I'm more than willing to share. There's plenty to go around.. apparently :lol:

You are willing to share the guy's, uh Carmen don't forget your friends :wink:
Kien should we mention the crabs here or no?

Snap!! Oh no you didn't girl! :nono:

:lol::lol::lol:

Oh how I love this hobby! So 6 plus months of great growth and general SPS coral vitality and now a couple of them have decided to start STN'ing on me... :neutral: So far they aren't beyond saving but I can clearly see blotches developing at the base where they are losing cells.

If I had to guess, and I suppose that's what I'm doing at this point, I would blame it on the bio pellets. I've been using them for about two months now and they have pulled my nitrates down to zero after 4 weeks. I assumed that my fish load would be enough to sustain my SPS but maybe not. Maybe the corals are starving? Looks like I need to look into supplemental feeding.

Nothing else has changed in the tank. All params are in check. :noidea:

Good luck sorting it out .. :(

you should try dosing rotifers and oyster-feast

This can be such a frustrating hobby, can't it Kien? I hope that is it for the stning...save what you can and hope it's just those. Your tank is incredible so you are doing something right...just a little bump in the road.:wink:

Yup, definitely challenging at times. This morning I found my gorg laying on top of my lobo which is a very powerful stinger. Half my gorg is dead :cry:

doh! I just found out that I haven't been running my carbon for a couple of weeks now. Yikes! I guess I unplugged it a couple of weeks ago while rewiring things around and forgot to plug it back in. The carbon is pitch black and it is hard to see under the dark stand so I just assumed it was running. Anyway, hope this was it. Carbon is supposed to help remove unwanted chemicals I think? Like for example the nasty chemicals that corals use during chemical warefare? So maybe without the carbon stripping it out it was building up in my tank and started affecting some of them.

One of my brains decided it wanted to have some lunch today. He usually opens at night but I have never ever seen him open during the day before!

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4045/...04d2fdc8_o.jpg

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4049/...ba1e412e_o.jpg

crazy nice close up picts

Awesome tank build Klein. Thanks for updating so often and sharing your experiences with everyone.

Kien

That brain is gorgeous...great picture. :mrgreen:

Thanks! Those are not my brains though, they are Coleus' :wink: You missing those brains yet?? :lol:

Cooking up a storm
 

Well, since I did up a little write up about how I made fish food I figure maybe I'll do one up demonstrating how I mix Randy's Two-Part for dosing Baking Soda (Alkalinity) and Calcium (From littlesilvermax).

Alkalinity
----------
1. The first thing I do is go out and buy baking soda of course. Easy enough. You can get 2 kg (4.4lb) box from just about any grocery store for roughly $4.99. That comes out to like $1.13 a pound. Not bad.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268116003

2. I then spread the baking soda out on a sheet and bake it in the oven at 350(F) for about an hour (or more).

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268115959

You can't really over bake this stuff. Randy has a couple of recipes. One that calls for baking and one that does not. Obviously I am using the one that requires baking.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268115852

3. After I've baked a batch (i'll usually do like 6 - 8 kgs at a time), I store it in a huge tub.

4. Okay, so on to the mixing. To make up a gallon (3.78L) of this stuff requires 2 1/4 cups of baked baking soda and 14 1/4 cups of water.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268116047

I put my water into a pot on the stove and turn the stove on low to warm up the water. This helps with the dissolving

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268116090

I then pull out my trusty fish blender. This also helps with the mixing A LOT! Trust me! Otherwise you are stirring by hand, very very briskly for a long long long long (did I mention long?) time..

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268116204

Even with the blender you still don't want to poor it all in at once. Instead I tap the cup of baking soda on the edge of the pot to drop in a little bit at a time while blending/mixing/stirring.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268116301

After a few minutes I'm all done and just poor in into a 2L storage bottle. Easy peasy!

Calcium
-------------
Mixing up calcium additive is more or less the same approach, except there is no baking involved! To make a gallon of additive I mix 2 1/2 cups of calcium (purchased in bulk from littlesilvermax/chemmaster) with 13 1/2 cups of water. I don't even heat up the water when mixing up calcium actually. Just dump both water and calcium together into a container, blend/stir/mix with my hand blender and not long after I'll have 1 gallon of calcium additive ready for dosing.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268116506

Fish toys, gotta love 'em :-)

Here we have the fancy schmancy Vertex UF-15 Media Reactor. Great for tumbling oh.. say.. some NP bio pellets perhaps? :biggrin:

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268116939

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268117015

The inlet and outlets are 3/4" so I needed to get a couple of adapters in order to hook the inlet up to a maxijet 1200 and to get the outlet to bend back into the sump. It is a fairly sizable reactor that can go in or out of the sump.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268117034

Bye bye phosban reactor, hello new hotness.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268117099

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1268117138

One mod I did perform was to cut the stock sponges in half. They were really really thick! I shaved them down to about a half a centimeter in thickness. If I had enkamat I probably would have used that, but sadly I do not have any enkamat :(
And here they are tumbling the day away..

Kien

Is that a little mad scientist going on or exotic chef? :wink:

I missed them dearly, so try to set up the cube tank as fast as I can but for some reason, it seems like the most difficult task for me :-(

both? Muahahahahha! My wife keeps accusing me of making up meth :neutral:

Well, things are look like they are back on track with the SPS colonies. It was definitely the carbon, or rather the lack of carbon. So ya, I had forgotten to run my carbon for two weeks and that's all it took for the really sensitive colonies to go south. They started to bleach pretty bad. Looks like I caught it in time. Carbon has been back online now for about two weeks and the bleached bits have started to regenerate. Luckily I did not loose any colonies.

Out of this I have gained a new appreciation for carbon and its benefits in an SPS reef. As we all know SPS (and other corals) like to conduct chemical warfare. Our reef tanks are literally filled with chemicals that we can neither see nor test for. How do we keep that in check? In the ocean dilution keeps this in check but we don't have that benefit in our tanks unless we do a lot of water changes. It is my belief that carbon aids us in this department. It helps to trap and clean up those nasty chemicals. Some corals are robust and are able to deal with these chemicals but more sensitive corals are not. I think this is why when these sorts of things occur we'll see some corals react while others are unscathed. I think the quality of the carbon is very important too. I've read a few cases now where bad carbon has been suspected to be the cause of mass SPS decline. I don't necessarily think that this is due to the impurities in the carbon, but perhaps more so the fact that the cheap-o carbon just does not have adequate absorption capabilities. That is, not all carbons are created equal. Some cheap ones may only last a week while it seems the general consensus is to change carbon out once a month.

Anyway, these are my theories based on my recent experience :-)

I would have to agree with you more than slightly, brother:wink:

Oh that's too bad .. I was hoping for a good discussion on the matter :lol: :biggrin:

Hey Kien, it was good to meet you tonight your tank is amazing you need to put a FTS that shows that awesome looking stand for all to see.

Excellent journal

Great to meet you too! Hope those bulbs work out for ya! There are lots of FTS with the stand in this thread, somewhere (I think if you go back to August).. :biggrin:

Thanks! There are some big changes in store for this system..

Oh do tell!:biggrin:........congrats btw on the TOTM my brutha:wink:

the alk and cal mixes how long does that last for Kien, of what you made.
what is the strenght the ALK and CAL per bottle

this thread needs less talk and more picture updates!!!

You're channeling Desmond Hume?

patience my friends, patience.. :biggrin:

My 2L bottle of alk seems to last me two weeks and, the calcium about a week and a half. I'm following Randy's two part formula and he states that it is about 1,900 meq/L of alkalinity (5,300 dKH) and 37,000 ppm calcium.

thanks Kien how much are you using per day for your dosing

Before I get started I thought it would be fun to see a before and after. Here's a shot of the tank in its infancy, pretty much day one (August 2009), and the second shot is what it looks like today (April 2010).

August 2009:
http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1270812953

April 2010:
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4002/...b97b639d_b.jpg

In a 24hour period I dose 234ml of Alk and 264 ml of calcium. I just did the math and it looks like I'm exhausting them quicker than I thought. Doesn't seem that quick but I guess I get just a little over 8 days out of the alk and a little less than 8 out of the calcium (from 2L bottles). I guess I could go with 4L bottles but topping up every 7-8 days isn't much of a chore.

ha i totally didn't see you were TOTM. congrats bud

Ya Kien I also didn't see that till yesterday. Wow when I was at your place and saw your tank in person I was blown away. Next time I come I will spend some time and add some nose prints to the outside of the glass.
Kevin

Love the pics of before and now. Kien, your tank is a real beauty.

Great before and after shots ! What difference. Been awhile since I read through the build but is that RBTA on the right side ? Be interesting to see what you have for change coming up.

Holy crap Kien! How come yours is using so little? It looks liek you have a pretty big sps load, I would think it would use more? I use the same recipe as you and I go through my 1 gallon bottles in less than 3 weeks... what are you doing right that I am not? :P

Thanks :-)

Yup,

Hmm I don't know. I did redo the math and it seems that I am depleting quicker than first guessed but doesn't sound like your rates still. You have way more SPS than I do though. I don't think I have that many sps given my 150 volume.

Profilux 3 !
 

So if you've been following along you'll know that I run a Profilux II to control my various aquarium equipment. Well, the Profilux 3 came out not too long ago and I jumped on the upgrade bandwagon pretty much right away. Got a smoking deal on it from my favourite LFS (Red Coral Aquariums - thanks Kevin!!). Haven't had a chance to install the it until now though..

Ever wonder what the guts of a Profilux looks like?

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1271231544

The hardware upgrade itself was pretty easy once I found the instructions (online). One complaint I do have though is the fact that every set of instructions I found said in step 1 to remove the top of the controller, but none of them said how to do that! It took me a little while to figure it out. Those blue tabs just click in and out of place, then the top and bottom halves slide apart. No screws involved.

Anyway, here is the reassembled controller with the Profilux 3 upgrade installed.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1271231722

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1271231773

The hardest part about the whole thing was actually reapplying all the settings as the upgrade pretty much wipes them all out. Good thing I wrote down everything.

And here we are back online!

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1271231848

Sump Upgrade
 

Earlier this year I started thinking about setting up a FOWLR tank. At first I wanted that tank to be separate from the main 150g mixed reef, but after playing around with my 104.72g lagoon for a while I decided that a separate tank of that size just isn't going to work for me. If I'm going to add another tank it HAS to be plumped into the 150 some how so that I can leverage one sump, which means one water change, one dosing location, one heating location, etc..

So speaking of sumps, that's where we begin. I took this opportunity to modify the existing sump while adding two additional sump tanks, one to be used as a connector sump to the main sump and one as a water change tank (more on this later). The 3 sump system looks some thing like this.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1271233998

Both tanks will have their own return pumps. I found that this is easier to control the herbies in each tank, rather than having one massive return pump with a splitter or manifold. Plus now I can electronically cut supply to each tank individually which is handy.

The sump tanks are fairly small in comparison to the 104.72g lagoon tank that I built so again I decided to build the sump tanks myself.

First up is the primary sump. Here it is held together with just the corner brace to dry fit it.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1271234380

Once I'm happy with the fit I drop down one of the side panels and apply a bead of silicone to the bottom of the pane.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1271234478

Lift that pane of glass back up, hold it in place with the corner braces, and lightly push the bottom in but NOT too hard as to squish ALL the silicone out. You never want glass on glass because that's just a weak point that will likely fail!

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1271234548

Repeat for the other side panel. Now we drop down the back panel and apply silicone on 3 sides and push that panel into place.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1271234708

Once that panel is in place secure with a piece of nylon tape on the top and bottom.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1271234740

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1271234820

Repeat for the front panel. Now we apply a bead of silicon in all the corners and crevasses and squish in with a finger.

The other two tanks pretty much went the same way. I decided that since these were sumps and I was in a bit of a time crunch I skipped the taping and masking on these tanks. It makes for very ugly siliconing but the sumps are going to get ugly anyway. Here's the trio.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1271234861

Here's the new Primary Sump back in place.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1271235084

Here's my new ghetto sensor array.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1271235170

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1271235212

Return section with the two pumps.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1271235252

Full Sump Shot.

http://i1002.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1271235128