135 Journal

[wetcoast]

Slowly my other ordered parts trickled in and I was able to complete the plumbing in the equipment room. One being an Ozone Reactor from Aquarium Life Support Systems.



I also built a big Air Dryer for it so that I didn't have to change beads so frequently:



A calcium reactor that I saved from my old 65 gallon made out of a very large Water container (will detail the build of that once I can find those pictures), and a Kalkwasser Reactor were put in place beside the refugium and QT tank. The Kalk reactor lasted two weeks and pee'd water all over the floor so a new one is being built.

The final piece I was missing was my skimmer. I originally had a Euro Reef CS400, but realized it was far too big for my plans and sold it. I ordered an ATI Bubble Master 250 Skimmer in July and in January just got fed up and purchased a Bubble King Mini 180 as I was starting to get a wee bit frustrated. Since I hacked up my sump stand a few times it made it quite difficult to get a skimmer in and out without draining the sump and disconnecting all the plumbing parts, so this was holding me back. I ended up modifying the stand one more time to make it all work out.





I then finished off the rest of the plumbing for the return, drain, refugium and to feed all the other components. The Ozone Reactor outputs into a TLF Phosban Reactor filled with Carbon - Another reactor will go in line in the near future. This was during the first phase of testing to see if my ideas actually worked out. There were a few issues with noise, microbubbles, leaking Snapper return pumps, and a cracked Dart Closed Loop pump, but I kept drinking beer and everything worked out.

Took my RODI unit a couple days to end up filling the whole tank, so in celebration I dumped 8 bags of sugar sand into the Refugium and Display. I'm still on the fence whether this was a good idea or not - Atinic Stew:



After that sorted itself out, I picked up 260lb of really nice pieces of rock, and got chewed out by my girlfriend for taking up her counter space.




I arranged the rockwork in both the Refugium and Display tank and let it sit for a long while. While I was waiting, I grabbed a couple pounds of sand, a couple 1" 45 degree adapters, and spread hot glue on them, for my closed loop outputs..

[michika]

Very nice so far!

[wetcoast]

While the tank was cycling I started doing alot of housekeeping, and tracking parameters via the Aquatronica computer I have. It allows me to track Water Level (Sump and Display) for adding Top off Water, Temperature in my Room and in the tank, pH for both display and effluent out of the calcium reactor, and ORP for the Ozone Generator. I met a nice fellow on ReefCentral who managed to reverse engineer the Aquatronica Ethernet component and built a monitoring application that blew the included controller software out of the water. I liked his development skills so much from where he was (South Africa) and convinced him that he should come with with me in Canada. He'll he here soon..

I noticed some alarming trends with my temperature, and built a fan array for the refugium and sump out of some variable speed 12v DC computer fans.


The fans turn on when the display tank gets above 79.3F at their most highest RPM, this so far has helped as the display one day made it to 86 degrees with the haldes on!






Once march came around I started stocking the tank with some snails, and other invertebrates to help control the algae outbreak that I was experiencing from new tank syndrome. I have a serious amount of Hair Algae growing in the tank that I attribute to the rocks I picked up containing large amounts of phosphate. I am running 8oz of GFO every 3 days to remove the source and constantly plucking it in hopes it will go away. I've since added some crabs, and some fish in an attempt to control it, waiting patiently for the day to be able to get my corals flown in from Winnipeg that a reefer has been holding for me for the past 2 years.

I also added a new refugium light from Litemor Industries (23watt 5000k Compact Flourescent PAR38 Flood) which is helping grow various types of macroalgae. In time I will stock the refugium with some sort of fish or inverts. On the fence on putting seahorses as originally planned simply due to the temperature that the system is running at, and what may come of it once summer arrives. Trying not to go down the path of a chiller, but will revisit that idea in June.

Feeling a bit sheepish about the tank right now with its overgrowth of Hair Algae and Bryopsis, so I have no pictures of the tank from when it started until now. Will fiddle with a camera tonite and post one shortly.

[tang daddy]

Hey Bud looks good so far, I envy all your top notch equiptment, looks like no cutting corners with this set up. Can't wait to see more as this will give me ideas for my next build.

[robzilla]

nice looking setup. great that you took pictures thru the process. keep them coming!!

[Pan]

Looks good....I lalways like to live vicariously through people who PLAN their systems. I wish I had planned a bit more.

[Delphinus]

Wow, that wood for the canopy and stand is "cherry"!!