Eagle's 240 Build
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eagle
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Not much going on with the tank. I've been at work in Ohio for 43 days so the wife has been looking after everything. Our qt tank cycled and we have our 3 fish in it lol. Letting the DT sit fallow for 72 days. We are gonna treat with prazipro then CP. The larger biopellet reactor came in and B got it switched out. Added some more ecobak pellets. Its a nice reactor with plenty of power. I bought an aquacare turbo III too. I decided to try it over the Deltec or dosing pumps for calcium, alk, and mag. I ordered some parts to T off my return line and make a manifold. I really like being able to run 5 gph through it and run it in cycles. I've been dreading running a dosing pump or dealing with needle valves on the deltec to feed it. The one I purchased has the c02 sensor too so no need to add on ph module to my apex. Rapid finally got the UV leds I'm using back in stock. They were real nice and let me know when they were gonna have them back. Not much else to add for a while. Still a few more led parts to get and maybe get home in a couple weeks.
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eagle
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Made it home for 10 days and we got the lights up and running. Back at work now. Still have to get optics put on them next time I'm home. I just wasn't sure what degree to go with. The 60 degree optics look best so I ordered them last night. Brandi helped me building them. It was a lot of wires and some soldering but they turned out nice. The tank is still fallow and fish are in qt. The CP I purchased seems to be working well. We picked up a Hippo tang locally that was not gonna make it. It had velvet setting in. The first couple days in our hospital tank she looked rough but the velvet is gone now. I just had to see if the CP I got was working or not. I've been ramping the lights up slowly. They're blinding lol. I got the Bluefish controller and really really liking it. Just simulating the Great Barrier Reef and letting it do cloud cover and storms etc. The storms are pretty neat. We got our RW-20's running off the Apex too while I was home. So I've been programming them a bit. Pretty much done with equipment. Gonna get the calcium reactor going on next days off and still need to build the LED light bars but that should be pretty easy after building the main lights. I'm gonna do blue only on them. I have too much white now. Running the whites very low. The whites overpower my blues when turned up. I'm using the Luxeon M for white and blue but they are basically four 3 watt leds. So on that I'm running 32 RB, 16 cool white, 12 UV, 4 cool blue, 4 turquoise, 6 amber, and 6 lime per light. It's night and day difference from my old lights for sure. Everything pops.
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eagle
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eagle
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We made the top of the canopy so it can be pulled off easily to work on lights if needed. The board holding the lights sets in at an angle front to back to try and help with shadowing. I was gonna try to angle each light but we decided its easier to just angle the board holding all the lights. That's why I have the main lights shifted slightly to the front of center. I have everything for the bars in the back too. At 20 inches height above the water I'm not sure if it matters as much. There is a lot of spread. I have the ledil minnie 63 degree reflectors on the left side whites and it makes a pretty significant difference. But not spotty. I wanted to make it easy to remove and reconfigure, as well as minimize shadowing and the disco effect. Hence more led's and trying to spread them around. I just don't want the heat that VHO put's into the canopy. Trying to just adjust led's to minimize that problem and stay with one type of lighting. My temps are much lower now and stable. I've always had vho or halides and they are great too. Just hate the heat and fans and timers. The control over the led's is really fun too. Mixing different colors to see what looks good to us. The few SPS I have seem to like it. Already starting to color up some.
MounteeFrag
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Looking good!
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eagle
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On this days off we made more progress. Put 60 degree reflectors on the lights, changed the overflows from Herbie's to Durso standpipes with emergency drains. The reasoning was due to how low the overflows are cut into the tank. It was just taking too much sump to hold the water with the herbies. My sump would fill up. With the durso's I can keep the water height higher in the tank with pumps off. We added 2 more RW-20's and all 4 are running off Apex. I completely modded my Euroreef RS250 skimmer into a hybrid with one recirculating Tunze hydrofoamer 9420 and a Sicce PSK-1000 with a Tunze 9420 impeller and volute feeding it. I had an old PSK-1000 laying around with a bad impeller. When I received the hydrofoamer I tried the Sicce with the Tunze impeller and volute. It skimmed a lot better. So I ordered a hydrofoamer 9420 impeller and volute for it. Perfect fit. I'm not sure if anyone has tried this but the magnet and pin wheel on the Tunze seem to be a much better fit. Since the Tunze started out as a Sicce motor block I figured it would fit right in. Tunze changed the Volute too to address the startup issues the pumps were having. So it was a win win to just change those parts out to the Tunze parts. I crossed over the piping from 50mm to 1.5 inch on the drain and built my own silencer. Ordered the metric to standard crossovers and schedule 80 pipe and fittings from BRS. It's a beast now. The foam head is crazy. Pulling around 2000 lph of air to 350 gph of water. And that body holds it fine with the drain 3/4 shut. The old pump was acting strange and finally threw the gfci it was plugged in. So I got to mod it sooner than originally planned. The hydrofoamers are a tad bit under powered with one due to the head pressure of the tall skimmer, but two of them really put out. I took a schedule 80, 3/4 inch 90 fitting and dremeled it out to fit the tunze volute for the recirc mod on the inlet. Then drilled the skimmer body and mounted it with uniseals. Completely silent too. It started pulling gunk out right away. I was pretty pleased. I read and read and read some more lol comparing pumps and skimmer bodies etc. Just glad it worked out like I hoped. If anyone wants to do the hydrofoamer in a recirc mod just make sure the pump sits in the water a couple inches since the Tunze and Sicce aren't water tight. They can't be used in a external recirc mod, but I personally would never have a external skimmer lol. We got the calcium reactor up and running. It's a monster too. I'm not fooling with the dripping it in perfectly. I'm feeding it with a tiny pump and running it on a timer with Apex. Just don't feel like doing dosing pumps or needle valves. This way my circulating pump doesn't run all day long either. Or the solenoid valve. So far so good. It's maintaining levels easily with no more corals than I have atm. We got a shipment of Marco rocks in for some scaping. I was very impressed with them. Very nice rock. And more than we thought it would be for the cost. Very porous and lightweight. So it was a busy few days. The tank has two more weeks of being fallow. Taking our time on that and not getting in any hurries. Starting to get ideas on what we want to add to it for livestock. A reef cleaner package is coming tomorrow. I took some quick pics but didn't have much time to get nice ones. Back at work now. I'll get more later.
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SeahorseKeeper
Where's the mysis?
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Looking good! 
OP
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eagle
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I went into detail about the skimmer mod because I couldn't find much info about using Tunze on them. And no info about Tunze in a recirc design. Reef Dynamics doesn't sell the metric silencers now for the older Euroreefs that were metric. That was a mess with ordering parts then having to send them back to reef dynamics. If youre not sure what piping you have its printed on the 90 fitting on the drain. Just wasn't much info out there so I did my own experiment. Another note is I tried the 9420 pump on my RS-135 too and it's too much. If I got one for it I would use the 9410. I set up a tote with saltwater and an air meter and found the best depth for them with these pumps. Around 9 inches on the RS250.
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eagle
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Thanks Soggy, I actually changed the lights up some a bit last week. I changed the Luxeon M royal blues over to stevesleds mounted on the square copper sinkpad and added ledil reflectors too them. They run cooler and MUCH brighter now. I made a new canopy top, mounted the leds in the middle, and added 8 120mm fans. I'm planning on running some T5's for my whites. I've tried all kinds of combos of leds trying to replicate the T5 look. I think I'll just go the easy route and add some lol. So it'll be backwards from what most people do with T5's for actinics. I have tons of blue with the leds. I really have tons of everything but trying to find that perfect spectrum to highlight all the colors seems to be easier with t5.
