How about a nightmare build thread?

[CwStrife]

How about a nightmare store instead? Just take a look at the ceiling and how some drywall is falling down. I'll give you one guess where the drywall ends up..........

 

[Gregg @ ADP]

How about a nightmare store instead? Just take a look at the ceiling and how some drywall is falling down. I'll give you one guess where the drywall ends up..........

What a mess. Is this a back filter/QT room? What the heck am I looking at?!?

Also, lol @ the box fan on the pump

 

[CwStrife]

What a mess. Is this a back filter/QT room? What the heck am I looking at?!?

Also, lol @ the box fan on the pump

Nope you're looking at the main filtration for the entire store. Where the drywall is falling is the reef system. The rest is the saltwater fish. And yea the fan was a joke, the pump would overheat and die constantly. Meanwhile the owner of the store was a millionaire owned multiple houses and ran the place to hell. If the sump room isn't proof.

 

[Lowell Lemon]

Nope you're looking at the main filtration for the entire store. Where the drywall is falling is the reef system. The rest is the saltwater fish. And yea the fan was a joke, the pump would overheat and die constantly. Meanwhile the owner of the store was a millionaire owned multiple houses and ran the place to hell. If the sump room isn't proof.

I guess that is why the owner is a millionaire. Extract profits and let the store run down until it dies under it's own weight. Nice. I guess some people think dry wall is a great buffer, and KH builder LOL.

 

[CwStrife]

I guess that is why the owner is a millionaire. Extract profits and let the store run down until it dies under it's own weight. Nice. I guess some people think dry wall is a great buffer, and KH builder LOL.

Absolutely correct, the livestock suffered, the employees got bottom dollar pay, and the owner took the profits. Seems it is catching up now because the store is falling into disrepair at an alarming rate. Doubt the guy cares though sadly.

 

[Gregg @ ADP]

I guess that is why the owner is a millionaire. Extract profits and let the store run down until it dies under it's own weight. Nice. I guess some people think dry wall is a great buffer, and KH builder LOL.

In my early days of working in an LFS, I worked for an owner like that. But he was buying more...ummm...Kalkwasser than he was houses.

 

[CwStrife]

In my early days of working in an LFS, I worked for an owner like that. But he was buying more...ummm...Kalkwasser than he was houses.

Got hooked on the kalk? lol I understand haha

 

[cpschult]

Just for clarification. Does that kitchen.. have a kitchen? Great read thanks for sharing!!

 

[Gregg @ ADP]

Just for clarification. Does that kitchen.. have a kitchen? Great read thanks for sharing!!

Yep. It’s about the size of my condo, so it’s got a little bit of everything. Fireplace, lounge area, 10 burner stove, etc.

 

[CwStrife]

Yep. It’s about the size of my condo, so it’s got a little bit of everything. Fireplace, lounge area, 10 burner stove, etc.

Going back and rereading everything you said about that tank has me laughing so hard! Potential to be great but they cocked it all up huh

 

[Lowell Lemon]

In my early days of working in an LFS, I worked for an owner like that. But he was buying more...ummm...Kalkwasser than he was houses.

You mean you worked for John DeLorean? I did not know he owned a fish store.

 

[Gregg @ ADP]

Going back and rereading everything you said about that tank has me laughing so hard! Potential to be great but they cocked it all up huh

Yep. The issue really is that the inside configuration of the tank is so messed up that it’s really difficult to make it look the way I want it to. And then not being able to easily access it makes it even harder.

But...I’m about to turn it in the other direction. The environment and chem has been good/really good for a few consecutive years, so now is the time to revamp it. It WILL be great. I’m tearing it down after New Years and building it back up.

 

[Lasse]

What do you think of this?

I can easily make a tower 60cm tall x 30cm x 16cm out of acrylic. Within this tower, there will be a few 1.5cm x1.5cm acrylic bars cemented on that will allow me to make shelves inside of it.

Water pours in the top, and I drill holes in the bottom 6cm. This allows (forces) water to through the tower and out the bottom.

The top layer would be coarse pad, with some less coarse pad under it, followed by sponge or fine pad. The top couple of layers are there to catch particulate and prevent the the subsequent layers from getting clogged up (and can be easily cleaned/maintained)

Middle layer- 6-10cm coarse substrate, sitting on top of the very coarse pad.

Bottom layer- 10-15 cm medium grain substrate —> small grain substrate on top of a final pad or sponge.

Bottom layer would be 6cm off bottom of filter. Holes drilled in acrylic along bottom of tower beneath bottom layer.

I could run any volume through I want, but it seems like maybe ~400 lph would be a good start.

Don’t you think that by the time that volume of water percolated through ~30cm of pads, sponges, and then coarse substrate that pretty much all the available O2 would have been used, and then the bottom 10-15cm of substrate would facilitate anaerobic activity?

I kind of want the bottom of the refugium to just be some fine substrate and then just let detritus from the tank settle in. I want to keep that ‘mud’ layer unencumbered, so I don’t want any rock on top of it. I can even install plastic grid baffles a couple of cm off the bottom to allow the macro-algae to anchor w/o anything actually being on the bottom. Extra live rock can be piled in the chamber downstream of the refugium chamber...for sponge growth, micro-inverts/detritivores, etc etc.

If you look at the pic of the sump, you can see that at one point I had made a 5cm hole between to two boxes. This height is approx where the current skimmer effluent line is. Thinking of running the effluent water back into the other side into...whatever. And I guess there is nothing stopping me from raising the skimmer off the bottom of the sump and then running some of the effluent back to the drain chamber and dump it into the bio chamber.

Thoughts?

My experiences say that a flow from up to down partnering with gravity in several ways. One - not wanted - is packing and clogging. However - to use free power (gravity) is a good idea. If you make the tower the way that you let the drain water go to the bottom and then up through the sand (or gravel) bed and out. The force to do this is the height of the water in the drain (over the filter). In this case - you need to have a safety drain if the filter will be clogged.

Sincerely Lasse

 

[Sallstrom]

My experiences say that a flow from up to down partnering with gravity in several ways. One - not wanted - is packing and clogging. However - to use free power (gravity) is a good idea. If you make the tower the way that you let the drain water go to the bottom and then up through the sand (or gravel) bed and out. The force to do this is the height of the water in the drain (over the filter). In this case - you need to have a safety drain if the filter will be clogged.

Sincerely Lasse

Good idea, and if there's a couple of cm of water above the sand bed, before the outlet of this filter, it would be easy to place a redox probe in there.

 

[Gregg @ ADP]

My experiences say that a flow from up to down partnering with gravity in several ways. One - not wanted - is packing and clogging. However - to use free power (gravity) is a good idea. If you make the tower the way that you let the drain water go to the bottom and then up through the sand (or gravel) bed and out. The force to do this is the height of the water in the drain (over the filter). In this case - you need to have a safety drain if the filter will be clogged.

Sincerely Lasse

So...

60cm x 30cm x 16cm tower. Built as a box (closed @ bottom). Partition in the middle going down to within 5cm of the bottom. Creating 2 roughly 60cm x 15cm x 15cm chambers. Shelves on both sides.

1st chamber- water in, flowing down. Layers of pad, sponge material, etc. Flows down, under partition, then up into 2nd chamber.

2nd chamber- water flows up from bottom. Shelf with coarse substrate to medium substrate to fine substrate. Total depth of substrate maybe 15cm? At the top of substrate, holes or slot in acrylic for water to flow back out into filter.

Couple of questions:

Use protein skimmer effluent water, or drained water from display?

Drip some skimmate into chamber?

Place upstream or downstream from refugium?

Very curious about your thoughts.

 

[Captain Quint]

Well Gregg @ ADP, I have thoroughly enjoyed this thread and your wit is keen indeed. I would work with you on any build with the exception of the ones from hell. Man, who did you tick off in another life my friend? haha

 

[Lasse]

Since 4 months ago - all skimmate goes direct to the return pump. My skimmer is only a gas exchanger.

Sincerely Lasse

 

[Gregg @ ADP]

Since 4 months ago - all skimmate goes direct to the return pump. My skimmer is only a gas exchanger.

Sincerely Lasse

Interesting.

Consider though that this system has/will have a high fish-load. Not ridiculously high, but I will want to remove at least some of the skimmate to help on the PO4 end. Then again, I’ve got a pretty big reactor on hand, plus carbon.

So, that gets back to my placement question. In application, a skimmer will remove hydrophobic macro-molecules but have a negligible impact on PO4 and NO3 in the water column. As such, running the effluent (which one would assume would be lower in things like phospholipids, etc) into the bed filter would offer the needed NO3 to the bacteriato concert to N. But how much PO4 would be locked up beyond being sequestered by small-micro organisms and bacterial growth?

To that end, my thinking is that I should put the skimmer downstream of the refugium and the bed filter/plenum back upstream of the refugium to loop that PO4 back around and through.

Or does it ultimately not really matter?

 

[Gregg @ ADP]

Good idea, and if there's a couple of cm of water above the sand bed, before the outlet of this filter, it would be easy to place a redox probe in there.

Pretty easy to design that if I go with that configuration.

 

[Sallstrom]

Interesting.

Consider though that this system has/will have a high fish-load. Not ridiculously high, but I will want to remove at least some of the skimmate to help on the PO4 end. Then again, I’ve got a pretty big reactor on hand, plus carbon.

So, that gets back to my placement question. In application, a skimmer will remove hydrophobic macro-molecules but have a negligible impact on PO4 and NO3 in the water column. As such, running the effluent (which one would assume would be lower in things like phospholipids, etc) into the bed filter would offer the needed NO3 to the bacteriato concert to N. But how much PO4 would be locked up beyond being sequestered by small-micro organisms and bacterial growth?

To that end, my thinking is that I should put the skimmer downstream of the refugium and the bed filter/plenum back upstream of the refugium to loop that PO4 back around and through.

Or does it ultimately not really matter?

Some thoughts (after two glasses of wine..).

I think removing the skimmate is more realistic in a tank with high bioload. Maybe after some time the tank will be packed with corals, then reusing the skimmate would be a good way to work against too low nutrients. But that's a pleasant problem.

I like the idea of keeping a sand bed like this in the system, as well as macroalgae and a cryptic zone. But when it comes to running the tank and keeping the nutrients at the desirable levels, it might be easier just going with GFO and adding a carbon source to the aquarium(together with a good skimmer and macroalgae). I know it's not as sophisticated as a controllable sand bed, but sometimes easier ways are just as good(or good enough)

Or, just pack the tank with corals and let them be the nutrient sink.

Skimmer downstream of refugium and macroalgae. I think. But that's just a guess. Probably won't do much difference. But again, just guessing.