Ouch about the Blackfin :(

Something is not right with the Tunze. I'm thinking you might have debris in the impeller assembly or it's missing one of the pin guide things. The vinegar bath should help. I hope you get it all sorted out..

Oh my. :sad: I guess you should try to call back and speak with Chris. Or make a thread in Reef Central with the above info... *snicker* ...that should get a reaction.

I'm pretty sure that would get a reaction. I left an e-mail for Chris so I'm hoping he will respond. Otherwise, I have a dead but brand new pump and i will have to come up with a a backup plan. I guess if one failed, I could remove the volute from the failed unit and put it on the cracked unit. That would give me a "painful" backup plan.

Hi Mark try getting hold of Chris at Interior reef in town / I think he has a few blackfins may have some parts.

Thanks Brent, I will do that.

She's ALIVE!!! I started everything up last night...after completely taking apart my overflow and re-building it because I had a premonition that it would leak (now it does not for sure).

The return pump is pretty loud...my wife hates it so I'm working on methods to quiet it down.
The Bean Animal is dead silent...once I got it going right and tuned in. Amazing but a 1/4" turn of the gate valve will move the water level 1/4" in my overflow...so I can see why ball valves would be crazy tough to tune.

Still dealing with some cloudiness in the water, but working on that too. :)

congrats man! it's both thrilling and terrifying all at once :biggrin:

have you managed to get flex hose in between the tank and the pump anywhere? you could also place some soundproofing tiles on the ceiling in your fish room maybe? if the sound is from pipe vibrating against walls though no soundproofing down there is going to help.

I'm just not sure. I just took apart the fan cover on the pump and put some padding into it where it touches the metal body. Haven't restarted it as I'm fixing a few spots where my unions needed to be "tightened".
If I can't get it to be quieter, I might take apart the return plumbing just out of the pump and try black spa-flex. The stores tell me it shouldn't be used salt as in salt pools, it degrades quickly. I'm also watching for the Blowhole 2750 pump as it might be enough to replace my Blackfin (with less watts and better head pressure abilities). I hear they may be out in March.

Is your pump base bolted down to something solid? If not, it is free to vibrate and transfer motion noise to your plumbing.

Yup, bolted to the bench, through several layers of padding and another 5/8" board. She can't move. The bench is bolted to the floor and is 1" plywood with 4" beams. You can't feel any vibration in the bench at all.

Okay...lots of effort but not a lot to show for it today. Kids were home sick so I was off and trying to get some tank work done.
Here's my skimmer getting its first workout. My daughter really wanted to help (be in the way) and so she jumped in the pic.
http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...ps1300d5e2.jpg

Yeah :lol:
Hope you find a way to calm down that return pump

Today I dosed the tank with 30 ampules of Prodibio Startup. That actually took a long time!! Glad I don't have to do 30 ever again at the same time. Hoping that with some proper attention to the stats, in the next few days I will be able to add my limited live rock and two little fish that have been living on their own for a long time prepping that live rock.

Current numbers for the tank are:
Ammonia: 0
PH: 8.0
Temp: 79
Nitrite: 0
Nitrate: 0

I have used prodibio twice now for tank startup and it works as it says.

Good to hear considering that I have bought enough Prodibio for the coming year already. :-)

Got the APEX up and running, updated the firmware and then started working on getting my lights on. Voila, here we go. This is them set at about 70% and the lights are about 14" off the water. This is a phone picture and it seems way more blue than when you see it in person.

http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...psacb47974.jpg

http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...ps677a26d4.jpg

My water hasn't fully cleared up yet. I know my pumps are blowing the sand a little and I'm thinking this is contributing to the problem but how quickly should I expect the water to clear? It's been mostly filled for about 5 days and the sand was well rinsed before it went in.

Run a 50 micron mesh sock or stuff one of your baffles with filter floss


The filter floss works best due to its density. I use the method to catch carbon and gfo fines when I don't properly rinse the stuff.

This is really looking fantastic. I'm eagerly following this keeping a little log of what I'm going to do on my next build!

FWIW, I have never been happy with the noise level of my Reeflo pump. I've got the dart, and from day one it sounded like someone was using a hair dryer in the next room. I got replacement bearings from Reeflo and swapped them out myself, but it didn't help at all. Shortly there after the seal went (why, oh why can't they make the metal components on pump seals out of stainless?) and it started to leak, so I ordered new seals from Reeflo, but this time I went with my dad to one of the high end transmission/bearing places and bought the highest end bearings of that size that they sold. The pump is still louder than I think it should be, but it's reduced to more of a hum that fades in to the background as compared to the high pitch whine that made it hard to talk on the phone in the office before.

I don't think the bearings that come with the pump, or that Reeflo will send you as a replacement are necessarily the greatest quality. If you can't solve the noise issue any other way, I would try sourcing your own, much higher quality bearings and see if that helps. I'm not sure about your model of pump, but the swap on the dart was relatively painless to do, you just need a bearing puller (super cheap) and the right deep socket to help tap the new bearings in place. I found a photo tutorial online showing exactly how to take the dart apart and do the swap.

Hey thank you so much for the info. I bet I could source some high quality bearings from my buddy at BC Bearing. The pump has settled a tiny bit...and if we close the fish room door, then it's just a hum that you can hear through the livingroom and kitchen upstairs. I think it comes from the pipes coming up to the tank.
Tonight I added my liverock and the one little Chromis that's been making it "live" for the last year. He's hiding right now and the tank looks quite different. Not sure where I stand on it still, gonna have to get used to the extra rock. I will get a new picture up shortly.

Here's some terrible phone pics as promised. :)

http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...ps18d2f519.jpg

http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...ps51106497.jpg

Today I began the tear-down of my old tanks at my previous house. I'm very tired of going there every day to feed and clean the tanks. (more feed than clean as evidenced by the look of the tanks right now).

I also bought my first two fish for the new tank. Two little glass cardinals will see the display if they fare well over the next month in my quarantine tank. I'm hoping to give myself some good habits instead of the bad ones I've been culturing for years in this hobby. :)

The Display is looking really good and the Chromis and Goby have done well, along with the small clean up crew that I added. Tests are all still reading zero so I have to say, Prodibio Startup has really come through for me.

I have to agree with sphelps that adding rubber couplers inline between the return pump and the output to the tank, especially before it makes contact with the wall should really help with the noise transfer upstairs.

If you really have no room, which I can understand as it looks pretty tight, then maybe consider cutting an access panel where the return plumbing enters the wall and adding the coupler there.

Other than that, great looking build!

Yesterday I added the fish from my other tanks into the main display...they seem very happy though I was worried about my clown as he seemed distressed while in transfer between my houses.

http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...ps9435eb18.jpg

http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...ps1d5b838c.jpg

I'm using Prodibio on this tank but the instructions for use from both them and from Aqua-digital are pretty vague, so after dosing 30 vials of Startup 8 days ago, today I started with the bio-digest and bioptim. I will start tracking them at 15 days now. Hopefully this keeps my tank ticking along the way that it's supposed to. :)

30 vials? :lol:

YAY, FISH!!!! I just bought a 6-pack of those Cardinalfish for my 50-gallon LPS tank. They are very pretty.

Figured an update is long overdue. Last week, I purchased my first batch of frags during a trip to Kamloops. Thanks again Matt.

Here they are in a little quarantine tank after i dipped and inspected them thoroughly. They are just under three stunners right now but I plan to move a couple of them up to the display today.

http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...pscd770d22.jpg

I see sticks! :D

Yup...4 of the in the display now. Having a few lighting issues. One LED went out in one of my parallel strings and the fuses shortly followed to protect the other LEDS in those strings. Needless to say...changing some fuses and troubleshooting that LED today.

Oh fun stuff...not.

Hey Mark, what's your LED set up? Fuses? Aren't you using constant current drivers? Hope you get it sorted out. LMK if you need assistance, I've got some electrical know how.

Hey Mike, thanks for the offer of help...I might take you up on that sometime. If you take a look early in my build...this DIY light uses some big drivers and I chose to do parallel strings so resistors and fuses were needed...and they worked well...I hope. Didn't end up fixing the light yet...there are still more than enough lights there to cook whatever is in the tank so I've delayed till the weekend.

I'll need to back in the thread to check out your LED build. My LEDs are hooked up in parallel as well, however not strings, rather single 10 watt multi-chip LEDs. I really should have fuses as well, but just haven't got 'round to it. I opted for 12 VDC power supplies rather than 'drivers', but am making sure the voltage I feed my LEDs is always less than the rated maximum vf, so underdriving. So far so good, the fixture is coming up on a full year of use in early April and haven't had a LED burn out yet. Only failures so far are several of the fans on the heatsinks. I have spares, so replacement is no problem & it takes all of 10 minutes. If I were to do another build using 10 watt multichips, I would use the larger heatsinks without fan now available and simply run a couple of bigger fans over the whole fixture. Probably would go with larger multichips with optics next time around as well. Three or four 50 to 100 watt multichips would be much simpler & less cluttered. They're fairly affordable these days & come in a good selection of spectrums, including multiple colours per chip.

Yeah, I love my light for coverage...no complaints at all, but it did appear that one led had an issue after being hung and that caused the "event" that the fuses were there to protect against. I have about six spare fuses and the control boards are readily accessible, so the biggest pain will be working on replacing the led as I don't want to take the fixture down.
You'll have to come by some time to check out the tank.

The tank is progressing along through the stages of "newness" and I'm still trying to get ahead of the "automation curve" that I've set for myself. Stockpiled for all this time while the house was built have been various pieces of the setup that only now am I wading through. My dosing and my ATO are not yet up. My activated carbon reactor is up but will be undergoing some changes shortly and my desk in the fish room is only half built.

I have learned that no matter how big you think your fish room is...it's not big enough!

I'm also starting to get some hair algae popping up in the tank. I know it's all part of the new tank syndrome but I still don't like it so I beefed up my CUC a little today with some turbos. They really are tanks but their already making a dent.
http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...psb87639b3.jpg

Thought it was time for a quick update.

Thanks to H202, I received a bunch of amazing frags / colonies from FragitDan and from Chowder. Really thrilled with the stuff I got and looking forward to seeing go into my display. For now, as with all things...quarantine time!

Here are a few pics (at 12:30 last night when I landed them) because I realize all the short attention spans on here. :lol: Remember that some of these had to travel from the Island and some from Vancouver so many of the "frags" are broken pieces off the colonies.

http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...ps0f7fc75a.jpg

http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...ps9a8f531a.jpg

You can see in this third picture all the large colonies below the frag rack that also came.

http://i485.photobucket.com/albums/r...ps7cab4b3b.jpg

have you gottem any those new corals in the display yet Mark? Quarentine shmorintine.. lets see some action :twised:

I believe I should call you a bad influence Nick. 4 more corals made it into the display tonight...two of which were fighting STN when I got them and may still be losing. I suspect at least 4 or 5 more will make the journey tomorrow. Will get some pictures then as I moved them with lights pretty much out.

last i saw that frag rack it was not nearly as full. What happened to all the corals that were on it? Can we see where they are now?

yeah...gotta get some FTS up on here. Thanks for the reminder Nick. My current phone takes terrible pics so I'll see about using my point and shoot. Tanks mostly dark now so it will have to be tomorrow.

You're going to need a nice camera to take pics of your nice tank you know! ;)