400 gallon project

[untamed]

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]

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.

[Delphinus]

Holy moly, that's a big skimmer!!

[untamed]

I have been wrong once before...but this time I really think the aquarium has turned around.

As most everyone knows, the past year has been a steady downward decline in the health of the coral. I lost so much coral, I can't even begin to describe it.

However, for the past 2 weeks there has been a dramatic reversal in the tank. Unfortunately, I can't say with certainty WHAT caused the reversal....but coral is growing like mad and colours are returning. Coral that had been reduced to a small puddle is suddenly shooting up branches.

1) The new skimmer went in 3 weeks ago. Could be that.
2) I began feeding ozone to the skimmer off/on. Could be that.
3) I began dosing VSV (Vodka, Sugar, Vinegar) at 4ml/day. I never measured nitrate higher than 10ppm, but since dosing began my nitrate is down to 1ppm. (almost unmeasurable) Phosphate levels have also dropped...but from a high of 8ppm to 1ppm.
4) I vaccuumed the sand bed (but I had done that 50x before) For whatever reason, this time the cyano didn't come back (VSV?)

Some things that I have NOT changed:
1) Same Salt
2) Same water change schedule
3) Same fish feeding amounts/schedule
4) Same lighting
5) Same water movement

[Lance]

Very puzzling, Brad. But the main thing is your tank is on the mend. Whoo Hoo!

[christyf5]

Wow thats some skimmer! Sometimes I think this hobby is funny as nobody can ever pinpoint what they did to make their tank "better" yet we can usually figure out what we did to make it worse

[lastlight]

I can sense the excitement in your comeback and I'm happy for you! Great to hear and I'm eagerly waiting for some new pictures =)