get some more flow in the tank (probably a couple of smaller cheapo little power heads at this stage), and bring on the Vic LFS crawl. I need to stock this puppy up.
Aug 4, 2012
A week in, and the algae is starting to get a showing in the frag tank- just brown powdery looking stuff. I've wound the lights back as I suspect they're just a little too much - like I forgot that they were at 100% lol.
Re-balanced the colouring a bit too to give the blues a bit of an edge to help get the colours to pop. A little dark in there right now, but until the algae settles, I might just go with it.
Made a few mods last night to increase the flow back to the sump. Can't be doing too badly for flow back to the sump though, the frag tank doesn't have it's own heater, and it's maintaining the system temperature in a room that's about 6 or 7 degrees cooler.
Tomorrow during the water change, I'm going to rip out one of the wavemakers from the DT and stick it in the frag tank and see what happens.
Aug 11, 2012
So after all these months, looks like someone has found a new home....
Aug 26, 2012
The morning after the night before.... lol
Spent an absolute fortune on coral, and came home with 2 1/2 boxes full. Some were in cheapo tanks that will require some TLC, and others were just random buys.
I'll need to do two sets of photos, as the stuff in the DT is still sitting in the dark until this arvo, and rooting around with the Typhon to turn the lights on early is too much effort lol.
Some of this stuff I had already, a lot of it is new...
Aug 26, 2012
FTS time...
Sep 23, 2012
Long overdue update (without pics.. sorry).
Tis the time of year where I need to leave the tank in the capable hands of a non-reefer to come by every couple of days to throw in a little food, top up the ATO containers and feed my cat while I venture off to Mt Panorama. Another week before I leave so still time to finish getting organised.
- Doubled the ATO holding tank volume from 25 to 50litres (last time I did this a float valve failed).
- Bought an IP based web cam with IR so I can see the tank in the dark over the internet.
- Just had the IBC filled for the 3rd time since I got it in December.
- Decided I needed more space next to the sump. All of the LED drivers are all on a board in the cupboard under the DT, so I decided to change the layout slightly, swing the board around so all the electronics are out of the way, and managed to salvage an extra 3 inches of space beside of the sump. 3 inches that will let me fit 3l containers of randy's home brew neatly. Amazing what a 10 minute change does for reclaiming space.
Sump is a bit of a mess. Have a filter sock coming sometime this week. Only going to put it on the pipe from the DT, but won't do that until I return from Bathurst. Not a big fan of big changes before I leave the house for a week. I used some filter wool for a while when the tank was first started, but stopped after I needed to change it every 2 days to avoid slowing the flowrate.
Working on sorting out a dosing pump soon to get my calc and alk a little more stable. Might even look at a chiller once we get to summer; it won't get much use here, but it will give me some piece of mind if I go away for a few days and it does get hot. Will need to think about that more when I have the money for it :p
Not much else to say really. I have frags overflowing from the frag tank into the DT - at least all the one and two polyp ones that will take a while to grow out. Made a 3 foot long, one tile wide holder out of egg crate and a magnet and attached that to the back wall of the DT. Probably looks a little too DIY, but the utility of it is far more useful than the aesthetic of it at the moment.
I have a stack of fragging I need to do still, but that will need to wait a few weeks I think. :D
Sep 23, 2012
I wasn't going to, but bugger it.. here's the DT
