bkl911

Don't even get me started about being jerked around from this place.

Ahhh...great point. When I setup my 333g + 100g sump in my spare bedroom in my basement, I felt like I was walking into a sauna everyday, so I went out and bought a dehumidifier. It is a 50 pint a day GE model, and I have been emptying the storage tank everyday. Once I get around to it, I will utilize the drain hook and never have to worry about emptying it.

I will have to agree with steveoutlaw....if you have the funds and am comfortable with it....go as large as you can. Initial setup costs are high, but once you have the equipment everything else does not seem to cost so much. Luckily, I have county water, so my water bill is cheap, but my BGE bill is steadily climbing to the mid to high $400's. Ughhh I started with a 125g tank, then added a 180g and now just setup my 333g tank. Now I cannot wait to move my 125g tank's contents downstairs into my 180g tank.

Well, I finally finished setting up my 333g tank with 100g sump and has had the ASM skimmer running for about a week now. For the past couple days there has been some light skim since there is no bioload yet, just fresh sand and salt water. This morning I woke up, and had an overflowing skimmer cup. What seems to have happened was that the overflow cup filled about 1/2 way up and the part of the lid that extends down was causing the water in the cup to basically "burp" air/water bubbles out. I was wondering if the lid is supposed to have air vent holes in the top lid like on the top of my Euroreef skimmer lid? It seems like their is a lot of air pressure in the skimmer body.

One other thing I did was the intake for the closed loop in the tank is 2 inch gray schedule 80 which tees off in four spots horizontally and there are four 2" strainers. In the one full tank pic, you can see the two up front and there are two more in the back. I figured that the four 2" strainers would prevent a fish from getting stuck from the intake flow.

Well, here is the manifold (from flexpvc.com) I used that is 2" and splits to six 3/4" tubes which are attached with some flex pvc. It is attached to the top of my Hammerhead pump with a 2" union and splits to ball valves and unions to all of the closed loops. There are four bulkheads with locline on the bottom and two on the top front corners. The tank is about 85% filled to keep the water under the overflows with freshwater right now to check for leaks and luckily only 1 leak from the top of the hammerhead, so I went to Home Depot and removed the teflon tape and bought some Hercules PTFE pipe dope. Now 16 hours with it constantly running there are no leaks. I bought PVC Gorilla glue from flexpvc.com and will say that it is easier to use then the Oatey stuff. There is no need for primer and you can get about a full 4-5 seconds of movement before it is fully attached where the other stuff usually bonds in a second. And here is a pic of my home made durso pipe. It is 1.5 pipe with a 1.5 inch to 3 inch reducer with 5 inches of 3 inch pipe for the outside sleeve which is height adjustable. I still need to drill the hole for the top, but may modify it so I can make it adjustable. Oh yea disregard the mess....

I completely agree about not using chemicals too, but I had got too frustrated back then about my cyano problem. I think something was leaching from my live rock that was causing the red slime to appear in spots, so I tried the red slime remover one time. The skimmer had to be dumped a few times and the skimmate was a pinkish color. It has been over a year and I had no problems since.

Just wondering since I already have 2 porky puffers in my tank, can I add a dogface puffer to the mix in a 333g tank?

I had some cyano a while back, and after numerous water changes, power head maxi-jet mods and new lightbulbs, I could not get rid of the cyano. So I tried the red slime remover one time and it did remove the cyano. It made my skimmer go absolutely nuts, and now a year later no cyano. Now I have a black hair algae problem I inherited from a live rock purchase.

I have read all of the mixed opinions on play sand, but tried the play sand in my 180g predator tank. It has been in there for almost a year and initially had a crazy diatom bloom, but after a while that subsided. I have no issues at all with it, but my only issue is that it does not look natural at all. The sand did have lots of "quartz" looking pieces.

Yep, just regular vinegar. I just cleaned my 333g acrylic tank because 80% of then entire tank was covered in coraline algae. I used 5 gallons of full strength vinegar and the algae just scraped right off. I let the vinegar soak on each side for about a day then used a plastic scraper.

Thanks, I saw that chart on flex pvc's site, but was not sure if they were showing gravity flow rates from a vertical pipe position. My pipes will be horizontal from one sump to another. So one tank will be about 55g and the other is 60g but they will be plumbed from one end horizontally to the other tank with 2 pipes, so the water will flow from left to right. Hope this is making sense.

Just curious what size PVC pipe I should use to flow water from my skimmer sump into another sump. Basically I am going to have a dedicated sump for my ASM G5 skimmer, then plumb that into my other sump with a refugium in it then will have a Hammerhead for a return pump out of sump #2. I want to know if 2X 1.5" pipes can potentially flow 3k-4k gph, or should I use 2X 2" pvc pipes?

I have one, he is about 6 inches long. Never gets aggressive towards anything until feeding time. But of course my predator tank gets pretty nuts when it is feeding time. I know they get up to about 9", so you will need a pretty big tank.

I would not think that salt would go bad, unless it absorbed humidity from a place like a garage where exhaust fumes would be present in the air. I had about the last 1/4 bucket of Oceanic salt go very lumpy on me because I didn't close the lid all the way. I threw into my mixing container, added a powerhead and heater and after about 24hrs it was perfect. Do you think maybe they tried to mix that clump and some other salt....then got the salinity perfect then added it and possibly after the clump dissolved, it raised the salinity too much. Of course that would have to be a pretty big clump.