The everything's wrong 75 build

[kdx7214]

Sorry to hear about your family's issues, sending ya positive vibes !
Gotta ask whats the mat below your tank between the tank and stand ? We're going to be setting up a 75 later this yr , and admiring your stand and sump work. Never thought about using a 40b for sump , looks good

Thanks for the kind words. The mat is just insulating foam board from Menards. It's the pink stuff you see used in houses. It's cheap, strong enough to hold it, and makes a great place to pin a skirt to around the stand. We're going with a fabric skirt rather than a wooden enclosure - my wife wants to make some beadwork fish to hang on it

 

[kdx7214]

Oh man I'm sorry to hear about the news. Sometimes just staring at my tank for awhile helps me organize my thoughts and compartmentalize bad news. Best wishes for you and your family!

Thanks. It's messing with my head pretty badly. I've been watching the tank and seeing a few little changes every day on the live rock. I now have a fluorescent light green sponge growing.

Years ago I had a 55 gallon tank with about 70 African Cichlids (freshwater) in it. This is back when they were still brightly colored (before inbreeding in the trade faded them out). I could sit and watch that for hours at a time. I'll eventually get to that point with this one - but right now there's too little to keep my attention for that long. Once I get more fish and movement (and more corals) I'll be glued to it.

 

[kdx7214]

Quick update. I finally was able to get the 3d printer working well enough to print the wall mounts for the Robo Tank that I got. It's only taken 2 months lol. So now I can get that mounted and my utility room cleaned up. Right now it's all sitting on a milk crate

 

[kdx7214]

Quick picture update on the two new corals. They seem to have recovered from shipping. Polyps are open and looking healthy!

 

[kdx7214]

Today reef-pi saved my tank! I had a heater go out (one of two). It caught the temp dropping below 77F and notified me by text. Fortunately I had a spare heater and could replace it. Loving this thing

 

[kdx7214]

Just received my first Hanna checkers today, one for alkalinity and one for calcium levels. Did my first test and alk came out to 13.7 dKH and calcium at 443ppm. Alkalinity seems a bit high for a standard salt mix (Reef Crystals). Going to do a water change and will test again in a day or two.

 

[kdx7214]

So I bought a 20 gallon tank used (drilled in the bottom), got the bulkhead and set it up. I've spent a couple of weeks now trying every bit of plumbing advice I can get and have concluded that it's not possible to overflow water from one tank to another without a massive amount of bubbles. Since this 20g is for culturing phytoplankton that would overflow into the sump, a filter sock won't cut it. Not quite sure what I'm going to do with it now. I've spent enough on it that I hate to just get rid of it. Maybe I can make a terrarium or something out of it.

 

[Projects with Sam]

I'm not quite sure I understand why your using a tank for phyto. and what's wrong with bubbles?

 

[kdx7214]

I'm not quite sure I understand why your using a tank for phyto. and what's wrong with bubbles?

I built my own sump. Poorly it turns out. All the references I used online were apparently the wrong ones or something. Anyway, I want to do a continuous culture of phytoplankton to feed the DT. The 20g was just going to be a convenient place to do so. Right now I have four 2L bottles and a grow light keeping the cultures going (have to have two in case one crashes).

The problem with the bubbles is they get into the DT and look terrible, and they act as a skimmer and pull the phytoplankton right back out of the water.

I've tried every type of overflow, standpipe, and herbie that people have recommended, but all of them still leave an enormous cloud of micro bubbles in the water. Where the 20g dumps into the sump is the chamber before the return pump, so they head directly into the DT.

As much as I've spent on the dang thing I hate to just upend it and not use it, but I just can't find a way to not get a ton of micro bubbles.

 

[Projects with Sam]

can you move where it dumps into the sump?

 

[kdx7214]

can you move where it dumps into the sump?

Unfortunately not. The chamber that has the overflow from the DT is full (two 1.5" pvc pipes with filter socks and a heater). It's in the middle chamber right now, which normally wouldn't be a problem but one of the glass panes that was supposed to be a bubble trap broke when I started the pump (the other 5 didn't, just that one) so it's not very effective.

 

[kdx7214]

Had a couple of small things come up over the past week or so. First, the silver molly (named Argent) died. He was an older fish and they apparently don't live too long. The hermit crabs and nassarius snails made quick work of the body.

Had an issue where reef-pi got borked. I had to wipe and reinstall reef-pi to make it work again. A bit of a pain, but not really a big deal.

Managed to catch that danged mantis shrimp I've been trying to get rid of. It wasn't a peacock mantis or I'd have turned the 20g into a species tank (they're gorgeous). Alas it was just a plain one, so it was removed. The hermits loved the cut up pieces though.

 

[kdx7214]

Time for a photo dump. I'm rather happy with how things are going so far.

There are two Stylocoeniella in the pics. The green one isn't really growing. It's not losing ground or anything, but growth hasn't started yet (the dead skeleton piece was there when I got it). The orange/brown one is already encrusting onto it's rock.

Some of the pics show an encrusting bright orange sponge and a fluorescent yellow sponge. I seriously want to keep them alive, but not quite sure how to go about it. I do feed phyto daily (both nano and tetra) and my current culture station is the last pic. Going to move the culture into the 20g side tank for continuous culture at some point. I have to get that moving as the light shown is my hydroponic light I use to grow hot peppers over the winter and my seedlings are already sprouting lol

Sorry for the blurry pics, all I have is a phone camera and am terrible at photography

 

[kdx7214]

Just a quick update. Due to an unexpected change in my wife's chemo schedule, we found ourselves in St. Louis yesterday and with actual time to make it to a LFS before it closed! Normally she has chemo in the afternoon and by the time she's recovered enough to make the 2 hour trip home, everything is closed.

So at her insistence we hit a LFS. At someone's recommendation we went to Gateway Aquactics and I couldn't be happier. Beautiful shop, lots of great frags and fish in all price ranges. They had a buy 3 get one free sale on frags, so I brought home four frags and a firefish goby Managed to get a fluorescent orange mushroom, some GSP, an encrusting monti (although they all plate out when left with nowhere else to grow it seems), and another encrusting sps I've forgotten the name of. The GSP and mystery sps are on the back glass of the tank. The monti is front and center on the rock work. The mushroom is weird. Gateway said they'd had the best luck with this particular one at high light levels. They had a lot of them, so I guess they know what they're talking about.

I did some general maintenance while waiting for the critters to acclimate and if the water has cleared enough will post some pics tomorrow.

There are a couple of strange things though. The store gets wild caught fish, which I'm not a big fan of. In order to control pests they keep the fish at 1.021 sg with copper in the tanks. That meant after acclimation I had to move the fish to another container of fresh saltwater. I did another drip acclimation (mostly for temperature stabilization), swapped it one more time, and then in the tank. It ate like a pig so I'm assuming it's okay.

The other strange thing is the tanks pH. Over the summer with the air conditioning running, the tank averaged a pH of 7.81 during the day and around 7.63 at night. Now that we've had to switch over to heating, the pH is hitting 8.1 during the day and around 7.9 something at night. Didn't expect that to happen.

The Halimeda in the tank was beginning to take over so I pruned it back a lot.

 

[kdx7214]

Well, there was an accident today that might wipe out the entire tank. One of my SPS has been dying, and upon testing, found that the alkalinity was only 6dKh and calcium was down to 300ppm. I started a very slow drip of an alk solution into the sump and somehow the thing went nuts and dumped half a quart in. pH jumped from 8.02 to 8.44 in a matter of minutes. I caught it within a minute or so and turned off the pumps to hopefully save the tank. I did a 5g water change of the sump and used some vinegar and now the pH is down to 8.2. We'll see if anything survives.

 

[Projects with Sam]

nice recovery! I hope its enough. wow; super low dkh

 

[kdx7214]

nice recovery! I hope its enough. wow; super low dkh

Definitely. One of my Stylos is having issues and apparently it's just super sensitive to low alk/calcium. At least I hope that's what it is. Tank is sitting at pH of 8.1 right now (with the lights off). Might continue to bring it down to around 7.9 or 8.0 slowly. No more drips for me.

 

[kdx7214]

Long time without an update. All the SPS died. Not sure why, but suspect alkalinity swings. Will work on that as I get time/money. Had a DS18B20 die on me, but fortunately had two others in the tank, so no problem. I replaced the two main DS18B20s in the DT today and all is back to normal.

Probably going to pick up a tuxedo urchin at some point. The green hair algae is getting out of control. I've also got a valonia problem, and the two emerald crabs, if alive, aren't touching the stuff.

I've got two Kamoer peristaltic pumps sitting here that I got since they are cheap. I already had one running as an ATO and it works perfectly. I'm going to try to set one of them up as a doser. I'll have to calibrate it and all that, but if it works I'm going to get the alk solution I'm using auto dosing. I'll probably go for 1ml per day to start and then up as needed.

 

[Projects with Sam]

Long time without an update. All the SPS died. Not sure why, but suspect alkalinity swings. Will work on that as I get time/money. Had a DS18B20 die on me, but fortunately had two others in the tank, so no problem. I replaced the two main DS18B20s in the DT today and all is back to normal.

Probably going to pick up a tuxedo urchin at some point. The green hair algae is getting out of control. I've also got a valonia problem, and the two emerald crabs, if alive, aren't touching the stuff.

I've got two Kamoer peristaltic pumps sitting here that I got since they are cheap. I already had one running as an ATO and it works perfectly. I'm going to try to set one of them up as a doser. I'll have to calibrate it and all that, but if it works I'm going to get the alk solution I'm using auto dosing. I'll probably go for 1ml per day to start and then up as needed.

sorry to hear about your sps. I lost a bunch to alk swings too. auto dosing is key.

 

[kdx7214]

sorry to hear about your sps. I lost a bunch to alk swings too. auto dosing is key.

That's what I hear. I don't know for certain that's alk swings, but that's my best guess right now.