Stone's 225 Carbonate Factory

[Stones]

Originally Posted by Reef Pilot

You have a very nice tank, with lots of nice corals. Hope you get it back on track quickly. Good luck with your new lighting.

Thanks for the kind words but the corals at present are no where near their full color potential. Hopefully this upgrade in lighting along with increased maintenance will help get everything back on track shortly.

Originally Posted by lastlight

great work on that fixture. scary stuff all these blown ballasts. after i sold mine the new owner had similar issues if i recall correctly.

shocker that the grill rusted so bad... your tank is open top right?

and it's pretty mean to not post a fts under the new light...

I somehow knew you'd manage to sneak in post before I could finish documenting the whole build Brett

Thanks for the compliments on the fixture. It was a ton of work and in hindsight I'm not sure if I would do it again from all the unnecessary stress and the time it took.

I'm only off work and at home for 48 hours every 7-8 days. The rest of my time is spent several hours away in SE Sask so when I am at home, I typically have an overwhelmingly large amount of tasks to accomplish in a short period of time. I'm hoping that all my work will pay off in the long run seeing as the current trend is to supplement LED lighting with T5s. I figured this would be the best compromise I could make at the moment and there is definitely enough room left on the heatsinks to accomodate more LEDs if deemed necessary in the future.

I'm not surprised about the ballasts failing in your old fixture as well. My old 48" Sfiligoi stealth was the same generation as my current fixture and the new owner had said that 4 of the 8 ballasts had died. He was going to sell it to another reefer to gut for a LED build until I told him Sfiligoi had replacement ballasts available that were easy to replace and actually not that bad of a price.

My tank is an open top with the fixture sitting ~9" above the water line. I'm pretty angered about the grills rusting and actually just being there in general.

My old Sfiligoi stealth didn't have these ghettotastic grills on the back side. It simply had the same perforated aluminium insert that was present on the opposite side of the fixture. It looked way better but I'm guessing the engineers at Sfiligoi thought that it hindered airflow too much hence the change to the open hole/grill configuration. If they were going to use grills, then they at least should have got some custom stainless ones built in order to prevent rust instead of using cheap computer parts.

Seeing as the next years models came with 2 sets of fans, I'm guessing changing to the open hole/grill setup didn't resolve any of the heating issues anyway. All they succeeded in doing was making the fixture look bad. It's like putting black steel rims on a Ferrari...

As for the FTS, I spent all of my spare time fixing this light fixture so I didn't even have time to clean the algae off my glass on days off. As you can tell, I carefully cropped the tank out of the one photo showing where I mounted the dimming potentiometer

I'm hoping next time I'm home, I can do another water change, clean the glass and do some much needed pruning to some SPS colonies as well as my current crop of hair algae and caulerpa.

[lastlight]

wow that sounds like a whole lot of NO FUN. hopefully this thing actually works for an extended period of time now. and yeah those grills are crazy ugly. mine had the nice mesh grill as your previous fixture had.

[Stones]

Well as per request, here is a FTS showing how rough a lot of the corals are looking after their 4-5 month lighting shortage. I ended up losing about a dozen of the more delicate frags I had and I'm going to have to do some serious pruning of some of the larger SPS colonies as a few of them suffered from some substantial die off.

Left side

Right side


Here are a few close ups of some of the corals. Most have lost a substantial amount of colour but the odd colony or frag looks just as good as they did prior to this summer. You'll have to try to mentally block out any valonia or aiptasia from the photos as I'm going to have to add some critters to help win the war against these pests.

Rainbow monti frag and bonsai from aquarium illusions


FAL blue dragon


Stardust PE palys and Reef Shoppe Tri-color nana


FAL purple tabler


Seacare bonsai


Tyree pink lemonade - this guy started out as a 1/8" nub I got from a good friend


FAL unknown millepora


Cali tort

[Stones]

Cali tort forest - my colony and 2 frags decided it was in their best interest to combine power rangers style into a giant colony


Aussie pocillipora


Tri-colour bird frag


Coralmaster purple valida - this guy has really lightened up and lost a lot of its color during the summer months


Rainbow monti vs A. vaughni


FAL banana lokani


Reef Shoppe Tri-colour nana


Loripes


My poor browned out efflo. It's gonna take years to get this guy looking good again.


Bottlebrush acro. About 2/3 of this colony STN'd on me due to lack of light as well as algae encroachment.

[Stones]

FAL unknown deepwater acro


Coralmaster rainbow stylo. Also lost a lot of colour as it is very low in the tank


Coral warfare on the frag rack


Rainbow monti taking over most of my rock work


FAL ultimate monti

[lastlight]

While your colours did take a hit I'm still amazed when I see how massive your colonies are. And they're only getting bigger!