kien's 150g Room Divider Mixed Reef & Stuff

[Carmen]

super cool Kien! And great photos!

[Argentiner]

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

[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

[kien]

So a little while back I performed a mod on my skimmer's collection cup to add a drain so that I could drain the skimmate into an external bottle. Well, someone brought up a good point, what if the outlet of the skimmer blocks? This would cause the skimmer to overflow into the skimmate bottle and pretty much empty the contents of the sump and probably tank onto the floor. I had a hard time imagining the outlet of the skimmer blocking but hey, I am not one to tempt fate! Murphy is a strange yet powerful force.

Anyway, here is my solution to that..



What we have here is essentially an old hang on filter all gutted and plugged up to act as the skimmate collection cup. If it should overflow for whatever reason, it will just dump its contents back into the sump. Yes, disgusting but at least it will keep water inside the tank!



Thanks to blueyota for the donation :-D

[Delphinus]

That's awesome..

[banditpowdercoat]

That's AWESOME because guess what happened to me last night!!! I use a 2l pop bottle for extra collection. Well, skimmer wasnt making much, so I turned it up, then went to go clean out the Biopellet reactor. 10 min later wife screams the skimmers puking!!! Ya about 2g on my new laminate floor. Mostly UNDER the laminate. Floors not level, so it flows to one edge, then under the floor. Great!! that lasted less than a Month!!. searching for NEW cup ideas today!!!

[lorenz0]

you guys know that the lids ussually are designed so that if something like this happens, it just overflows back into your sump. lol those holes on the lid do have a purpose.

personally its not hard to check everything twice a week or every day while their food is warming up

[blueyota]

Thats brilliant ...I might just have to steal that idea just so happens i have another HOB kicking around

[kien]

Originally Posted by lorenz0

you guys know that the lids ussually are designed so that if something like this happens, it just overflows back into your sump. lol those holes on the lid do have a purpose.

personally its not hard to check everything twice a week or every day while their food is warming up

Yes, and they do a good job of that.. but that won't help if you have the contents of your skimmer cup emptying out into a secondary container outside of your sump

[kien]

Although these are not mine, I could not pass up the opportunity to photograph them. They are gorgeous and I had to share

I am babysitting them for a fellow canreefer.