Angry Upgrade 120 to 230 Peninsula!

[saintsreturn]

Exciting to see the fish! I wish i was nearby, but Houston might as well be Florida haha.

If you are building a box, i do not see how the slide out could do anything but help with access. Regardless, the work you have put in is detailed and well thought out. So i am excited to see what you end up with

 

[AngryOwl]

So maybe around Wednesday I noticed my purple stylo had some bare spots... then today I notice even more... but I've made no changes to anything I'm putting into the tank or changes to equipment... Alk has been just as stable as the picture below that shows massive growth. This stylo has survived all kinds of nuclear blasts while probably upwards of 50 sps frags died throughout the year. Pretty freakin dumb and I'm completely over this stupid 120g. Thinking about selling most of the corals and starting as fresh as I can....

 

[AngryOwl]

Almost done with the electrical box... I didn't take a picture but I got all the controllers I want mounted on the front in place. Next steps for tomorrow is to finish up and get things running via the apex. Taking the panel off is pretty easy but making sure the cables are tucked back in is a pita... but I shouldn't need to access this often.

In the meantime I'm considering what fish to catch and add next!

Also made a little shelf, this will hold the doser.

 

[AngryOwl]

Electrical box/panel is mostly completed. I think I want to add hinges on the bottom so it swings open and then add a little arm to keep it from falling in. I have everything temporarily set up as I add more equipment to this tank. This will all be refined and tucked up nice and neat once I get everything I need on the tank... that way I'm not redoing work.

Also have a few things set up on the apex so I'll keep going with that as well.

So a few weeks back I was working on something and wanted some electrical tape... I look around all over the place and couldn't find it. I ask my wife and of course she has no idea... then I text my neighbor asking if I let him borrow it... he tells me "I was gonna ask you the same thing" lol. Then today I go to add some windshield fluid to the car and well... there it is...

 

[AngryOwl]

Video on adding the clownfish to the tank.

 

[AngryOwl]

For those of you interested in the Electrical Panel, here it is! Today I added some hinges on the bottom and a little handle to make it much more functional. I'll clean everything up once I get everything move over and I have some more wire management stuff I'm ordering.

 

[AngryOwl]

After an hour, I caught my trigger and he is now in the 230! The tank is still pretty cloudy, I took a short video but it's unwatchable :mad: Hopefully it will clear up soon.

 

[AngryOwl]

It's gone a bit quiet in here for the holidays. So let me take this time to ramble about some of the stuff I have coming up next.

Over the course of the next 2-3 weeks I will look to transition all of my fish to the 230g as well as the remaining equipment (i.e. gyres). I recently broke down my IM 25 Lagoon tank. That tank was being completely ignored and I had/have no interest in continuing to mess around with it. So I took out the few corals that were in there and threw them in the 120g. Then I drained it down, filled it back up with tap water and ran it with bleach for a few days. It's amazing what bleach will do to hair algae, if only it was reef safe... Anyways, after the bleach bath I removed the rock and vacuumed out all the sand, then I filled it back up with tap water and added some vinegar. This weekend I'll drain it down and give it a good wipe down.

The plan for the nano will be to temporarily house my corals through a "quarantine" process. The 120g is a disgusting place, veritmid snails all over, bubble algae, flatworms... its madness. So the plan is to remove all the livestock and all the rock in the tank... then I'll dip every single coral and scrape them down good. I will be using bayer and coralRX to dip. After the first dip they will go back into the 120g to recover slightly, maybe 5-7 days. After that I will dip every coral again and move them into the 25 Lagoon tank. They will sit in there for the same time, 5-7 days, before they are dipped once again and finally placed in the 230g.

I pretty much expect to lose all my corals... but this process is better than trying to sell people infested corals.

So this is where I'm currently at with my thinking about the transition. It will also allow me to remove the 120g from my living room sooner.

As far as major upgrade or projects to the 230g, I don't see anything big happening for a little while. The next biggest purchase and project will be to wrap the stand in stone, but I'm in no rush to do so. At this point I have everything I need to start having success and it's just a matter of time and fine tuning everything.

Let me know your thoughts on this plan and what you want to see in the future!

 

[AngryOwl]

Under cabinet lights are finally installed, nice and bright! Having some bright under cabinet lighting makes such a difference when you're trying to work on things under the tank.

Next up will be to tackle the task of wire management and I'm not excited about that one bit...

 

[AngryOwl]

For anyone interested in harvesting phytoplankton and copepods, I made a video on the kit I got from Poseidon Reef Systems. Overall I really enjoy the plug and play setup and I've been able to almost get my money back in the amount of harvests. The 230g is completely full of pods all over the glass already and if I had to guess I'd say I'm getting well over 5000 pods per harvest. I have no idea how companies like Algae Barn "count" the pods. Impossible!

 

[AngryOwl]

Here are some full tank shots as of today. I nearly have all the fish moved over from the 120. Just 4 more to go.

So next weekend will be spent getting those guys added in and the breakdown of the 120 will begin. I'll remove all rock & sand, dip corals and put them back... after 1 week they will be removed and dipped again before going into my nano tank. After 1 week they will be removed and dipped one last time before entering the 230. Hopefully this works to keep crap out of the new tank. Below is a homemade frag rack I pulled out of the 120... completely infested...

 

[AngryOwl]

Spent this weekend breaking down the 120. I removed all the remaining livestock, rock, and sand (as much as I could grab). I dipped all the remaining corals in bayer for 15 minutes and then gave each a good scrub down. Next weekend I will remove them from the 120 and dip again then throw em in my nano for another week. So next weekend should put an official end to the 120! Good riddance! :mad:

Also this weekend I put the skimmer on the 230 and added in my anemone! We will see how the anemone ends up doing. I've only been running 2 bulbs on the tank daily; and the fixture is mounted 17 inches off the water, which is way higher than it will be. Sometime this week if I get bored I will lower the fixture and start taking par readings to determine its final resting height.

On another note I've tested the water for NO3 and PO4. I got ~32 and 65ppb or .199ppm respectively. The tank is obviously still going through the cycle but I think it would be interesting to experiment with stuff I never have before. Clearly whatever I was doing on the 120 wasn't working, so why do the same things expecting different results? Even though in this hobby you can have 10 people do the same exact thing and each will have a different result or experience.

Possibly considering doing some NOPOX dosing to see how it is. I'm also curious how a testing acro would do in here. Anyways, more on that in the future.

 

[AngryOwl]

Oh one other thought... I went to go clean the gyres before putting them on the 230... well... don't ya know that port A shows as off. I think, that's weird, and I go to manually reset the program. Port A shows on but then goes off by itself. Port B is working fine... so to determine it was a controller issue and not a pump issue I switched the connections and once again Port A shows off and B is on working fine on the other pump. So it's not a pump issue. I put in a ticket with coralvue but I'm not holding my breath anything will come of it... I'm 2 months past warranty.... :mad:

For now I added the 1 gyre to the tank.

 

[AngryOwl]

CoralVue got back to me early this morning, asked for proof of purchase, the serial number of the controller and my address. I'll add asking for the serial number is very annoying because they make it mandatory you enter that to even open a ticket... and you also enter the month and year of purchase.

Anyways... I supply the information no problem and then the reply I get is it's out of warranty... this was a complete surprise to me.... Their next suggestion was to update the firmware. I did that about 10 minutes ago and of course it didn't fix the issue. So we'll see what the next reply is....

I find it extremely annoying that the controller is only covered for 1 year. I'm not sure how many people have issues but the pumps rely on this controller to function, there is no fall back here, rendering your $160 pump useless as well as your $180 controller useless... then you have to pay more than the pump is worth to replace it

Let me add... I've been operating ONLY port B for a year. I only recently in late November or early December got a second pump and connected it to port A. So Port A's life span is 1 month and the other is TBD I guess...

 

[Janci]

Great thread. Subscribed!
Bad luck on the gyres.

 

[AngryOwl]

Great thread. Subscribed!
Bad luck on the gyres.

Thank you! Hoping I can make this tank into something special

Awaiting CoralVue's reply, which I'm sure will come with an Angry rant

 

[AngryOwl]

Its me again...

I suppose you were expecting me to come back here pretty Angry... but CoralVue got it right this time and is honoring the warranty even though its about 1.5 months past the warranty period. This gives me some type of emotion I rarely feel... Happy?

Oh another note... I took some par readings of the tank last night, tested the water parameters, and got a few tester pieces to sacrifice to the reef gods! For par I measured with all the lights on (8 T5 bulbs + 2 sbReefbars) and got 550-575 at my highest point of the rock scape. Way more than I expected to get. The lights are roughly 12 inches off the water which is also way higher than I expected they would be. I'm going to give this par a shot and see what happens. I still have the option to raise the fixture and turn down the sbReefbars (both at 100%).

As for parameters:
Alk: 7.7
Cal: 400
Mag: 1360
NO4: ~16 (hard to tell what the color was, redsea kit high range test)
PO4: 85ppb or .261ppm

Before I added the tester pieces I took the opportunity to buffer up Alk and Cal a bit. I'd like to run around 8.2-8.5 so I threw in 40ml Alk and Cal 2 part, will test today to check if it's in my desired range. I think I will throw on the doser even if it is as little as 1ml a day, cause why not?

For fun I threw in 4ml of NOPOX which is an extremely low dose. I want to experiment a little bit. Will most likely purchase and try phosphate-rx to drop PO4 to be more in line with NO3.

More to come on how this goes!

 

[AngryOwl]

Better picture of one of the acros. Seems to be super happy despite "dirty" water.. weird that high phosphates didn't kill it immediately...

Alk is sitting at 8.3, right where I want it!

Nitrite finally showed up less for the first time in weeks. Who would have thought a little nopox would cause that

 

[Janci]

Nice frag.
How do you manage Alk at this moment?
I think I did not see or read about a doser yet?

 

[kaxt]

Great build! I really enjoyed reading through it, and now I’m anxiously awaiting your updates to see how this tank does.

I had one thought a few pages back when you were wondering why the 120 might be struggling with acros. I saw that you run your lights from early in the morning to late at night. I run Radions on my tank. I remember that when I was first setting them up I tried to have the lights run for 14 hours. A little warning box popped up saying that their research suggests the lights shouldn’t be on for more than 12 hours a day. I know many people also run their lights for more than half the day, and I have no idea if LEDs have different suggestions than T5s in this department. But it might be something to consider if you find yourself in the same boat of throwing your hands up in the air and wanting to start over. I have good feelings for this tank though, so hopefully it won’t ever be something you have to look into.