Man it's been a while since I updated.
Tank has gone through some changes. Had a monster ich problem, tried fixing it with cut corners, which, you guessed it, not only failed, but made my display tank look like garbage. I tried using my modified sump as a QT for a hypo treatment. The hypo protocol didn't work for me (likely do to the fact that I couldn't prevent backsplash from the DT and my salinity fluctuated too much), but for all that time, the DT had no protein skimming, no water changes, no GFO, no bio-pellets, no nutrient export of any kind. And I kept feeding the display. Fast forward 6 weeks and the display tank looked like this:
Front:
Back:
Basically it looked like garbage. After the fish got ich again in the hypo treatment, I moved them to a separate QT tank and started a copper treatment, and returned my sump to it's normal operation. This had hte nasty side effect of forcing me to reset my fallow clock to 0 days after already having a fishless display for nearly 6 weeks. Needless to say I'm itching for my fish to be back in a proper home. They're banished until November 30th.
Since then I've been aggressively correcting all the problems that co-opting my sump for 6 weeks caused. I started GFO again, tuned my bio-pellet reactor, started doing water changes a couple of times a week (my salt budget has exploded), and got a small army of Mexican turbo snails. I also cut back on the amount that I feed the display. However, none of that was really all that effective. It was obviously working, as I didn't even have to clean the glass anymore, but that nasty hair algae is tough as nails. It's almost like once you have it that badly, you have it. You can slow it down but it's so pervasive that it sucks up the nutrients faster than any of your nutrient reduction systems can remove them. For 3 weeks I was manually removing at least 2 pounds a week and it was still growing back, albeit slower than it had been. So I ordered Algaefix Marine from an Asian seller on Ebay who didn't mind shipping to Canada (it's technically banned here, and most US retailers won't ship it) and started dosing as per instructions. I'm 4 doses in, and this is the tank now:
Front:
Back:
I've also gone on a bit of a coral shopping spree, have rescaped the rocks a tiny bit and moved stuff around to make room for all the new things. I've also upgraded my Radions to the TIR lenses and picked up an Apex controller unit, which has made my life oh-so-much easier. Not having to unplug things when I need to clean equipment alone was worth the cost, but the feed cycles are also invaluable. I haven't set it up online yet as the ethernet cable in my cabinet is dead (another thing for the warranty people!), but the control panel is pretty straightforward.
So far the only disasters have been to do with my RO system. I was using a switched timer to bring the water up from the RO reservoir in the basement because I couldn't find any three pronged switched outlets. Basically it had a 'timer' mode and an 'on' mode. I deactivated all the timer points so that it was effectively an off switch. I went out of town for 10 days, and the night before I was refilling all my dosing chambers and must have knocked the timer on the switch with the bucket, which told the timer to switch on at 4 pm the next day. When I was 2000km away. Thank any deity you can thank that my roommate just happened to be home when the pump kicked on called me freaking out. She was literally walking out the door when it happened, and had she left 5 minutes earlier 55 gallons of fresh water would have emptied on to my office floor. Needless to say I ordered proper switches that day.
Anyway, that's kind of it. I'm looking for someone who wants to sell a frag of red planet, Oregon tort, cali tort, or any other 'premium' level frags in Calgary, so if someone reading this has some they want to sell, let me know!