290G Peninsula Tank

[mike31154]

Originally Posted by mseepman

Hey Mike, thanks for the offer of help...I might take you up on that sometime. If you take a look early in my build...this DIY light uses some big drivers and I chose to do parallel strings so resistors and fuses were needed...and they worked well...I hope. Didn't end up fixing the light yet...there are still more than enough lights there to cook whatever is in the tank so I've delayed till the weekend.

I'll need to back in the thread to check out your LED build. My LEDs are hooked up in parallel as well, however not strings, rather single 10 watt multi-chip LEDs. I really should have fuses as well, but just haven't got 'round to it. I opted for 12 VDC power supplies rather than 'drivers', but am making sure the voltage I feed my LEDs is always less than the rated maximum vf, so underdriving. So far so good, the fixture is coming up on a full year of use in early April and haven't had a LED burn out yet. Only failures so far are several of the fans on the heatsinks. I have spares, so replacement is no problem & it takes all of 10 minutes. If I were to do another build using 10 watt multichips, I would use the larger heatsinks without fan now available and simply run a couple of bigger fans over the whole fixture. Probably would go with larger multichips with optics next time around as well. Three or four 50 to 100 watt multichips would be much simpler & less cluttered. They're fairly affordable these days & come in a good selection of spectrums, including multiple colours per chip.

[mseepman]

Yeah, I love my light for coverage...no complaints at all, but it did appear that one led had an issue after being hung and that caused the "event" that the fuses were there to protect against. I have about six spare fuses and the control boards are readily accessible, so the biggest pain will be working on replacing the led as I don't want to take the fixture down.
You'll have to come by some time to check out the tank.

[Skimmerking]

pictures mark get on with it

[mseepman]

The tank is progressing along through the stages of "newness" and I'm still trying to get ahead of the "automation curve" that I've set for myself. Stockpiled for all this time while the house was built have been various pieces of the setup that only now am I wading through. My dosing and my ATO are not yet up. My activated carbon reactor is up but will be undergoing some changes shortly and my desk in the fish room is only half built.

I have learned that no matter how big you think your fish room is...it's not big enough!

I'm also starting to get some hair algae popping up in the tank. I know it's all part of the new tank syndrome but I still don't like it so I beefed up my CUC a little today with some turbos. They really are tanks but their already making a dent.

[mseepman]

Thought it was time for a quick update.

Thanks to H202, I received a bunch of amazing frags / colonies from FragitDan and from Chowder. Really thrilled with the stuff I got and looking forward to seeing go into my display. For now, as with all things...quarantine time!

Here are a few pics (at 12:30 last night when I landed them) because I realize all the short attention spans on here. Remember that some of these had to travel from the Island and some from Vancouver so many of the "frags" are broken pieces off the colonies.





You can see in this third picture all the large colonies below the frag rack that also came.

[nrosdal]

have you gottem any those new corals in the display yet Mark? Quarentine shmorintine.. lets see some action

[mseepman]

I believe I should call you a bad influence Nick. 4 more corals made it into the display tonight...two of which were fighting STN when I got them and may still be losing. I suspect at least 4 or 5 more will make the journey tomorrow. Will get some pictures then as I moved them with lights pretty much out.

[nrosdal]

last i saw that frag rack it was not nearly as full. What happened to all the corals that were on it? Can we see where they are now?

[mseepman]

yeah...gotta get some FTS up on here. Thanks for the reminder Nick. My current phone takes terrible pics so I'll see about using my point and shoot. Tanks mostly dark now so it will have to be tomorrow.

[Myka]

You're going to need a nice camera to take pics of your nice tank you know!