400 gallon project

untamed · #1 08-11-2009, 11:11 PM

When I returned from two weeks holiday, the tank had moved in a few ways.

1) Things got too hot (hitting 85 degrees F a few times). It turns out this was primarily because someone accidently shut off my ventilation fan. That won't happen again.

2) Salinity got a bit lower than I would prefer...measuring 1.020 when I got back.

Overall, I lost another 3 or 4 coral colonies...and browned out a few others. One of the gobies hasn't yet been seen, but that isn't entirely unusual. We'll see.

So...some rapid salinity adjustment, a water change, and getting the fan turned back on seems to have returned the tank to as normal as normal has been for the past while.

Here's the interesting part...the events seem to have triggered a massive spawning. My urchins spawned last night and.... for the first time in 12 years, my carpet anemone spawned at the same time. This turned the tank so milky you could barely see into it and I was very concerned that the tank couldn't take it. By next morning, all was fine aside from a slight unusual smell and a LOT of skimate.

While spawning, the anemone changes shape distinctly....stretching itself as high as possible and forming a "cup" shape. It seems my anemone is a male...or..it was this time.

Snappy · #2 08-11-2009, 11:41 PM

That is pretty cool!

christyf5 · #3 08-12-2009, 03:31 AM

Wow, neato! So is your anemone male because it made that funny shape?

untamed · #4 08-26-2009, 11:29 PM

I can't believe that it took me 3 years to figure this out.... doh!

2 years ago, before we air conditioned the house, the tank was getting too hot. So...I naturally installed central air conditioning to the entire house.

That prevented the tank from getting too hot, but there was still a significant high/low day/night swing in the temperature. For some dumb reason, I figured that by keeping the tank warmer at night, it would minimize the daily swing. Stability is better than instability, right? I adjusted my heaters to keep the tank at 79 overnight.

It only just became clear to me that this didn't really work at all. Each day, the lights added a certain amount of heat energy to the tank, while the air conditioning was able to remove a certain amount of heat energy. That all happens mostly independently of the temperature that the tank happens to be every morning when the lights start up.

In other words...the tank goes up about 3-4 degrees every daylight cycle, and it is going to do that regardless of how cool I allow the tank to get at night.

So...I've decided that a range of 78-82 is probably much better than 79-83. In fact, I'll probably end up dropping it right down to 77-81 or even 76-80.

Delphinus · #5 08-26-2009, 11:34 PM

Erm .. I'm not sure I follow. You mean the A/C *eventually* kicks in and lowers the tank temperature, but there is still a heat "surge" (for lack of a better term) when the lights turn on ?

If I do understand this correctly, it seems there may still be a case to add a chiller to a tank even if the house has central air?

untamed · #6 08-26-2009, 11:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Delphinus

Erm .. I'm not sure I follow. You mean the A/C *eventually* kicks in and lowers the tank temperature, but there is still a heat "surge" (for lack of a better term) when the lights turn on ?

If I do understand this correctly, it seems there may still be a case to add a chiller to a tank even if the house has central air?

The lights are putting heat INTO the tank when they are running....and the air conditioning takes heat OUT of the tank pretty much all the time. During the time when the lights are on, the lights win...and the net contribution moves the tank about 3 or 4 degrees. When the lights go out, air conditioning drops the tank toward room temperature, but the tank stops dropping because heaters kick on. (which now happens at 78 degrees)

A chiller would probably be able to prevent any rise in the tank temp at all during light cycle. However, I don't really have space for a chiller...don't want the noise...and I would need to vent the heat out of the fish room and can't come up with a simple plan to do that.

As an aside...the central air conditioning does not have a vent directly into the fishroom. It therefore is less effective at cooling the aquarium than it could be. I plan to tap into a duct in the ceiling of the fishroom that should improve that situation quite a bit. It could be that once I do that, I might end up at very stable temperature.

untamed · #7 09-23-2009, 05:24 AM

This took an entire day of work, but I finally got that new skimmer into place. What a beast! This is a Reefmania PS12-4 with wet neck option. I don't yet have the wet neck plumbed in and working.

So far, it hasn't skimmed much at all. Still breaking in, I hope.

The key changes from the G6 are:
1) The volume of the skimmer is almost 2x
2) There are 4 Sedra 9000s instead of 3
3) All 4 pumps are recirculated and out of the water
4) The skimmer is now directly gravity fed from the main display

I'm a bit concerned that I'm flowing too much water through, so I intend to order a 9" height extension to the skimmer which should result in a dwell time of about 2 minutes based on chamber of 20 gallons and flow of 600gph.