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Decadence

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    Laurel, MD

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  1. Thanks. As of right now, this is basically just my own personal stuff and nothing will be for sale. The stuff on the left is the start of the life-support for the 300 and the stuff to the right is the quarantine system. Right now the quarantine system is holding all of my livestock which will eventually work its way into the 300.
  2. Thanks guys. Nikola had a lot of fun at his birthday party this weekend. I wound up having to pick up all of the corals from my 90 which meant that I had to set up my quarantine system at lighting speed.
  3. I got the property in September to start a custom limo/rv/mobile office shop spcializing in building Mercedes Sprinters. I got a space big enough to set up an aquarium shop in the front. I'm setting up my personal system first and will build out the shop for a spring or summer opening. I don't want to list a name or location or anything until I have vendor status on WAMAS.
  4. Got the refugium plumbed. Since these pictures, I have added more rock to the system. Tonight, I am moving my starting to move my whole home system to the shop. And of course, almost a year later, my little guy is growing up.
  5. My second update is very, very small because I'm not getting much time at all to work on this. I was able to get the table built for the refugium (just chaeto). It is probably hard to envision from the direction that I keep taking pictures. This is the view from inside of the room. There will be a will behind the refugium that extend all the way over to the 300dd display. It will be cut out behind the display so that I have access from the back but it will look like a solid wall from the front. Another view from inside of the fish room. And the view from the other side of the wall.. The tank has not been plumbed yet but it will share the feed from the DC12000 with the frag tank and a 2" overflow will run under the table to where a very large customer filter sock will be. The sock will be shared by the refugium and the display returns.
  6. Thanks Duffy. I'm happy that I'll finally be able to give back to the community when this is all done and I set up the shop.
  7. I am finally rolling on this system. My time has been very restricted with my other business, but this system is going to be the main display for my new aquarium retail store which will be open in 2015. The idea is to make everything easy to maintain and lay it out so that it is easy to clean equipment or add new things as necessary. There will be a wall behind the 300 which I will put up after I am done building. A temporary skimmer is being used right now to help cycle the rock. Most of it started as dry rock. The lower 40br tank and the 220g sump will both be filled with just live rock. A few times per year, I plan on removing and cleaning the rock, though there are filter socks in place to keep anything big from getting into it. The upper 40br tank is a frag grow-out tank. I only plan on keeping a handful of large SPS colonies in the display. By keeping this tank, I can buy more colonies and not put them in until they are larger and take off. I also can monitor them for pests in the same system that they will be in permanently. The lighting on this tank is a single 250w SE radium on an icecap ballast with a lumitek elite reflector. The display will have three of the same lights, with six additional AI sols and four 6ft actinic t5 tubes. I'll dive more into that as it is built out. Updates are going to be relatively slow.
  8. GFO, phosban or other phosphate binders are a sure way to kill off SPS if they aren't added very slowly.
  9. I'm glad that post stuck with you Duffy. We are working on a big system which will have redundancies galore! As was noted in the post which was quoted, I had a calcium dosing pump fail on me. The motor locked up while only a few months old and it was replaced under warranty. I only test calcium every month normally and alk every week. It had been a few weeks since testing calcium when I discovered it low. I tested it because my alkalinity got high, presumably because the corals stopped growing. I would guess the Alk rise to be why I lost some corals even though it was brought on by the calcium drop. I would honestly say that my dosing pumps were the biggest pain of allof the methods that I used due to the high consumption. They're great for smaller tanks or for those with lower consumption because they don't have to work as hard. My calcium reactor has been the only piece of equipment which has not failed me to this day. I would definitely recommend that if you were to chose only one piece of equipment.
  10. The only thing that they did was put me on oxygen which bumped me to the mid 80s. They had absolutely no idea what to do and I believe that the first round of doctors was trying to limit their exposure to me until my ebola test came back… not even joking. I actually forgot to add one symptom which I was the only one to experience.. My scalp got incredibly itchy, like to the point where I could not stop scratching. That came in waves and was enough to drive me insane.
  11. To add to that post, the floor between the showroom and the nursery where we sometimes sleep is built from a single steel I-beam with braced steel cross beams. On top of the I-beams is a solid sheeting of metal spanning the entire distance, all the way up to the concrete walls. The metal is sealed to the walls. Basically, that means that the palytoxin-filled air traveled up the staircase 30ft away, through a hallway and in to the room where we were sleeping. I almost feel asleep downstairs on the couch but decided to go up because my dog was there. The concentration would have killed me. Chelsea has half of my body weight. The amount of palytoxin that I took in being downstairs as long as I was would have probably killed her. We are very lucky.
  12. Thanks guys for the well-wishes and to the people who actually defended the conclusion. Palytoxin isn't a rarity, we just found a new way to be exposed to it other than boiling the rocks. If I had not been familiar with Steveoutlaw's case, I wouldn't have known what was going on. I actually was greeted originally with the same skepticism by the doctors at the hospital. Just to clear things up, this is in my commercial building, not my house. There is absolutely no humidity in the building as it is all above ground and has excellent drainage. It hadn't rained recently to my knowledge. I never thought that mold was an issue originally, I though that we had a freon leak as I have had similar symptoms from freon inhalation as I did originally at the shop before they got bad, this is why I turned off the A/C unit and went back to bed. We were sleeping above my showroom where the tanks are. I was downstairs in the room with the tank for two hours before going upstairs and going to bed. The skimmer pump that was running was a mesh modded OR3700 and is an absolute beast of a pump. Palytoxin is noted to be very hydrophilic, meaning it readily bonds to the bubbles created by the skimmer pump and raises to the top to become airborne as the bubbles pop. Mind you, this skimmer pump filled the entire 75g tank with milky white bubbled which you could not see through and there was a thick foam head on the top in places. My air heater is gas powered. The air heater has not been turned on yet for the year and the gas line is off. The hot water heater is electric. After spending three days in the hospital recovering, we went back to the shop as we were very confident in the diagnosis. I had turned off the pump, opened a few windows and turned on my commercial ventilation system before we left the shop. No new symptoms came about after being in the shop 80% of all time since the incident. My symptoms were: Extreme shortness of breath Constant coughing Near complete muscle paralysis Uncontrollable shaking Inability to get "warm" An extreme fever (103.5 hours later when my symptoms were coming down) Extreme nausea Coughing up blood Bloody brown mucus coming from the nose Extreme weakness after paralysis wore off Dizziness, almost feeling drunk Extremely high blood pressure at first, followed by extremely low blood pressure Extremely high white blood cell count 140+ BPM resting heart rate Resting oxygen saturation below 75% Craving Papa John's pizza (possibly unrelated) Appearance of a chest infection in X-rays Doctors kept telling me that I had a very bad flu. The only way that I was able to get them to dismiss that theory is when I told them that my dog was affected in addition to the rest of us at the same time. They treated my symptoms, hydrated be and ran some powerful antibiotics through my system. After I get all of my medical records, I will make a more detailed post about palytoxin and add it to the wikipedia page to help doctors in the future.
  13. I'm running my light 24/7 and have found that it is impossible for moisture to build up in it because of the heat. I get salt at the very bottom of the reflector and on the tip of the bulb and clean it weekly but haven't noticed anything which could cause any damage.
  14. Awesome Alan. That's pretty consistent with what I saw in the first few days as well.
  15. I run mine 24 hours. The Lowes bucket leaves very little light-bleed. Looks great! After my chaeto ball got huge, I wound up sticking a powerhead in there with a screen on it to prevent it from clogging with chaeto. Now that the bucket is completely filled, I think I need an even bigger powerhead.
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