kien's 150g Room Divider Mixed Reef & Stuff

[Coleus]

Originally Posted by kien

I am officially a Bubble Magus fan boy!

Mmmm.. seafoam..

Wait until BM breaking in and you will be more impressed.

Great picts and description as always

[kien]

Today I decided to top up my NP BioPellets and while I was at it, I figured I'd re-plumb the reactor. The reactor, although performs beautifully, is kind of awkward to plumb. Currently I have a crap load of hose adapters to go from my MaxiJet 1200 into the Vertex with hose snaking through the sump. Not a very clean setup but got the job done.

Instead of flex hose all over the place I decided to use rigid 1/2" PVC and cemented all the pieces together. I also wanted to minimize the footprint of the whole rig so it took a little playing around with. I also wanted to increase the input so I threw a bigger pump at it.

Utilizing this cheap-o 500gph pump from Odyssea.



Here's what I ended up with..







here she is in the sump.



Even with all of those 90 degree bends I still have to throttle back (about 1/4 turn) the input or the pellets get blasted through the outlet. Also, as you can see here the outlet drops right in front of the inlet to the skimmer.



and here is my new full sump shot.

[kien]

Originally Posted by Coleus

Wait until BM breaking in and you will be more impressed.

Great picts and description as always

i am impressed! Here is what the Bubble Magus pulls out of my system.



yummy!

[Delphinus]

What's the blue stuff wrapped around the pump? I see you have it in the water as well.

[Coleus]

Originally Posted by Delphinus

What's the blue stuff wrapped around the pump? I see you have it in the water as well.

was going to ask that as well the yellow and blue sponges that you have in tank. What are those for?

[kien]

Originally Posted by Delphinus

What's the blue stuff wrapped around the pump? I see you have it in the water as well.

A few layers of foam to dampen the vibration from the pump. The pump comes with a foot that has suction cups but I found it a little annoying how it suctioned to the bottom of the sump. Plus, the foot added a little bit of width to the whole thing which I wanted to reduce :-)

Originally Posted by Coleus

was going to ask that as well the yellow and blue sponges that you have in tank. What are those for?

The sponges are dish sponges that are quite porous and I used to use them for bacteria culture when I migrated everything from my previous 90g to the new 150g. I was going to take them out but discovered that copepods love to use them as breeding grounds so I leave them in there now. They are so porous that they don't seem to gunk up as I've never had to rinse them out in the entire year that I've had them. It might also be because they float. I'm thinking of throwing a few more in there to use as bacterial seeds for my quarantine tank. That is, whenever I need to set up a quarantine, just grab some of these sponges and throw them into the QT tank. If things get bad and I have to treat the QT with say, copper, I can throw out the sponges and buy new ones with little impact to my wallet.

[kien]

And here's a video of the reactor with the new plumbing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEyPg8tatDo

[Delphinus]

Wait, what, no HD video? Get with it man, I expect more from you. If they can film an entire episode of House on your camera then you can film pellets in HD.

Seriously, looks like a keen little setup for them pellets. Pun only semi intentional (noticed it after I typed it in, but think I'm gonna leave it in. )

[kien]

Originally Posted by Delphinus

Wait, what, no HD video? Get with it man, I expect more from you. If they can film an entire episode of House on your camera then you can film pellets in HD.

Seriously, looks like a keen little setup for them pellets. Pun only semi intentional (noticed it after I typed it in, but think I'm gonna leave it in. )

Actually I did film it 1080p HD :-) However, it takes YouTube a while to process it before you can access the HD version. In the meantime you're left with just the standard def conversion.

edit: the 1080p version is available now :-)

[Delphinus]

... oh.

Um .. could you pretend that there's something that's not ridiculously perfect? Mostly I'm just trying to avoid myself from spiralling headfirst into full blown depression. Lie if you have to.