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#71
03-06-2011, 08:54 PM
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Thanks, Tony.
Actually, up to this point I have had a thought in the back of my mind saying to me - what kind of a make work project have you gotten yourself into this time?..  Not until I saw the sand in it today have I really become excited about it! Now I want to stay home from work and just keep working on it.  Not an option, I'm afraid! I see they now have come out with 1-1/2" seaswirls. I might upgrade to a couple of those in the future. We'll see how these do.
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Mitch 
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#72
03-06-2011, 09:08 PM
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I have an auto-feeder planned too.
The top brace on the tank is 8" wide, so I had lots of room for it to sit. It's going next to the front left sea swirl. It comes with a tube that extends down below the surface of the water so it stops the food from going down the overflow. 
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Mitch
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#73
03-06-2011, 09:25 PM
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What is the output nozzle like on the seaswirls? I've been wanting to replace the outputs on my wavysea's with locline too but I think I'd have to switch the output from stock to 1" PVC elbow with a bushing to mount the locline and I kind of worry how bad that would look. Plus when I tried hanging Tunzes off them initially with a DIY bracket, I found that 1" PVC was just ever so slightly too large for a snug fit. I don't know if it's a metric size or what but it's not a standard 1" PVC coupling size for the output apparently.
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-- Tony My next hobby will be flooding my basement while repeatedly banging my head against a brick wall and tearing up $100 bills. Whee!
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#76
03-07-2011, 12:48 AM
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looking good Mitch what is the tank mainly going to be .
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180 starfire front, LPS, millipora Doesn't matter how much you have been reading until you take the plunge. You don't know as much as you think.
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#78
03-07-2011, 02:46 AM
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Slip, sort of. It's grooved to hold an o-ring. When I was playing around with the DIY mounts I tried larger o-rings to see if that could make it snug but it was either too big or too small, never "just right".
Threaded makes a lot of sense!!! Score one for Seaswirls in that case. One of mine stopped working so I've taken it off and was going to crack it open to see if I could fix it, if that works out maybe I'll swap the pipe for for a threaded fitting (I have no idea how feasible the idea is, never looked inside a Wavysea before). Quote:
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-- Tony My next hobby will be flooding my basement while repeatedly banging my head against a brick wall and tearing up $100 bills. Whee!
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#79
03-07-2011, 03:24 AM
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Quote:
SPS in the top zone for sure. I'm working on getting the sand bed set so that it can be as friendly as possible for a functioning DSB. I've learned that there are some animals in the sandbed that do not like living by large objects, like our aquarium walls or rocks. I can't do anything about the walls of the aquarium, but what I can do is suspend the rock structure above the sand floor. How I'm going to do that is still undecided. I could drill out some pieces of large PVC or I could drill some acrylic legs into the bottom rocks. On top of those bottom rocks I'll drill and peg or epoxy the rest of the rock. I'm also kind of interested in what will happen with all the crud that the live rock sheds, like when you "cook" a tub of live rock. I'm interested in what will happen to that detritus as it falls to the sandbed. I'm going to be ordering some detrivore kits from Indiana and Hawaii once the weather warms up in a few months. Before then I don't think they would survive the shipping process. By then the sand bed will have matured so that those organisms can survive when I get them. Once I have the rock in place, I'll try to determine where food in the water column is going to accumulate and I'll start placing larger polyp corals in those areas. I'm going to try various plankton and live brine shrimp. I'm interested to see what happens when I get that bidirectional flow going. Maybe build some caverns that will channel the water somehow. If I can find some locally, i'm going to be starting the tank on ProdiBio this coming week.
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Mitch
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#80
03-12-2011, 02:30 PM
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In the Summer 2010 issue of the magazine Invertebrate Biology, there is an article - Effect of a fluctuating thermal regime on adult and larval reef corals, where the authors study the effects of a daily temperature fluctuation between 21 and 28 degrees celsius (70 - 82 fahrenheit).
They set up a number of 10g tanks where they controlled the temperature using a Neptune controller, heaters and chillers. The temperatures were forced up or down according to the natural temperature fluctuations at Nanwan Bay, Taiwan. They found that the varying temperature environment made for corals that were stronger and more likely to survive incidences of high heat situations. I wonder if that isn't the next step in advancing our keeping of corals; trying to even more closely replicate the environment where they originate? How may years ago was it that SPS were deemed impossible to keep? I think we've got the "survivable" parameters down pat, I would like to see a lot more incidences of coral spawning reported and a lot less reports of "mysterious" coral deaths. My analogy of how we keep corals now with rock solid steady parameters is like growing a tree in a nice, climate controlled greenhouse. The tree does fine while all parameters are steady and even, but bring along the slightest breeze or other environmental fluctuation and the tree can't take the stress. Meanwhile, the same species of tree growing outdoors in the wind, rain, heat and cold does just fine. I'm trying to come up with a way to incorporate this into my system. The article is from my paid subscription, so I don't think I should post it here, but if someone would like me to shoot them a PDF, let me know.
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Mitch Last edited by MitchM; 03-12-2011 at 09:17 PM. Reason: initially put down wrong magazine edition
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