Asylumdown's 275 Tank build

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by kien

I ordered a couple of 60" strips of reefbrites to supplement my halides and T5s. :-)

I'm not sure why you would want to change out your LEDs when they appear to be doing so well for you. My tank is OK, but yours is WOW. It has that awesome LED Rave look that mine does not have.

The sad part about LEDs is that the coral's 'best angle' is always top down, and since I need to climb up on a ladder just to get my hand in the water, it's not an angle I really get to see that often.

I will also say that any notion I had of moving away from these lights has been firmly put to bed. As I mentioned I've been having issues with the white diodes on 5 of my 8 units, and was having a mild heart attack over it as my units are well out of warranty. Ecotech thinks its a problem with the way I installed my TIR lenses and they're taking care of the whole thing as a warranty issue. Consider me a fanboy for life.

[asylumdown]

My roommates are going to Hawaii for Christmas, so Brandon bought a water proof camera. I got to play with it tonight. eek.

While it's MUCH better than an iPhone camera, it still has the same issues with blue washing and white balance due to the LEDs, but I don't care, I just took some awesome photos.

I have neither the time nor patience tonight to try and colour correct them, so here they are as seen from the sensor. I was playing around with the light mode while I was taking them, so these first few were with all channels at 0 except white, which was at 100%:






And these were with the blues on varying levels along with the white, as well as a couple different white balance/exposure settings on the camera. I could spend 2 hours correcting them all, but you get the point.

[asylumdown]

That last one has gone from brown, to white, to blue, to white, to now a the slightest hint of rose. Adapting to LEDs is a journey for some corals. I'm hoping it gets pinker as time goes on.

[asylumdown]

and finally:

[lastlight]

Gorgeous corals bro. Saddens me to admit I've lost the majority of the frags I got from you. My sps troubles continue.

[asylumdown]

Really?!? Oh man what a bummer! I want to help somehow, we should get together and troubleshoot.

[kien]

once again, nice LED corals Adam! I need to get in on some of that cerealis action there !

[asylumdown]

haha, I can't remember which one the cerealis is, but it's yours!

[asylumdown]

So it turns out you actually need to be kind of careful with MB7. After dealing with a cyano issue with an aggressive dosing of chemi-clean, I stepped up the use/change of GFO and started dosing the 'start up' dose of MB7 for high nutrient tanks, which in my tank worked out to about 70ml a day. I missed a couple of days to go up north over the holidays, but otherwise I was pretty religious about it, including turning off the skimmer.

I ran the inlet/outlet lines of the BP reactor in a bucket of salt water for the first 4 or 5 days after the chemiclean treatment while I started dosing the MB7 because I have no idea what chemiclean does to biopellets and I didn't want a bunch of excess organic carbon to flood my tank, potentially giving the cyano a leg up over the MB7. When I put the reactor back online with the tank, I put about half the daily dose of MB7 directly in to the pellet reactor to get things going again.

Now, I have to say I was extremely suspicious of MB7, and bacterial supplements in general. I've used them before and never saw an effect of any kind, and I've always been highly suspicious of aquarium supply company claims in general (they use as much pseudo-scientific non-sense speak as the alternative health industry), as well as being suspicious that a bacterial product could have anything living in it by the time you bought it at the store.

Well, I suppose the proof is in the pudding -



That disgusting pile of what looks like mucous is 1/4 of the goo that I had to eject from the outlet hose of my recirculating biopellet reactor yesterday. In less than two weeks of dosing large volumes of MB7, that outlet hose, which has remained clear and free flowing for nearly 2 years, clogged up so badly with that crap that water completely stopped flowing through the reactor. It's recirculating, so there was still some movement of water inside the reactor, but with the outlet blocked it slowed down enough that massive orange sized wads of white bacterial mulm had formed on the surface of the pellets that were largely stuck together.

The foam pads in my GFO reactor have also completely clogged up with bacterial mulm, causing the entire column, along with the foam pads, to rise all the way to the top of the reactor. Something that also, in nearly 2 years of running the tank, has never happened.

I've gone down to the daily maintenance dose of MB7, which if I'me measuring the volume of a 'drop' correctly, is about 6ml, so hopefully this stops happening.