Coral Hind January 5, 2012 January 5, 2012 Wow, that's a long time to wait. What type of resin you are using? Doing that much of an area in an enclosed room could have some high side effects.
dave w January 5, 2012 Author January 5, 2012 I'm using West marine 105 epoxy and a fast cure hardener. It has no smell in comparison to polyester resin, which smells terrible. But it caused my arms to break out with little red bumps so next time I will wear a respirator and long sleeves. If weather permits, we open the doors and windows for ventilation while working, then leave the room for a couple days. But there are no cannabis-like side effects, or maybe the expensive stuff would be more popular. At $100 a gallon they are probably similarly priced. I kid about being ready by 2112, but have finally learned to stop predicting when the tank will be ready for water. That took me a while.
dave w January 5, 2012 Author January 5, 2012 What type of resin you are using? Doing that much of an area in an enclosed room could have some high side effects. According to the label, if you light a match while working with this stuff they could probably see the fireball from New Jersey.
Coral Hind January 5, 2012 January 5, 2012 According to the label, if you light a match while working with this stuff they could probably see the fireball from New Jersey. That's always good when an LP heater is nearby.
dave w January 6, 2012 Author January 6, 2012 That's always good when an LP heater is nearby. With a combination of the resin and LP canister, something would be going into orbit that doesnt belong there.
dave w January 6, 2012 Author January 6, 2012 I just thought of another plankton generator (again??!!) combining the thoughts of Adey, Sprung and Delbeek. Adey wrote that 40% of primary food production around the reef comes from turf algae, 45% from eel and turtle grasses, 4% from zooanthellae, etc. Sprung and Delbeek wrote that blades of aquatic grasses are covered in organisms which generate plankton but the covering critters stick so well that only strong and changing tides can shed them from the grass - very hard to duplicate in the aquarium. Sprung and Delbeek also theorize that a windshield wiper on a piece of refugium glass could periodically scrape off bacterioplankton and algae to feed corals. So here's a crazy thought to combine both ideas. Make two circles of coiled plastic screen in the refugium, one inside the other. The inner coil is operated by a clockwise motor and is circular like a doughnut hole. The outer one is shaped like a doughnut around the inner one and is operated by a counter-clockwise motor. When enough growth has occurred on the screens (once or twice a day?) a timer simultaneously turns both motors as fast as your tank will allow (and still keep the water from splashing out). The counter turning screens cause violent water agitation, dislodging plankton to feed your corals. For optimal production this area should have lots of water flow and light. Also best if the refugium is at the same water level or higher than the display tank so live food doesn't go through a pump before feeding the corals. The two circles of screen are easy to build, timers for two motors is easy. I'm not mechanical enough to make one motor shaft turns inside another for counter rotation, but most people are smarter than me to figure that one out. Because the growth on the plastic screens absorb dissolved nutrients it would recycle waste N and P into live food and increase water quality. I think that the electric cost of operating two motors a few minutes a day would be pennies. Call me crazy but I think I'm going to build one. My refugium is under full sun, 36" wide by 16" deep, and if I turned over the tank just 5 times an hour that would be 360,000 gallons of water flow per day, so it will be a whopper. No mad scientist will have one over me. Any ways to improve?
LanglandJoshua January 7, 2012 January 7, 2012 (edited) If your using a mesh don't you want something to get in between the fibers? Why not use a broom head or something like a toothbrush. Less worry about wiper rubber dry rot. And more surface area. As well as extra agitation. As for a counter rotating dual shaft...check into clock designs. The second minute and hour hands are often set around each other. This could mean more screens in a smaller space. I will PM you a couple images tomorrow. I can see differing lengths/diameters of PVC pipe and some good belt drives doing all you need for that mechanism. Unless you want to pay out for aluminum pipes. Just my 2¢. I can't wait to see what you do with this algae idea. *EDIT* But how about a sane one? MUWAHAHA! Edited January 7, 2012 by LanglandJoshua
dave w January 7, 2012 Author January 7, 2012 I think the all the sane ideas have already been tried, so if you want sanity you're talking to the wrong guy. I didn't anticipate using wipers, just spinning coils of plastic mesh. It is a good idea to have contact to physically brush off growth but this could cause debris like you mention. Still that is a valid alternative and I could find that water pressure alone isn't dislodging growth. I also was given the idea to shoot powerheads into the spinning coil, but my first try would be a method that doesn't pass tank water through an impeller. Thanks for your continued ideas. They are very helpful.
davelin315 January 7, 2012 January 7, 2012 Dave, very neat to see so much progress. Like David, I'm worried that you'll end up blasting the roof off of your greenhouse and floating/rocketing away! In regards to your new plankton feeder, I'm thinking that you'll have the same effect every time you clean off the glass to look into your tank. You've got quite a bit of surface area there already and I think that creating another one would just duplicate what you've already got going on. Perhaps if you automate the cleaning of the glass with a wiper you'd have the same effect? I would think that housing it in a refugium wouldn't have a great impact overall as most of your fish will be picking over the mountains of rock and feeding off of suspended plankton in the water column rather than picking over the glass to get nutrition.
jason the filter freak January 7, 2012 January 7, 2012 Looking good, cant wait for this thing to be at its full glory
dave w January 7, 2012 Author January 7, 2012 Dave, very neat to see so much progress. Like David, I'm worried that you'll end up blasting the roof off of your greenhouse and floating/rocketing away! In regards to your new plankton feeder, I'm thinking that you'll have the same effect every time you clean off the glass to look into your tank. You've got quite a bit of surface area there already and I think that creating another one would just duplicate what you've already got going on. Perhaps if you automate the cleaning of the glass with a wiper you'd have the same effect? I would think that housing it in a refugium wouldn't have a great impact overall as most of your fish will be picking over the mountains of rock and feeding off of suspended plankton in the water column rather than picking over the glass to get nutrition. Great points Dave. Regarding the blast effect, at least we will have found another cure for smoking. About the plankton feeder, you may well be right the screens will produce excess plankton with little effect on the tank, and you are also right that a light green cloud will flow through the tank. I would do anything to program a controller and a brush on a stepper motor for automated glass cleaning but it just seems like too much trouble to design and build. The refugium is part of the circle that also contains the tank so the plankton would wash into the tank for coral feeding. And if I end up with too much food, that is justification for increasing the number of polyps, no?
dave w January 14, 2012 Author January 14, 2012 A small update. I got another 5 gallons of resin and a gallon of catalyst/hardener. You can see the color change when you pour the orange hardener into the clear resin and the mix becomes yellow. So we add a quart of hardener to 5 quarts of resin and get this funny look because there's no color change. Then we look at the can of hardener and it says "resin"! The boat company had sent us the wrong stuff. So we have a good laugh and stopped work. I've ordered another gallon of hardener so we can fiberglass the sides of the tank if we have a warm day next week. I will take another boring pic.
dave w February 5, 2012 Author February 5, 2012 Here's a pic of the fiberglassed southeast corner. I know the yellow fiberglass looks ugly but we will finish it with a gel coat or epoxy paint that is slightly less ugly. If the pic doesn't go through, I'll keep trying. http://i1196.photobucket.com/albums/aa410/davidwillmore1/utf-8BSU1HMDAxNDItMjAxMjAyMDUtMTMyNy5qcGc.jpg
dave w February 5, 2012 Author February 5, 2012 (edited) Here's a pic where the lit refugium flows back into the display tank. Hope it goes through, I'm a real idiot on copying and pasting images. javascript:void(0); oops, if it says javascript: void, I suspect the pic didn't get copied. I will keep trying. Edited February 5, 2012 by dave w
dave w February 5, 2012 Author February 5, 2012 Here is another try. Looks like I got it this time, if so it was pure accident. The 16" hollow space at the top is the lit refugium. The fuge doesn't look much lit right now because it's covered by shelves and tools.
dave w February 5, 2012 Author February 5, 2012 (edited) Does the link to the second pic (transition) work? Sometimes I wonder why file transfers that seem so easy to everyone else are so hard for me. Edited February 5, 2012 by dave w
Coral Hind February 5, 2012 February 5, 2012 Nope, it didn't work. Inserting the link from photobucket like you did for first one is the easiest method I think.
dave w February 5, 2012 Author February 5, 2012 It did not work, we don't have access to your C: drive And that's a good thing too, you would die from boredom!
dave w February 5, 2012 Author February 5, 2012 Nope, it didn't work. Inserting the link from photobucket like you did for first one is the easiest method I think. I tried that a half dozen times but it only worked on the first one. Probably really easy for others, not so much for me. I'll try again after the game.
Coral Hind February 5, 2012 February 5, 2012 In photobucket, go under the thumbnail of the picture you want to select and then click on the "IMG code". It will automatically select and copy the link. Then you just paste that link into your post here.
dave w February 22, 2012 Author February 22, 2012 (edited) OK, I followed CoralHind's directions and the pic came through. This is the part of the tank where the 16" deep refugium against the back wall makes a transition to the 37" deep display tank. The refugium hasn't been fiberglassed yet so it looks like a big void. Edited February 22, 2012 by dave w
dave w February 22, 2012 Author February 22, 2012 Here is that same part of the refugium a few days later after it has been fiberglassed. This section of the fuge is 3' from front to back and about 8' long.
dave w February 27, 2012 Author February 27, 2012 COming together well, Dave! Thanks Chad, your advice has been very helpful. A quick update now that the main tank is nearing completion. The last thing to build is the toughest, a 24" square tube completing the perimeter 3,000 gallon display and the 500 gallon refugium into a circle. So I'm turning attention to plankton enrichment and feeding. I got a 12" sonotube from Home Depot to mold zooplankton enrichment containers. If it is too hard to remove the male mold from the fiberglass tube, I will abandon fiberglass for PVC. The idea is to put rotifers and baby brine shrimp in the tube, add phyto to gut load them for 6 hours and then drip enriched zooplankton onto the corals. Because there are no pumps or skimmers to kill the plankton, they should survive long enough to be eaten by a polyp. 24 hour feeding means a rotifer and brine shrimp tube will cycle 4 times a day. I think the cycling can be automated with a controller and solenoids. After each cycle I also think an upside down shrub sprinkler can clean out the tube before the next enrichment. I don't think calanoid copepods need much enriching. They're already nutitious and most of my phyto will already be dripped to the pod reservoir for water quality reasons. (Pods need higher quality food and water than rotifers or brine shrimp.) Although I may still enrich pods, their lower rate of nauplii production means they can be enriched in a much smaller container. I've also modified the idea of a brine shrimp reactor. It was pointed out that although brine shrimp will happily recycle fish poop into millions of BBS, detritus is so low in calories that better production will occur by removing detritus and fecal pellets from the settlement chambers and feeding high calorie foods to the zooplankton reservoirs. Good thing there are REAL biologists out there to straighten out this pseudo biologist. That's it. I'll post some pics of the zooplankton enricher when its made.
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