AlanM

By the way, when he feeds it clams he freezes the clams and then shaves off slices from the frozen one so the whole thing doesn't go in at once.

And possibly the tallest?

His CBB eats from the same funnel/electrical tape holder/fishnet brine shrimp nauplii feeder that he uses to keep the mandarins happy. http://reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=2166449

My 4 year old son is kind of death obsessed, and not troubled by it at all, seemingly, although he hasn't experienced it personally. It started with Sunday School classes, the Old Testament is kind of grim. Then it continued with kids books about animals introducing the subject, and he made the connection while watching Dinosaur Train that "carnibores" who eat meat necessarily have to eat something that until recently was alive. I'll be interested to see how he reacts when we lose saltwater fish in the big tank. The planted tank never troubled him very much, but those fish are more part of a crowd of danios than individuals with personality like the reef tank will be. Anyway, hope your little guy gets over it soon.

I have my moments of regret for not buying one 160W (or two 120W). The folks who have gotten them on nano-reef.com really like them. My DIY LED is controllable from the Apex, but the controls are kind of kludgy, and I probably won't use them except to play.

This DIY breakout box looks really great. Audio jacks on sensors are so much nicer than bare wire. http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1847474 I was going to come here and say that the sensor on the skimmatte locker doesnt work because mine didnt shut off the skimmer when it overflowed, but it turns out that it works fine if you put the outlet into Auto mode instead of On. Doh.

Rob, I'm basically trying to go fallow for 3 months. But add nothing else? No dead shrimp or pee? Lights on regular cycle? Do you think it will hurt anything to leave the skimmer going to break it in and let it empty into the sump? It was really a small quantity of live stuff I put in from Congressional without too much on it. I'm game to go low maintenance for a couple of months and spend the time working on other stuff, though, like testing operation in power outages and getting the drains more reliable. Guess I should have put that rock and sand in a trashcan for the last few months with a powerhead.

Now nothing to tinker with at the moment. Hmm... The water is crazy cloudy. I can't see the back wall at all from the front. Does anyone doing a cycle of a new tank with dry totally dead rock and dry bagged sand try to get the water less cloudy with carbon or something else? I currently plan to just kind of let it run for a few weeks and get funky unless it starts smelling bad enough that the wife complains. But if I'm going to have to fight later to get extra organic junk out, I might as well start that now. I'm running the skimmer to break it in, but letting the cup empty back into the sump because it keeps pushing out piles of very wet white foam and filling up the Davy Jones in minutes. I'm not running any reactors or anything else. I'm dumping in 3 capfuls of MB7 and a pinch of dry fish food each morning. I got 3 pounds of cycled live rock from Congressional yesterday and put it in there. I might play with the test kits, but don't really plan to start testing to see how the cycle is going for a few weeks. According to the probe, which I calibrated last night, pH is 7.9, which sounds kind of low, but probably doesn't matter at this point.

Mike said he dips zoas and everything. He didn't mention anemones, that I recall. I read the RC thread a few months ago and didn't see that mentioned either. Are there really pests that live on nems?

Blissful silence! I asked Mike to come over to give suggestions for how to get the drains working quietly, and the darn things were totlly silent the entire time he was here. Thanks for coming, Mike! I will call you if they get loud again and maybe you driving over will fix them again.

He mentioned that shrimp eating the mucous that comes off after a dip croaked. It looked like he not only rinsed them, but also put them in a holding tank until they stopped being so pissed off.

I am too. I really thought the two upper returns would break the siphon, but it just keeps gurgling and draining.

Woot! I dont know what happened, but I basically just barely cracked open my full siphon gate valve, let it run as a noisy durso for an hour and eventually it got the air out of the siphon and is dead silent now. I ended up needing to increase the flow just a bit to get it to stabilize and be silent. I opened up those drains under the box, which will drain half the tank if the power goes out. Guess I do have to figure out a siphon break for them.

OK. They're 3/4 now. Good thing I put flexpvc up at the transition from horizontal to vertical so I could just bend them out of the sump to cut them. Still no joy, but maybe it's quieter a bit? Basically doing a durso with a little flow from the full siphon. I know you did 1" instead of 1.5" and you even told me I should do 1", but I didn't listen. I may switch to 1". One question for the crowd. Run skimmer during the initial cycle of the tank with dry rock and basically nothing else? I got a couple of small and nice looking pieces from Congressional today. Aquarium One was bizarrely out of rock. They should help with initially seeding bacteria and I'm dumping in 4 capfuls of MicroBacter 7 each morning which is what the directions say to do. I'll put a pinch of fish food in each day.

Correction, they are 1.25 inches under the surface. I just measured. Think that is close enough?

Yep. Itis about 3/4 inch below the water level. Gate valve is about 5 inches above the pipe exit. I will give it a try like you said. I wish the gate valve or pipe ends were clear so I could see what was coming out of what.

Bridgelux lights work fine. Not as many lumens per watt as a Cree or Luxeon, so you're getting cheaper lights but paying more over time for the electricity to run them. That said, it sounds like with the few lights you're looking at and the tank you're doing you will definitely not have a problem with too little light. You might have the opposite problem, like Coral Hind says. If you can't dim them you might have to raise them up or put some kind of a neutral density filter or something on them.

I was going to suggest that a fully automated tank that you don't have to spend money on is "someone else's tank." Get a friend with a nice tank and a beer fridge and spend time over there. Leave when he starts scraping algae or doing water changes. 8)

My wife can testify that I spend the majority of the time on a project looking for that thing I was just holding a second ago. You do much cleaner caulk lines than I'm capable of. A true caulksman.

Yes. I did finish it. I was playing with the light colors last night. I'm getting a weird effect that when I turn the fans on the red channel flickers just a bit even when the VarSpd port is set to off. The folks at RC suggest inductive kickback from the fans, so I'm trying to trace it down and put in a snubber or something to get rid of it. It doesn't happen when the fans are spinning fast, just when they're going slow.

Hah, thanks, but it's not totally working yet. I still have powerhead programming to play with, but I suspect as I get stuff in there that I'll want to move them around and tweak settings for a while. If I ever get to your place to pick up frags I can help you get the external networking working so that you get emails out and can access it from your phone when away from home and stuff. It ended up not being too big of a deal to get working.

Also, my Tunze 6095's are about 8 inches below the water line and at 100% they keep pulling a vortex down. They're beasts. I'm playing with apex profiles to try to get a resonant wave going.

But now I have to start worrying about parameters and learning how to use the test kits. I think I'm getting good at the refractometer. This is what I started it up with: http://www.theaquariumsolution.com/h2ocean-natural-reef-salt I won't be buying more of it, so I decided to use the bucket I got from a guy many months ago as my water for the cycle since it will involve many changes, probably. For those that run it, it's kind of expensive salt to cycle with, but oh well.

Full of salty water! I'm really liking the lights, which is a good thing considering the trouble I went through to build them. The 420nm and 405nm violets make things fluoresce like crazy. Now I just have to tune the BeanAnimal drains which were not built to his specs since they include an 8 foot nearly horizontal section. It's doing the flush and fill thing at the moment, heh. Super duper loud. It almost woke the baby.

I discovered that my genius idea of putting returns under the box is not a good one. I didn't put in a siphon break because it's tied in to the upper two drains and I figured they would suck in enough air to break the siphon. On the back it's kind of a crucifix shape, if you know what I mean, with a 4-way angled Tee on the back. Return coming up in 1.5 inch PVC, then split three ways with the outer two going to the upper returns and the middle going to the ones under the box. Turns out it will siphon all the way down to there if I open those. Hmm. I have a valve on it, so I can always just leave them closed so a power outage doesn't drain half the water out of my tank. Or I could drill a little hole or something. Any suggestions?