AlanM

careful with drilling. Take your time and go slow.

I had a weir in my tank with three bulkheads, three elbows inside, and no external box. It was basically the same as what WheresTheReef posted above and worked well. The pipes went straight down to the basement. It's the classic BeanAnimal design. He didn't have an external box either, but I think most people put the valves close to the sump these days instead of how he shows as up by the tank. Most people also use a single gate valve instead of three ball valves. https://beananimal.com/projects/silent-and-fail-safe-aquarium-overflow-system/ Anyway, you want a very slim internal overflow box avoiding elbows inside the weir but you don't want an external box, so you'd have to get the heights right when drilling. Sorry, this might get long cause I have thought about plumbing a lot. Using the BeanAnimal terms for the different drain functions, normally you want a single "Full Siphon" drain that carries the water full time from your pump. This would be your lowest hole and should be as low as you can make it in that slim overflow box. You never want it to see air or else it will get noisy and may convert out of being a full siphon. Next you want an "Open Channel" which just gets a bare trickle of water in it or is basically right on the edge of getting a trickle of water. This one will handle any obstruction in your full siphon once you get it tuned. You want it to have a tiny trickle at steady state because as it picks up more water from anything obstructing your full siphon that's your adjustability built in. It lets you have a range of operation for the valve on the full siphon pipe without having to hit the exact spot that the siphon starts and no-more/no-less. Basically, you start closing the siphon valve until you hear it flush and push the air out, then turn it a tiny little bit more to keep it there which should cause a tiny amount of water to start coming down that open channel. Lastly would be the "Dry Emergency" which is dry all the time and should be completely out of the water, but below your tank rim. The problem with what you want to do is that the water height in the overflow box will need to run at a level where there's just a trickle of water down the open channel hole. That means your open channel hole would need to be drilled so that the bottom of the hole is close to the "weir" which is the edge of your overflow box (to avoid waterfall noise in the overflow box). You could drill it lower, but then you're talking about water falling pretty far into the overflow which will not be quiet. You'll probably see the bulkhead on it coming up above the weir. That's fine if you're ok with that. You'll need to drill the emergency one even higher so that the bottom of it is above the water level in the overflow box at all times. As you can see, it's easier to make the overflow box deep enough to hold some elbows which lets you drill all three holes at the same height and adjust where the opening sees water by rotating the elbow down/up like WheresTheReef posted. I made a box like he posted and used 1.5" street elbows like he posted where one side of the elbow goes directly into the bulkhead and ended up being able to make the box just 2" deep which I felt was pretty slim at the time. An external overflow box, like YHSublime suggests, is a good way to hide those plumbing considerations in the outside box and keep the internal box small. I think it's also cleaner than the photos you posted. You're bringing all those height considerations from the inside to the outside and handling them by making the pipes different heights in the box. One caution with the external box is that the bulkheads that move water from the internal to the external box should be entirely submerged to keep it silent. Otherwise you're going to hear water running around those bulkheads. I think most manufacturers don't put those bulkheads connecting internal to external low enough in comparison to the internal weir and external box height. It looks like YHSublime handles that by keeping the height in his external box pretty high. It's fine to do that because of the redundancy in drain pipes.

OK. I left the lid off over the weekend. This morning I added around 150ml of DI to top off back to the line. It was exactly 1.025 SG before topoff and 1.024 after. So a visible swing, but not a huge one.

Ah, I'm so out of it. I didn't realize it measured all three of them. I thought it just did alkalinity. When I get a reef bigger than 3g I'm putting one of them on it.

Yes, you are adding carbonate ions when the Trident doses alkalinity, so you'd also want to add calcium ions to match with the carbonate since the corals growing are making calcium carbonate. But it's a bit complicated because bacteria and algae also use carbonate. I was wondering if the Trident measurements and calculated dosing drives dosing of the Ca and Mg as well or if you're setting the dose of Ca and Mg the "normal" way where you measure a few times over a few days and tweak the ml/hr to match consumption to keep a desired ppm number.

Does the trident cause the Apex system to also add Ca and Mg in balanced amounts with the Alkalinity? I haven't read up on it, but that's what it looks like it's doing from those screenshots.

Ah, makes more sense. If I leave the glass lid off I evaporate about 200ml per day. If I leave the lid on I only evaporate 50ml per day. It makes a huge difference. Right now I'm doing top-off by bringing a jelly jar downstairs to my bucket of DI water and filling it up once a week. Each morning I look at the marker line I drew in the return section of the rear filtration area and pour in a little bit of DI to bring it up to the line. If I put the lid on I can leave for a week and not lose very much.

I'm sorry, I don't know what that means.

Starting with zoas and ricordia, so I'm just about to the point where I want to look for some of those. I'd like some movement in there, but am concerned that anything I put in there that would sway would quickly take over the tank. I like xenia and GSP, though, so I may eventually put that in there. I started running the light on a controller and will do that for a couple of weeks to see how much algae and cyano grows. I'm feeding a bit now that I know I have many bristleworms in there to eat it, heh. I'll visit a local store or two to pick up some hermits as well and maybe some small ceriths since I'm getting some growth on the glass.

No guaranteed pest free way, I'd say, but you might check out the build thread that @tpallas has going on to see how he got a bunch of live sand and rock scooped up from florida waters. Lots of life in there for ya. Probably more pest free than trying to get it from a store or another reefer.

They definitely look like dinos to me. I'm trying to remember what I did when I had them, but I think I made the tank dirty. Grew some algae. Ran my UV. Ran my skimmer. I think I also used some Dino-X by Fauna Marin. Not sure if it helped, but I eventually did stop having dinos and then the algae eventually went away. I had the same symptoms as you with corals and inverts dying.

Wasn't Justin Casp one of the founders of Reef Central from way back?

I was on nanoreef.com for a while and would look up the owner at MACNA who is really nice. I mostly hung out on their lighting forums because they were early LED DIY enthusiasts. When I started I was on RC and actually ended up on WAMAS because of Robert Chu (chucelli) who was a WAMAS member of years posting there about his early LED build (done with Zygote2k) and his 75 gallon tank in which he hadn't added any livestock for around 7 years. I got a lot of my early coral from him because his tank was immaculate from a pest point of view.

Only a bit. I'm running the lights each day seeing if I grow some algae. Not much so far, but I'm getting brown on the glass which is good, I think. I picked up some rubble from Isaac and am letting it go in the tank for a bit. Various amphipods, bristleworms, and a few asterina stars came out of it, which is just what I wanted. I think one of the rocks he gave me will fit absolutely perfectly under my little purple rock sculpture, so I'm going to pull out my purple rock, push the sand to the edges, lay his rock down on the bottom and then put mine back and see if I hate it. I'm soon ready for some coral since I have done a few successful water changes. I've just been ghost feeding so far, no ammonia drops or anything. No testing either. I'm hoping such a small water volume can be handled by water changes.

That cabinet is looking great. I always sandwiched rox carbon in between two layers of floss in the reactor. Bottom floss kept detritus off the carbon and carbon didn't tumble or escape because it was held in by the top floss.

Nice to see crud in the bottom of that sump. It’s a real system now.

I hadn't heard of Fiji aquariums before. It looks really nice. Did they include all of that schedule 80 plumbing or are those pieces you bought?

Neat. Between that and the sand that should be a good foundation to start the tank. It's a good idea to put it all in a fuge.

Yeah, I’d worry about humidity and salt spray. A skimmer can really put it into the air in an enclosed stand, as can a durso carrying down bubbles and popping in the sump.

I have the tiny orange Flipper magnet cleaner that I think can get the round corners, but I guess we will see.

Did some modifications this weekend to promote surface skimming. I modified the overflows with a piece of thin packaging plastic so now I get surface skimming. The water height difference between the back and front is about 3/4" now. You can see the height of the water behind the slots in this photo. I also plugged the slot down at the bottom that was put there to keep the water levels in front and back the same with some super glue gel. Looks terrible now, but it will age in.

This seems unlikely, given your profession, but is there a chance that your alk test is off? Do the corals look like they're doing ok or is there a reason you started wanting to raise your alk?

does the media in the CaRx seem to get used up?

I really do think he did a really nice job, just not one that I would have chosen, heh. For user interface I meant something with buttons you might expect to push or need to look at to see a display. On his panel I'd keep his toggle switches (which are just inputs to the Apex breakout box, I think), the battery voltage display, and the iPad accessible and put everything else inside a box, including the EB832 all modules and the Vortech controllers. He has a way to access the box anyway with those flip hinges if he ever wanted to unplug or replace something. He doesn't need to look at his fancy Neptune-stickered extension cords each day, lol. He's controlling the vortechs with the Apex, and if that fails he will have bigger problems than needing to get immediate access to change his vortech modes. I suppose seeing the vortech lets you see the color and therefore what mode it's in as verification, though. Maybe that could be accomplished with a light pipe. Also, I guess I'd have the tablet on the outside of the door rather than on the inside, or maybe have it in a slot that charges it and lets you pick it up and remove it to see the status if I wasn't keeping it permanently on and facing out showing the status at a glance. Actually, on the side of the hood would be better. Is he planning to sit criss-cross on the floor to use that iPad?

It's cool, but I believe it's really unnecessary to have anything that doesn't have a user interface exposed out the door. Do you really need to make custom holes for all of the modules, the battery backup, and the EB8, for instance? How much controller porn do you really need on a daily basis? I feel he would be better served by putting all of that stuff in a watertight box with watertight grommets going into it for the cords and holes in the front of it for the things with buttons or displays.