Amoo's Pasture 60 Gallon Shallow Reef

[Amoo]

Looking good man!

Man I'm really crappy at this. Thanks Rev and welcome aboard.

 

[Centerline]

Great build man! Following!

 

[Daniel@R2R Verified Admin]

Looking good, @Amoo. I'll follow this build too.

 

[Amoo]

Thanks @mdbannister you should check out what I have going on right now in the Nem forum

 

[Daniel@R2R Verified Admin]

Thanks @mdbannister you should check out what I have going on right now in the Nem forum

Will do!

 

[Amoo]

UPDATE TIME!!!

Ok so let's see what has changed?

YAY!!!! I have a Mag back. The clowns were literally in it within seconds of it hitting the water. It has been so funny as without a home they have just king of hung out towards the right front corner of the glass and spent more time randomly wondering around away from each other. Since the return of a house they have literally rarely left it, I've even had to shift to start feeding on that side of the tank because they would not come to the side I normally feed on which is the opposite end.

Okay so let's see, what else has happened since the last update. Ah yes I calculated out my daily usage for dkh, dosed my first Core7 dose and immediately nuked half of two corals. Literally within 10 minutes they were shedding tissue So yeah instead of dosing 5ml like they recommend starting with I'm dosing 1.5ml twice a day. Since then things seems to be going much better. I'm getting some really great PE on my corals and everything seems to be humming along nicely.

This second picture shows the millie I nuked up top. I think it got hit so hard because even though I dosed into the highest flow area of my tank, that millie was right in the direct path. Ironically enough there is almost no tissue left on it at all minus the very tip top and there is still some PE on the very top. Who knows, maybe it will come back. The millie below it is doing fantastic as is the Frogspawn and Stylo

Here's a FTS to give you guys an update of that.

The one thing I did do this week was I swapped out my Jecod 8000 for a Jecod 6000 and installed a 1" FMK module on it. Which ironically enough in the last 15 minutes has just dropped from 350GPH to 280GPH so I'm wondering if maybe a piece of Chaeto may have escaped and clogged the dang thing already. The really nice thing is I finally decided after almost 3 years to actually start using my Apex Lite some. Nobody mention this to @Terrance I'm pretty sure he's not exactly thrilled with me at the moment. I literally just sat here and went to my fusion dashboard and turned the pump off and on a few times to try to dislodge whatever might have been jammed in there and it seemed to free it up and it's back where it should be now. Don't tell anybody but I even pulled my Jaebo DC4 out of the closet that has been there for 3 years and am probably going to calibrate it and put it online

The pellets have balanced out nicely. I decided to try to combat some of the particles by going back to a felt sock and after 2 days of that and running directly off of the inlet pipe to the sump all of the pellets seemed to have freed themselves up and are tumbling nicely in the BRS reactor which is directly hooked into the return pump manifold, so there ya go, you don't need an expensive special bio pellet reactor to run bio pellets.

Either way right now things are going too well so I'm expecting something major to happen any time now, oh yeah I'll have a hurricane here tomorrow.....go figure.

 

[Amoo]

Great build man! Following!

Thanks @Centerline welcome aboard man, I'll have to give your thread a look.

 

[Amoo]

So for the few of you following this I'll probably have a few updates coming tonight. Have some really fun pictures of the tank in different power states while I was getting generator things sorted out. Actually ran just the return pump and a small sump LED for about 36 hours till I got the whole tank back on line. 70 degrees was scaring the crap out of me but everything seemed to come out okay on the other side.

I think the only casualty might have been my Apex display unit, which is sad because I really like having a quick glance readout right there on the tank. Especially since I'm undecided which controller I will ultimately put on this tank, as this current one is moving to my 32g build.

Back with more later.

 

[Amoo]

No pictures yet, getting ready to go take a shower. Figured I would sit down and relax after a long day of Hurricane cleanup and moving a generator to mom and dad's.

Relaxing is not exactly what is happening right now as I'm ready to throw my whole darn APEX unit out in the yard. I was cleaning up old modules on my module configuration screen and somehow deleting a display module deleted my EB8 instead, but my EB8 was still showing, so I power cycled the Apex unit itself and a new EB8 popped up.... Now I'm not recognizing a display module at all, which I kind of expected, but I can see my FMM module, but can not access any settings. I'm also getting no readings out of it, but the light is green....

I'm thinking I'm going to look for instructions for a factory hard reset, see what comes back and what doesn't and if the darn thing doesn't start acting right I'm tossing this whole darn thing. I may also try doing a clean update direct from LAN and see if that helps with anything. Either way I need a shower and I'm debating taking my APEX in there with me.

 

[Amoo]

Oh and if anybody was wondering it was behind a surge protector and a UPS the entire outage.

 

[Amoo]

Ok so I guess if the worst thing to happen to my tank after being without power from Sunday through Wednesday was I lost my Apex display unit and had to hard reset my entire Apex, I can live with that. Definitely still a little salty about the display unit, but it is what it is and it's not vital... I got my FMM back working after the hard reset and had to reconfigure everything for Fusion and re-update, but whatever. Not exactly thrilled. Either way my Fusion and Dashboard doesn't appear to be logging or pulling any historical data, but the update did say that could take a bit, who knows maybe I'm missing a toggle somewhere....sigh

Ok so let's see, the first 30ish hours without power I ran the DC return pump off the outlet in my truck and that was the only thing running in my tank. Tank temperature dropped down to 70F, but conditions weren't good enough for me to have hooked up the generator. Conditions still weren't good enough for Generator yet when I couldn't stomach seeing my temp probe hit 69.9 and hooked an inverter up to my wife's car battery and ran 1 heater and this little 10W LED spotlight at the ball of Chaeto in my sump you can't see because of the glare.

At about the 36 hour mark, temp was up to 72F and conditions were good enough to get the generator going, so I actually unhooked my Apex, which is why I'm kind of salty about it, ran everything through a Surge Protector then a UPS then to my full tank system. While I only the return pump running you can see I had it dialed way down and I actually cut the reactor off with the pellets because I knew my skimmer wasn't going to be running. I did bump a little water in there every 4 hours or so just to make sure there was no die off.

Ironically I had a UPS on the 28 Cube in the living room and the only thing it runs is the MP10 in that tank. It ran for quite a while, but didn't make it the full 36 hours. As a result the lonely little Black Ice now resides in the sump of this tank until I get my "Greener Pastures" tank up. I thought I would have all this down time with the power out to work on it, but the thoughts of saw dust and having to bathe in a 70 degree pool was not very appealing to me so literally NO progress was made on that.

I've not had time to check parameters yet, but I do know my alk is probably closer to 7 based on my pH. Hopefully I have time to do some testing tomorrow as I would really like to keep things on the path they have been going, but I do need to go to mom's and get my generator back now that they have power and I'll be there most of the day cutting up Limbs while father in law takes her for ankle surgery...

 

[Jim Harrison]

Following! I'm really in love with your tank!

 

[Amoo]

Thanks @Jim Harrison and welcome aboard. I hope the only updates I have in the next week or so is that I'm updating with pictures or updating how dosing is going or I get a wild hair and decide to buy something new. If something else breaks I have plenty of ammunition to finish it off.

 

[Jim Harrison]

Thanks @Jim Harrison and welcome aboard. I hope the only updates I have in the next week or so is that I'm updating with pictures or updating how dosing is going or I get a wild hair and decide to buy something new. If something else breaks I have plenty of ammunition to finish it off.

Good luck! I'm not going to consider my second tank (first one is a 75g and waiting for a couple things before its up) will have to be a shallow tank. I absolutely love the way your tank is laid out.

 

[Amoo]

Thanks man, same to you, I'm enjoying it much more so then I was my 125G. Still using the same 75G home made sump and the old stand, but I'm really digging the depth and I don't have all that space at the top of the tank that I just feel the need to do something with. IF I upgrade this tank ever it will be to a rimless and it will most definitely be no higher than 18" This tank is 4'x2'x12", I'm thinking a rimless 4'x2'x18 would be ideal. That is a LONG way off and many projects from now though. At least I have my 32 Rimless build to keep me tinkering in the meantime.

 

[Jim Harrison]

I think 12-18" is perfect for a stylish tank. Rimless would be brilliant. You've inspired me to look into a shorter tank after we've found a house to buy.

 

[Amoo]

I figured why not start out the post this morning with some early morning acitnics.

What kills me is you can clearly see the orange coral there on the floor of the aquarium. In life it is orange and in that photo it looks red/orange, yet when you start color correcting the photos

WHY DOES THAT CORAL LOSE IT'S COLOR?!? The clowns keep their color, most everything is showing very close to appropriate real life color, MINUS that one coral...

Anyways. So since I swapped to this tank I've been having this problem:

That's the flow from my return pump. Essentially Apex logs every ten minutes but literally it was changing every second, literally even with the holes in the pipe with a larger coupling and air hose I would still randomly get air into the main return which was literally throwing my return chamber level all over the place and also effecting my return flow. Notice there is a gap there from 308-322. But it was literally up and down constantly and you could hear the bubbles hitting the sum.

So let's see a little bit of remodeling

Removed the outer cap and simply allowed more flow through the pipe and decided to run it as close to full siphon as I could without raising the water level to the emergency drain. As a result:

Now while at first glance that may look worse, it's only a deviation of 5 and the major dips usually correlate with feeding/cleaning. Combine that with the fact I never hear air hit the sump anymore and it is dead silent, it's a complete win/win. Now the pipe is still capped, and flow is still restricted from just a full 1" drain, but I've gained over 80GPH turnover and complete silence and return level stability. I hate Durso drains, but it's what this tank had. I COULD have changed it, but meh...

 

[Amoo]

So I have something HUGE to update you about. It's not very photo intensive, but it is a huge step in the stability direction.

I've had this thing for so long now just sitting in a bin in the closet and I finally dug it out to see if it even worked. The first head seemed a little glitchy so I opted to not use it as it would intermittently get stuck while manually flowing to get bubbles out, but the other three ran no problems at all. Got the three heads calibrated, triple checked them and wala:

Please ignore the fact that I haven't put the light cords back yet properly after the hurricane outage as well as my wife's colic kit she stores under my stand. I wanted to use Yellow, Blue and Black, but sadly the black RO tubing that I had left over from previous projects was too short to reach across my sump so blue it is.

So for those tracking I've been dialing in my dosing with Core7 Other Methods since the 10th and my tank still isn't calling for a lot of ALK and as a result I have been manually hand dosing every day to get it dialed in. I literally haven't measured anything but ALK since the 10th, which hopefully will change this week.

Either way those are 4L containers and I filled each with 3L of RODI and 300ml of Each part of the 1 (Mg), 2 (Ca), 3A and 3B (Alk). So I'm dosing 10ml of 1 & 2 and 20ml of 3A & 3B, 3 times a day and I'll make adjustments to that as needed.

Of coarse being my first time with a doser, yes all these years reefing and I've never dosed with a doser, I was a dummy and my 3A and 3B container will empty before my 1 & 2 container will....sigh. Oh well I have quite a while before that runs out to figure it out (which isn't difficult but I realized it after the fact).

My tank stand has a window in the front of it so I can see my fuge 24/7, I probably should add a little window so i can see my dosing containers, although that's not as exciting to look at. Either way if we're not careful I might actually grow some sticks in this tank.

 

[Amoo]

Man I have new friends going into the DT today, one of which is a small YT and the small powder blue who is already in there is already going after the dang Sailfin Blenny....going to be a long day

 

[Amoo]

Ok so not a ton of pictures yet as everything is still pretty, well comically friction-full in my tank at the moment. Let's start with a picture of my new wrasse:

Yup pretty much. Oh make no mistake about it, I have a new wrasse in the tank and he's very cool looking and doing fine so far, but refuses to leave the rockwork until the absolute insanity calms down a bit. I maybe should have put him in a day later then the rest. He should be fine though.

So far there's been a lot of this:

The minute the yellow tang hit the water the blue was on him like white on rice. That lasted about 30 minutes and I gave him a few whoopins with some RO tubing till I finally fed the tank for the day and that seemed to calm everybody down for a bit. They've gone from extreme chasing to just kind of casually flicking their tails at each other like ships passing in the night as they pass each other going from rock to rock doing their job. They're both given it about as well as they're both taking it and while they are both a little marked up, I haven't seen anything super serious that doesn't look like it's going to work itself out. Ironically every Powder Blue I have ever had, has always been my most peaceful and passive fish. This one though has the personality of devil-spawn. Either way I'm not too concerned, foxface, YT, PBT is a combo I use quite frequently and I've yet to have a fish fight related casualty or serious injury. Of coarse now I'll have to watch them both close for the next week or so to make sure all their scrape marks heal appropriately, but there doesn't appear to be any permanent damage other then maybe some egos hurt.

The other additions today was a little bit more risky and I'm still not too sure if it's going to work:

In my house these are known as "Mr. Uglys" and I figured with 48x24 inches of floor space I could maybe get away with two in this tank and hopefully get lucky enough to pair them up. Everything went according to plan from the additions. Smaller one was added first on the right side of the tank, larger one was added second on the left side of the tank, they crossed paths a few times and nobody really seemed to care much. Then all the sudden the big one noticed the smaller one laying on a rock he was coming up to lay on and it's been non stop mayhem ever since. I was hoping I could make this work as the Foxface is getting to the point where in about another 6 months I may feel he's too big for this tank and need to rehome him. He's such an algae machine though that I was hoping to have better luck with 2 Sailfins as I transition the Foxface out and replace him with a smaller one, but might have had better luck getting a second foxface instead.

Either way if this goes south the Clownfish that came out of the 28 has been in this tank's fuge since the hurricane and will stay there until the 32 build is done. If things start to get too bad for "Little Ugly", I may have to move him down there as well. Hopefully Big Ugly let's up soon, Little Ugly could still use to add a few calories.

I knew adding 5 new fish to the system today was going to be a bit of a gamble so I've been waiting to put the second MP40 I got on the tank until today. Was hoping the change in flow pattern would be enough to quell some of the aggression. On the plus side, 1 Gyre running 70% in laminar flow gyre mode and 2 MP40s running in reef crest at 70% is an incredible amount of flow for a tank this size. On the negative side the inhabitants seem to care less about the new flow pattern and would rather play "pin the tail on the other guy" all day long.