super cool Kien! And great photos!

Wow, you can take amazing pics. Corals and blenny look great.

Yeah you got to see his camera equipment :-) Great photos always

Your tank is amazing and a definite inspiration to my upcoming build. I have a question for you though. I saw on your videos that you have some mushrooms on one rock. How do you keep them from taking over your whole tank? I had one mushroom when I started 3 years ago, now I have 200 and they are busy killing everything they can, and that's after me harvesting them every month.

Thanks! Looking forward to your peninsula build! I think it must be the species of mushrooms. In a previous tank I had the same problem, mushrooms grew like weeds and nearly took over. Kinda put me off mushrooms for a while. Then I got back into mushrooms in my last 90gallon tank and started with that rock of blue mushrooms that you see in those pics. It has not grown much beyond its rock. If I do see it heading to other rocks I prune it, but it does not seem to do that that quickly. Certainly not plague like that I've experienced before. I also have a couple of patches of two different varieties of red mushrooms which grow/spread even slower. Very very slow. And then there's a rock of rhodactis and a couple of rocks of ricordias which are also painfully slow. So I guess in the end I am just lucky, I don't know.

Sorry that I can't offer much more of an explanation other than that. If I had to make a more educated somewhat scientific guess, I would maybe chalk it up to low nutrients ? My SPS seem to do really well so maybe they are starved ? :noidea: I do love my mushrooms but ya.. if they ever started to take over again like last time I'd be put off and try to get rid of them.

So what did you do when you had the plague? I would like to use my current rock in the new tank but there are so many mushrooms that I couldn't imagine taking that over.

Took the infested rocks out, scraped them off the rocks with a razor, put rocks back in. Any babies that tried to come back were immediately scraped clean off the rock. Was a royal pain but it worked.

Oh, they tended to shrivel when out of the water so i scraped them while submerged in a rubbermaid tub. I think i used a metal scouring pad as well to scrub the leftover bits.

The Hydor 700 Vacation Mod
 

I recently went to Mexico for a week long trip and had my sister tank sit for me. She's done it before and is generally pretty good about looking after things but she's no "Advanced Aquarist". I didn't want her to have to monkey about with the tank too much so I took some steps to make her life a little easier.

1. I had a 33g rubbermade tote full of RO/DI water as a top off reservoir which is good for nearly two weeks of top off water. My usual reservoir which fits under the tank is only 8 gallons, good for about 2 or 3 days.

2. I set up an automatic fish feeder to feed the fish once in the morning and once at night. By the way, what a great little device! I got the Eheim one. I like it so much I use it almost full time now. It plops food in in the morning only though as I still like to hand feed (my fish mush and PE mysis) for the evening feed.

3. Lastly I decided to modify the skimmer to collect a week or mores worth of skimmate. In the past I just turned the skimmer off. However, this time around I wanted to keep it on but I didn't want my sister to have to empty the skimmer cup every few days or so. The cup does fill up pretty quick. Well, it doesn't actually fill up, but it fills enough (about half way) to a point where the foam itself has no room and starts to bubble over. Anyway, here's what I came up with.

I used one of these elbows and simply chopped off one end like so.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1263538927

I then drilled a hole into the base of the skimmer's collection cup the size of the chopped off end, like so.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1263538978

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1263538996

I then silliconed the elbow into the collection cup.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1263539037

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1263539054

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1263539071

Then I stuck an appropriate sized hoze into the nozzel.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1263539096

And voila!

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1263539131

At some point I'm going to put a valve inline there. This has worked out well and I have not touched the skimmate collection since before I left. I do dump some fresh water into the cup to rinse it a bit though. I will probably be using this full time even though it was only meant to be temporary.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1263539370

Also, I think I can use a slightly smaller bottle, like a 2 litre soda bottle would be fine, instead of that gallon monster I have on there now :lol:

Haha, I totally did the opposite with my bubble magus skimmer. I took off the drain line and capped the hole. The reason being is that, while this is a great idea and is good for the reasons you outlined .. there is also now nothing to stop the skimmer from overflowing your sump empty should a snail or something get wedged into the skimmer's output.

Now it used to be pretty common to use a waste collector instead of a bottle on beckett skimmers but you don't see them used on needlewheel skimmers. The reason being though is that the cup is not sealed like they are on becketts (usually flanged and bolted, with a gasket) so that air can't escape except via the drain line. When the drain line closes (usually by a pingpong ball float in the waste collector) then the skimmer can't produce foam anymore because of the back pressure. This was one neat feature with beckett skimmers that seems to be lost with the current gen needlewheels.

Anyhow it's just something to watch out for.

I think what some people are doing nowadays is just putting a drain line on their collection bottles or buckets so that if the bottles overfills it just drains back to the tank. Yeah, gross to dump skimmate back in the tank but it beats an empty sump and a wet floor (it would get skimmed out again pretty quick after you fix the issue anyhow).

Whoa! That is a very good point! Never thought about a snail ever getting into the outlet of the skimmer as the outlet is pretty darn big.

I just went to inspect my skimmer and I have a sock tied to the outlet to cut down on bubbles :-) So I think I'm safe? Anywhere else a snail could get in?