AlanM

Hmm. Wonder if some stainless mesh would work just as well as wires and wouldn't corrode. We have that around here, or I could sacrifice one of my wife's strainers.

Hey, good idea. You're right, just some bare wire would work fine. But the drop would have to connect the two. Wonder if some kind of fabric would wick up the water and complete the circuit with a smaller amount of water. I'm thinking of two long pieces of bare wire with duct tape on top of them and a strip of old t-shirt stuck to the bottom of the tape with the wires sandwiched between. Then when the shirt got wet it would complete the circuit and would sense over a large area.

Think these would work on the floor as leak sensors connected to an Apex breakout box? Seems like they'd work and would be pretty cheap at less than $3 per sensor. http://www.seeedstudio.com/depot/grove-water-sensor-p-748.html

Sounded like they were narrowly averting a big blowout. Also sounds like they have to actually build roads to get back to the break location.

I am using a free account at gmx.com for outgoing non-SSL email, and it seems to work all right. I never log in to it manually with the web since setting it up.

Yep. 29 of them in each group and 3 groups, so 87 of them. I know it's a lot of light, but every color is on a dimmer, and only the neutral white and royal blue will go up to 1000mA. The rest peak at 750mA even at full power. I don't want someone coming to me at some point to say "I don't think you can grow X because you need more light."

RTV103 is the black stuff. Here are a couple of pictures. I ended up putting under/over baffles really close to the end where the drains are with the heaters in that chamber. They're 4 inches off the end of the 40B sump. They will set the water level for the drains and heaters at 12 inches, and there is 1.5 inches between the baffles so that I hope the water doesn't fly through too fast and carry bubbles with it. In the foreground you can see the drain I drilled in the bottom. Here is the overflow box. 4.5 inches tall, 2.5 inches front to back, 36 inches wide, with a lid and 0.75 inch gap between the overflow and the lid. Not quite coast to coast. Almost. I am bringing the returns over the top of the tank and used some black acrylic to hide the plumbing and to attach the locline for the returns. It's all removable with unions in the back. You can also see some locline flare nozzles that I have coming out under the overflow box. They run on a ball valve behind the tank so that I can blow stuff from behind the rocks out towards the sides to get picked up by the powerheads and put through the tank. The lights I'm working on are in the picture too. I've been hot-gluing on 60 degree lenses for the past few days here and there. I'm planning to mount it 18 inches over the water. So glad I decided to do hot glue rather than silicone or something else. The hot glue pops right off if you make a mistake, and I never do anything right the first time (or second or third usually).

Momentive rtv-108, I think if that's the black stuff. I liked the sound of dow745 that you used, but this stuff was super sticky and easy to work with so far. I can take some pictures, but with black acrylic, black background, and black silicone it is hard to see details.

I siliconed on the overflow box and sump baffles and mounted my tunzes. Waiting for the cure on the silicone is killing me. I wanna tryout the return pump and these drains, but I also want to wait long enough for my splooged on caulk to dry in the sump because it would be a mess if it fell. Overflow box caulk feels nice and hard, though.

Coralux storm controller looks really nice. Amazing what is possible now with arduino and some inexpensive board fabs. I feel like huge progress has been made just in the last 6 months.

I'm considering keeping a few of these in my tank, but they apparently use Vanadium in their blood or something. Can someone help setting up a vanadium dosing pump? 8) http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/running-ponies/2012/06/21/pyura-chilensis-the-closest-thing-to-getting-blood-from-a-stone/ Pretty amazing little guys, but not very pretty unless you cut them open. The ocean is full of amazing and weird stuff. (I'm not really going to keep them in my tank, was just a joke)

Can you go to reeftronics.net and follow the instructions for requesting an account there and for opening up the read only part of your apex to the internet? It might be more complicated than that because you have to get a static IP and all that stuff, I guess, but it does really help debug the code. I assume the code with Switch1 in it is the code for an virtual outlet called "Skimmer_Full"? Is it possible that the name is slightly wrong? Also, it seems like in the code for the skimmer outlet you'd need another statement to say something like If Outlet Skimmer_Full = OFF then ON in order to get it to come back on? I don't know for sure. I'm kind of an Apex novice too, but it seems like you should have a statement in there that turns the outlet on again.

Thanks for the advice guys. I did look at Melev's site. He has good info there. I know the theory of how the sump works, I guess, but the devil seems to be in the details.

You're right. I forgot about putting it in a stand. That should work for the skimmer. I guess what I'm looking for is advice from people who have run them for a while for sump mistakes. There are a few things I've thought about already. I'm wondering if I'm going to run into trouble with things like, for instance, an ATO sensing in such a large body of water, meaning the entire rest of the 40g breeder with an 18x26 inch footprint. I tested out the Avast Deluxe ATO, and it doesn't seem to kick on unless I move it up by around an inch. That's 2 gallons of evaporation over an 18x26 footprint before it kicks on. Maybe there are problems with the ATO, or maybe there's a time delay built in, but that seems like a lot of evap before replacement with a 100g total system. Or maybe I need another baffle near my drain from the sump that would let the ATO sensor be on a much smaller compartment of water. But then what if that volume is too small so that it makes startup impossible because the volume of my return line and drain lines will be larger than that small compartment of water volume so the water won't start flowing through the sump before that compartment is empty. Or if I've made a mistake setting the water level so high with 12 inches at the first baffle because it will end up being a tremendous amount of pressure trying to push the baffles out of the way if I want to set the second baffle at 6 or 8 inches in order to keep the sump volume down to account for backflow in power outages. So it's things like that which maybe people who have owned lots of sumps before would know that I don't.

I was posting on someone else's thread about glass baffles and ended up wanting to ask a bit of advice about my own sump, so a new thread seems appropriate. I have a 40 breeder that I drilled in the bottom in the corner and put a 1.5" bulkhead in. I have the three drain pipes from a BeanAnimal config going in at the opposite short end and ending 11" from the tank bottom. BeanAnimal says that they should always be below the water line, but only by 0.75" to 1". So that means 12" baffle around those drain lines at least or else extending them with a coupler. I cut them that high when i had some baffles held in with weatherstripping, but they let go. My original plan was to put a bubble trap under/over pair of baffles about 10 inches from the drain end and put my cs1 in there. That would be a 12 inch water height for cs1, but it can supposedly handle that. Then i would just leave the rest open with a bucket in it for a fuge or maybe put another pair of baffles near the drain for a big fuge section. My questions are, does the cs1 work ok in 12 inches of water in folks experience? Would I be better off just setting the level that high around the drains using an L shaped baffle and put the cs1 and any other reactors just in the restof the sump? I guess I'm wondering if the easy way I was thinking about doing it is wrong for reasons that will only beome apparent to me with time.

Huh. I know their website has caveats. I did the update on mine, purchased in February from QR, following the webpage instructions when I unpacked it and it just worked, but I have seen people who had issues on Reef Central.

Ah, then you probably need to go download and apply the firmware update from neptunesystems depending on how oldyour apex is.

Scroll down? Yours doesn't look like this?

Great. Wil do that then.

Do you put the silicone on the edges and also on the glass with some tape to confine it? Or just blob it between two straps of tape and smoosh the baffles into it?

Right. Supposedly the acrylic eventually swells. That might have eventually made it hold, but it failed too soon, heh. Maybe if I had measured 1/8 instead of 1/4 smaller to do the cut... So now i have these acrylic sheets with 1/8 on the sides. I will try to use rtv100 to hold them in. Think that will grab em and hold?

So the epdm foam thing doesnt work. It holds for a while, but starts slipping and then it seems to be game over. I had 12 inches on one side and 11 inches on the other. You wouldnt think an inch would push that hard but it slipped and just failed totally. Also, the adhesive is extremely difficult to get off the acrylic edge. Maybe it would have held if i had mde the bffles larger so they would be tighter, but i just followed the instructions...

I think very few people should take Paul's implied advice about not testing and not worrying about water quality, etc. The fact is that Paul is very experienced with a very established tank and a lot of inertia if things start to go wrong and he can get away with not testing every little thing. Me with my first saltwater tank, fresh sand, dead rock that I'm going to try to make alive, etc., I have no choice but to try to control my parameters and test and hope they're good for at least the first 5-10 years, and then I can start to coast. 8)

You can get meters at Lowes or HD or radio shack, but if you put it on the Apex without blowing into anything it should say "Switch 1: Closed" down at the bottom of the dashboard that comes up when you log in over the web. The rest should say Open. Seem like if you don't have a multimeter already, the Apex would function as a good one now that you know it's going to switch 1.

Nope. looks like a brown wire to me, doesn't it to you? The red one is the little stub that they cut out. I can see it in your picture. The labels on the diagram I posted above were for some other device. I posted that diagram to show you which pins the wires go to, not for the labels. Assuming the pressure switch works, and you should be able to hear it click when you blow lightly in the tube, you should be able to stick a meter between the two terminals that the brown (not red) and the black wire connect to and see that it is continuous when you're not blowing and opens up when you do.