280g Inwall

[Delphinus]

Yeah unfortunately the sad part of that is that the powerheads are in the spare drawer for a reason - most of them are either tiny (the Hagen 201's and 301's don't even put out enough flow for the 40g carpet tank but I use them there on a wavewaker just to shake things up a little in there - but in a 280g they may as well be eye droppers) and then there's a fairly large collection of Maxijet 12's which would be not so bad except that they almost all need new impellers. The impellers only last so long but the motor drives on THOSE appear to last forever and ever (Tunze maybe needs to take lessons from Maxijet?!)

With the sump return, waveboxes and one 6100 there's probably enough flow to get the tank through the cycle and just be a FOWLR for a little while. I can accept not having corals at this point it's not any different than what I have going on right now anyhow. Or maybe I sell one of the waveboxes after all and put that towards the purchase of something else.

Kien - thanks for the offer, I'll msg you offline and we can talk some more

[lastlight]

I'm really anxious to hear some good news for a change man this sucks. It doesn't seem worth it to replace that motor block and I hear ya on feeling squeezed. Best to just make do. Even a couple Koralias new would be good for a while but sounds like Kien has you covered. There's always that evil other option and that's to shift towards Vortechs...

[michika]

Yes, good news would be awesome!

Also you need to December FTS! How far away are you from cycling and adding livestock?

[Delphinus]

I assume there's a cycling starting now but I haven't measured anything. My plan was to start taking more proactive steps once the sand was all in. I've got about half the sand in there now and it's still cloudy but part of the problem is the sand is all sucked into the back half of the tank because the pumps aren't all there to balance it all out.

Anyhow once the sand is all in and I have the ATO going (so that salinity is stable) then it's just waiting out the cycle. I have some time off after next week and I was hoping to have the livestock transfer happen when I'm off but we'll see how that goes I guess.

Oh .. speaking of ATO. I have this vague recollection of turning on my RO/DI last night to top off the tank and I have no recollection of ever turning it off before I went to bed. I, uh ... crap, nobody's home right now. I, uh .. yeah shoot I'm going home for a quick errand !!

[lastlight]

I hate it when that happens! I was out once with the family...we were at one of the LFS and suddenly my phone alarm goes off. Wife asks what that was for and I reply we gotta get home FAST! Got in the door as my topoff tank was just starting to show meniscus!

[Delphinus]

Yeah that was a bit of an "oops". There was indeed water on the floor. Turns out last night I must have bumped the RO/DI line because it was just dripping onto the floor and the sump water level was still way down. DUH! Oh well, with the tapwater being so cold right now the RO/DI's production is WAY down and there was surprisingly not as much of a puddle as one might have thought there would be for 12 hours of RO/DI dripping onto the floor.

So naturally instead of turning it off, I just put the tube back into the sump and left for work again (after I wetvac'd the floor some). In the meantime I have a really nice clean spot on the floor in the closet next to the tank room. The one silver lining is that now I know where I need to shore up the silicone along the floor to help contain floods. The front edge of the tank is completely dry so the silicone there either did the trick (or the water didn't run that way).

[MitchM]

Tony,

I am just in the process of cleaning up my 2 6215 waveboxes to get ready to sell them. Would you be interested in those?

Mitch

[Delphinus]

Well .. things progressed a little since last update. Every step has a minor stumbling block though. Some days all you can do is laugh.

We'll start off with a Boxing Day FTS:


Tank is in super need of some colour. Dry rock and new sand just looks so sterile.

The lighting is in 3 phases:
1) Initial dusk/dawn is provided by the 2x24w t5's left of centre. They run 10:30 to 22:30.
2) Next up is the centre 400w and the 4x54w t5's. They run from 11:15 to 21:45.
3) Highest intensity with the left and right 400w's from 12:00 to 20:00.

All 3 halides are Radiums. The middle is a standard pulse-start (ANSI M137 or whatever it is for 400w pulse-start). The outside two are SonAgro ("HQI"). You can tell the middle light has a slightly blue hue to it, the outside two are a super crisp white.

The 54w T5's are 2 SuperActinic and 2 454's. The 454's are neat choice. Almost like a brighter-than-usual actinic, a little more blue than purple like a standard actinic would be.

The outside two halides aren't on right now because I ran out of timers. You wouldn't believe the number of timers that I've bought that are faulty out of the box. I'm up to around 3 now that I've had to return to Rona. And one more now. Crazy, they must have had one super bad shipment. Anyhow so I have to go get another freakin' timer before those lights can be on automatic. Grumble.

Some shots of the light stand with the t5's installed:








You can sort of see the difference between the SuperActinic and the 454 here. See how there is a purplish tint to the second lamp, that's the actinic, the other is the 454.


Also got the ATO installed. On the advice of Chin, the ATO empties into the skimmer intake to keep it clear. This meant for the first tank in 12 years I'd use a pump based top up instead of the usual $10 Home Depot humidifier float valve (which I'll say has NEVER failed me in 12 years. I would have done the same for this tank but I like the idea of an automatic rinsing of the skimmer air intake - I find I need to clean the air intakes of my other tank skimmers about every 2 weeks, there's enough gunk buildup in those to justify doing so.)

Sensors on the left side of the sump:

(Ignore the messiness, I want to clean the glass when I do a water change but since the tank hasn't finished cycling, I haven't yet done so. No water changes until I get a zero nitrite reading! Last night it was still at 0.2 so it has a while to go yet.)

Controller sits on the right side of the stand:


And the mini reservoir sits under the sink. I had to use a bucket with a float valve so that the RO/DI reservoir (which is currently too far away) can drain into the bucket but not spill over, and then the pump can sit in this bucket and go feed the skimmer air intake line when it switches on.


Installing a top off on your tank isn't supposed to cause this:

This happened when I was stringing the wire and tube from the top off pump over the sump area and I was cutting electrical tape to hold it all together so it wouldn't be such a gong show of a rats nest of wires and tubes. Actually you can see the scar on my pointer finger as well. That's the gash I gave myself trying to install the Zeovit reactor about 2 weeks ago. No word of a lie, I cut my finger doing that too. Well, it wasn't so much the reactor itself to blame but rather the plumbing needed modding, and the previous plumbing was glued to the pump, so I was trying to break things apart without breaking the pump itself. I succeeded in that goal if nothing else.

Guess that's about it. Well I guess I did modify my zeovit reactor so I will take some pictures of that later. I'm trying the zeovit 14-day cycle thing but I have to say so far it's not looking like it will be ready for fish in 14 days. Part of the problem though is self inflicted, between holidays and sick kids and a pet needing surgery this last week, it took me longer than I wanted to get the lights on timers and I don't think the cycle can really begin in earnest until there is light. Now that at least phases 1 and 2 happen on the light cycle, I have noticed the nitrite reading start to spike. So while this means the wait has to continue, at least there is a sign of stuff actually happening.

Unfortunately in my other tanks things continue to remind me that we need to shut down. On Christmas Day yesterday I lost another clam in my serial clam death event. This is what I hate about clams: if you lose one, unless you get it out quick enough, whatever kills it spreads to the others. I've lost about 6 in the last two months. I am hoping this is the last one. This one in particular surprised me for lasting as long as it had: over the summer it sustained a mantle injury. It had been showing signs of recovery lately but then bam, just like that, it too checked out, all of a sudden yesterday. Ugh. I'm depressed about it but I guess these things happen. I feel like I'm paying the karmic price of not having a single clam death in 5 years prior to this fall. Maybe old age is a factor? I somehow doubt it but if I pretend it is then I sort of feel a little less bad about it.

[Delphinus]

Oh and you can see the Tunzes on the Wavysea's have been taken out. I had been leaning toward removing them for a while on account of a few reasons:

1) They sat way too far into the tank because of the Eurobracing. Apart from the obvious visual nuisance of two outboard motors hanging into the tank almost 8" off the back wall, it was ruining the scale of the tank as well. It made the tank feel really small and well .. while it's far from a big tank by many standards, it is the biggest tank I will ever attempt so long as I live in this house. (Well, ok, never say never, I suppose ... but realistically the odds of that ever happening are very slim.) I totally resented that they made the tank seem small.

2) Sand. I have sand after all. In the beginning I totally intended on going BB with this tank. But after putting the rock in, the very rough silicone edges on th bottom panel were visually disjarring so I elected to go with sand. And "lots of flow" and "lots of sand" never seem to work well together. With both wavysea combos on the back, the front half of the tank would lose all sand. So I tried moving one to the front to offset the one on the back, and this posed a few challenges, notably, it interfered with the t5's on that side of the light rack, and it had to work around the Calfo manifold. In the end I bolted the wavysea to the wall and then this transferred pump noise into the wall. The wall resonated with the humming of a running Tunze. Not offensively so, but it did take away from the goal of not wanting to hear the tank noise at all on the display side. And then after all that was all said and done, it didn't fix the shifting sand issue. Instead it created a trench in the front of sand-free area, and a second one in the back of the tank.

The final straw was this - found this on Christmas Eve:


After moving the one Tunze to the front, apparently the wire had a constant wiggle in one spot and the insulation eventually gave way. I was watching the Tunze sweep back and forth and noticed that at the right setpoint, it would turn off and on. So yeah, awesome, I killed another Tunze. Starting to wonder if Tunze is a 4 letter word in German..

So my plan right now is to switch two of the outlets on the Calfo manifold over to Wavysea's. Figure I have them and might as well still use them.

[michika]

I think we can all now say that your build has moved on from glacial to a brisk walk/slow jog! Its really coming together now.

Which timers are you using? I want to know what to avoid buying from Rona for the next little while.