Ritteri in a cube

[Delphinus]

After looking at it a lot tonight, I think it -might- be just one heck of a scratch. I'm flummoxed I haven't noticed it before, I think it's from transporting the tank over to my place back in September; you'd think one would have noticed it a bit sooner!!

At any rate it's something I'm watching very carefully to see if it changes. I can feel a bump on the outside of the tank but nothing on the inside which makes me think it's a scratch. It's just the way it catches the light that makes me really nervous.

...

Vanreefer, here's a picture of the sump. It's a bit tight in there so hard to photograph to show it clearly, sorry about that.



The back pipe with the grey unions is the sump return. The overflows bend around the sump return pipe. In front of the white unions there are T's that connect the overflows into a single line (which just joins the two), that has a T in the centre, into a line which goes down and feeds the skimmer. The big lines continue onwards to carry the excess flow to the sump (since there is too much flow through the overflows to feed the skimmer 100%, it overwhelms the skimmer and causes a flood). The ball valves are there to put a little backpressure in the overflow lines to make sure enough flow feeds the skimmer (water will take the path of least resistance, without the ball valves there would be not enough pressure to feed the skimmer). The skimmer has the gate valve mod on it.

The yellow line is just a 1/4" water line that I can use to drip-acclimate future tank inhabitants.

The webpage asmskimmer.com (not ASM's website, just a reseller) details how to do the recirc mod and the gate valve mod. Neither modification is tricky, although the hardest part (for me anyhow) was sourcing the additional uniseals. I couldn't find any local supplier for these so I ordered them from that website (and probably paid way too much as a result, but beggars can't be choosers).

The ritteri puts an enormous amount of nitrates into the water column, so I'm hoping the mods will help with that. The tank has only been running like this for a few weeks, so I can't really tell you if it's worth the effort yet to make these mods, although the theory behind them seems sound, so it should be good. Or so I hope. I hope my explanations make sense; let me know if there's anything I can try to explain better.