kien's 150g Room Divider Mixed Reef & Stuff

[kien]

The Clowns have spawned! At least I think they did. This is the first time I've seen them spawn and the eggs look nothing like the eggs on Finding Nemo









They did the deed on the slope of a rock just behind the goniopora that they host. Very cool stuff.

[lobsterboy]

congrats, those would be clown eggs, they will darken as they develop, its pretty cool once you can see the little eyes.

really nice pink stylo you got, looks wicked

[lorenz0]

Originally Posted by lobsterboy

really nice pink stylo you got, looks wicked

lol you need to go to stylo rehab, sadly its starting to wear off on me

nice work kien. maybe you will have a nice big family

[Carmen]

super cool Kien! And great photos!

[Argentiner]

Wow, you can take amazing pics. Corals and blenny look great.

[Coleus]

Originally Posted by Argentiner

Wow, you can take amazing pics. Corals and blenny look great.

Yeah you got to see his camera equipment :-) Great photos always

[mseepman]

Your tank is amazing and a definite inspiration to my upcoming build. I have a question for you though. I saw on your videos that you have some mushrooms on one rock. How do you keep them from taking over your whole tank? I had one mushroom when I started 3 years ago, now I have 200 and they are busy killing everything they can, and that's after me harvesting them every month.

[kien]

I recently went to Mexico for a week long trip and had my sister tank sit for me. She's done it before and is generally pretty good about looking after things but she's no "Advanced Aquarist". I didn't want her to have to monkey about with the tank too much so I took some steps to make her life a little easier.

1. I had a 33g rubbermade tote full of RO/DI water as a top off reservoir which is good for nearly two weeks of top off water. My usual reservoir which fits under the tank is only 8 gallons, good for about 2 or 3 days.

2. I set up an automatic fish feeder to feed the fish once in the morning and once at night. By the way, what a great little device! I got the Eheim one. I like it so much I use it almost full time now. It plops food in in the morning only though as I still like to hand feed (my fish mush and PE mysis) for the evening feed.

3. Lastly I decided to modify the skimmer to collect a week or mores worth of skimmate. In the past I just turned the skimmer off. However, this time around I wanted to keep it on but I didn't want my sister to have to empty the skimmer cup every few days or so. The cup does fill up pretty quick. Well, it doesn't actually fill up, but it fills enough (about half way) to a point where the foam itself has no room and starts to bubble over. Anyway, here's what I came up with.

I used one of these elbows and simply chopped off one end like so.



I then drilled a hole into the base of the skimmer's collection cup the size of the chopped off end, like so.





I then silliconed the elbow into the collection cup.







Then I stuck an appropriate sized hoze into the nozzel.



And voila!



At some point I'm going to put a valve inline there. This has worked out well and I have not touched the skimmate collection since before I left. I do dump some fresh water into the cup to rinse it a bit though. I will probably be using this full time even though it was only meant to be temporary.



Also, I think I can use a slightly smaller bottle, like a 2 litre soda bottle would be fine, instead of that gallon monster I have on there now

[Delphinus]

Haha, I totally did the opposite with my bubble magus skimmer. I took off the drain line and capped the hole. The reason being is that, while this is a great idea and is good for the reasons you outlined .. there is also now nothing to stop the skimmer from overflowing your sump empty should a snail or something get wedged into the skimmer's output.

Now it used to be pretty common to use a waste collector instead of a bottle on beckett skimmers but you don't see them used on needlewheel skimmers. The reason being though is that the cup is not sealed like they are on becketts (usually flanged and bolted, with a gasket) so that air can't escape except via the drain line. When the drain line closes (usually by a pingpong ball float in the waste collector) then the skimmer can't produce foam anymore because of the back pressure. This was one neat feature with beckett skimmers that seems to be lost with the current gen needlewheels.

Anyhow it's just something to watch out for.

I think what some people are doing nowadays is just putting a drain line on their collection bottles or buckets so that if the bottles overfills it just drains back to the tank. Yeah, gross to dump skimmate back in the tank but it beats an empty sump and a wet floor (it would get skimmed out again pretty quick after you fix the issue anyhow).

[kien]

Whoa! That is a very good point! Never thought about a snail ever getting into the outlet of the skimmer as the outlet is pretty darn big.

I just went to inspect my skimmer and I have a sock tied to the outlet to cut down on bubbles :-) So I think I'm safe? Anywhere else a snail could get in?