davelin315's 300 Gallon In Wall Reef Tank

[davelin315]

It's been an awfully long time since I updated on anything so I thought I'd resurrect this thread and get some of my plans down here for recovery.

 

My tank is looking OK again, and it's ability to support LPS is perfect (just not in the display where the Emperor likes to have LPS snacks) again. The "refugium"/frag tank has developed a severe case of valonia which I will probably just rip out in the next few days when I do a massive water change. Funny enough, the valonia has not become any sort of a nuisance as it exists only in this one frag tray and since I have no real frags in it right now, other than some shrooms, zoanthids, and a couple of LPS, it's not a problem. They have outcompeted the chaetomorphia for nutrients and I have only a few clumps of it left in my system, no more than a golf ball in total. They have not outcompeted the codium, however, although I expect that when I do my large water change this may change the balance of the macroalgae that I have in there.

 

Anyway, as soon as I have time to dedicate to a scrubbing of a 150 gallon sump I'm going to change out 125 gallons of water, clean out the calcium reactor, and get the system back up and running with SPS again. I've got a large "frag" of red table acro from Bob that I need to pick up and Tom (origami) has offered up some cheapo frags to make sure that the tank is ready to support sps again, and once I have proven to myself that it's ready, it's time to get this bad boy up and running again.

[moga]

It's been an awfully long time since I updated on anything so I thought I'd resurrect this thread and get some of my plans down here for recovery.

 

My tank is looking OK again, and it's ability to support LPS is perfect (just not in the display where the Emperor likes to have LPS snacks) again. The "refugium"/frag tank has developed a severe case of valonia which I will probably just rip out in the next few days when I do a massive water change. Funny enough, the valonia has not become any sort of a nuisance as it exists only in this one frag tray and since I have no real frags in it right now, other than some shrooms, zoanthids, and a couple of LPS, it's not a problem. They have outcompeted the chaetomorphia for nutrients and I have only a few clumps of it left in my system, no more than a golf ball in total. They have not outcompeted the codium, however, although I expect that when I do my large water change this may change the balance of the macroalgae that I have in there.

 

Anyway, as soon as I have time to dedicate to a scrubbing of a 150 gallon sump I'm going to change out 125 gallons of water, clean out the calcium reactor, and get the system back up and running with SPS again. I've got a large "frag" of red table acro from Bob that I need to pick up and Tom (origami) has offered up some cheapo frags to make sure that the tank is ready to support sps again, and once I have proven to myself that it's ready, it's time to get this bad boy up and running again.

 

regals all gone?..

 

we want some pics..

[davelin315]

regals all gone?..

 

we want some pics..

Nope, the regals are going strong and are still getting along with all of the other major fish. I lost a few here and there and my own neglect of feeding them often enough gradually depleted my anthias population, but otherwise most are still going strong.

 

I also have a large crab that I suspect has eaten quite a few shrimp and a few smaller fish as well (including some of the grammas).

[extreme_tooth_decay]

I also have a large crab that I suspect has eaten quite a few shrimp and a few smaller fish as well (including some of the grammas).

 

 

Fortunately you have that mantis shrimp back at Floris now.

[moga]

Nope, the regals are going strong and are still getting along with all of the other major fish. I lost a few here and there and my own neglect of feeding them often enough gradually depleted my anthias population, but otherwise most are still going strong.

 

I also have a large crab that I suspect has eaten quite a few shrimp and a few smaller fish as well (including some of the grammas).

 

wow that's great.~!

 

i failed twice with regal angels..just can't get them to stay alive..(they both were eating..but just died all of sudden..)..

 

maybe my tank was too small for them..(72 gallon)~

[davelin315]

Just did a MASSIVE water change. Took the main sump that the reactors and skimmer run off of and drain into and removed all of the equipment from it (while I did that I took the opportunity to scrub down the skimmer body and drill some extra holes in the bucket that it sits on to have some better water flow through it). I then drained out about 125 gallons of water from it after diverting the return pump away from the main pump to allow it to drain down and level off (turns out that it's right on the money when the tank drains down to the overflow and the two sumps run out of water - right at 125 gallons). I then sealed off the main sump so that none of the detritus could go over into the other sump and then proceeded to empty out the rock that has been tossed in there over the years as well as a litter box full of sand. I rinsed off each rock as I worked and also removed some massive cryptic sponges (there were a couple the size of dinner plates and when I ripped them open they were filled with detritus that they had filtered out of the water). I then started scooping off the bottom and pulled out about 1/4" of sand, rubble, and old snail shells. On top of this was probably a 1/2" layer of detritus that had built up over the years, much of which was probably the result of no skimming for a period of time when my impellers went out. I then used a back up pond/sump pump and drained out the water from the bottom of the tub over into the utility sink, occasionally turning the pump back over to the sump so that I could stir it up again. While I did this I was hoping to find the leopard wrasse that surfed down the overflow within 10 minutes of being added to the tank, but no such luck, it's either buried in my other sump or got eaten by something along the way. Anyway, when I got down to the bottom of the tub I used a hose from the utility sink to spray as I drained, washing away all of the detritus and sand that was still there and letting the pump pull it up and out into the sink. Once I did this I did a quick rub down of the walls of the tub to remove anything else that was simply clinging to the walls versus being attached to the wall. As soon as I was not getting any detritus off the tub I took some time to take apart my calcium reactor and clean it out. I am using the stuff from the group buy and had never noticed it getting depleted at all so I decided I'd give it one more whirl and see if it would dissolve. Anyway, I took apart the reactor, rinsed out the media as it had built up a lot of detritus inside the reactor, and the moved the feed for it over by the return for the skimmer so that it could get cleaner water. I also put a Y coupling on my skimmer return so that I could drain the effluent from the calcium reactor into the return water and resituated the skimmer so that the return was further away from the overflow for the sump and further down into the water to prevent microbubbles. As soon as I completed all of this work I refilled the tank (took about 10 minutes to empty out the 125 gallon drum) and started everything going again. So, I did about a 20% water change and also removed TONS of nutrients from the system and will probably do another massive change in the next week or so. The next step in full recovery is to scrub off the UV shields for the lights and then raise them, plumb the inline chiller I bought from Justin, to remove some of the heat in the room, and then star to restock (perhaps not in that exact order).

 

I'll try and snap a picture tomorrow of what the end result was, couldn't do it as I worked because it was simply too gross to want to touch my camera. Essentially, the sump was like a skimmer cup and I didn't even realize that it was that bad. I thought there was a thin layer of detritus, not the huge amounts that I actually removed...

[davelin315]

OK, so I was too late to get any photos of the tank when the lights were on (and I need to scrape the front panel anyway) but I took some shots of some of what I have modified a bit lately.

 

Here's the skimmer. I changed the output a bit to eliminate the microbubbles that were coming through and also to add a port for the effluent for my calcium reactor.

 

Here's the port I used. I added a sanitary Y to it and extended the output of the skimmer further away from the overflow for this sump. The effluent for the calcium reactor goes directly into the Y and this keeps it from getting encrusted and also allows for the lower pH effluent to mix with aerated water from the skimmer.

 

This is where the output from the skimmer dumps back into the tank. It's pretty clear that the water coming out of the skimmer is pretty clean as these filter socks only need to get cleaned out about once a month and that's only because worms, pods, snails, and starfish end up in there. This is removable and it is hung so that the bottom half is below the water line and the top half is above it. There's an air gap to allow most of the air to escape up and out and the filter sock eliminates most of the microbubbles before they have a chance to make it into the next sump.

 

Here's a shot of the newly cleaned out sump. The water is pretty darned clear in this sump and I'm going to leave this sump more or less empty so that I can vacuum detritus out of it periodically.

 

Here's another shot of the sump and how much cleaner it is than before (again, no before pictures but you can clearly see the bottom of the sump and there's nothing but black down there whereas before it was brown from detritus.

 

Here's a picture of some of the codium that has grown out of the rocks in one sump. This is currently in SWAP.

 

I ended up adding back on the whole house filter I used to filter the sand out of the water before and put carbon in it. I switch this back and forth between a bag of phosphate remover and carbon.

 

Here's the CoralRx dip from Justin's group buy. Tried it out for the first time tonight, we'll see how it does!

[davelin315]

Forgot to say thanks to Tom/origami for the frags to test out the system. I have them in a sump under PCs right now and will move them to the main display and see how they do when I get home with enough time to get them into the display while the lights are on. I raised the lights today and will clean the UV shields when I move them into the tank.

[moga]

Forgot to say thanks to Tom/origami for the frags to test out the system. I have them in a sump under PCs right now and will move them to the main display and see how they do when I get home with enough time to get them into the display while the lights are on. I raised the lights today and will clean the UV shields when I move them into the tank.

wow 125 Gallon water change?..that's alot of water for sure..

[davelin315]

Took some pictures and tried to play around with the settings. It's been awhile since I took any pictures of the tank but here are some of the ones that seemed to be better as far as the right exposure and crispness of the shot. One of the lights was already off so that made some of them darker than I wanted and I couldn't find the tripod to stabilize, so there's a bit of blurriness here, but some of the fish came out well and comparing them to old ones, you can really see the growth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[davelin315]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[davelin315]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Noobalicious]

that mandarin looks happy and fat

[davelin315]

It's huge... no joke. It's about as fat as fat can be and it's one of the biggest ones I have seen. I finally added a female to the tank that it didn't kill, too, from BRK this past weekend. I have added a couple in the past that it has taken out, possibly they were not actually females and were just males with the dorsal fin bitten off, but they have encountered each other without any issues. Now I just need for her to grow up a bit and start to mate with him. The really dark pictures are of her in the back of the tank.

[davelin315]

Things are looking up again. Corals are surviving and doing well so far and the system seems to be in good shape again! I have added a few frags from Tom/Origami and also from Chris Tran as well as buying a couple of small colonies. I'm still closely monitoring things to make sure that they don't go south on me, but seems like the things that are are because of my placement of them and not because of something in the tank.

 

I also bought a couple of harlequin shrimp (wonder if I'll ever see them again) and a couple of small copperbands that will be added to the tank later (I put one in and had to fish it out as the powder blue was messing with it) after they have fattened up and weaned themselves off of just eating mysis. One is supposed to stay in the frag system to eat aiptasia, while the other may either go to school to do the same or may go back in the main display when it grows a bit and is eating to my satisfaction. I'll snap some pictures of everything in a few days.

[davelin315]

Well, it's been 13.5 months since I had the great toilet incident, corals are starting to go back in the tank and do well again, so I am ramping up efforts once again!

 

A couple of weeks ago when I was at Bob's (lanman) my girls really enjoyed looking down into the tank so a few weeks ago I bought a piece of 6" PVC and cut some sections off of it to make lookdowns. I ended up making one so far that is smooth and works, so I have been taking some top down pictures lately, or at least trying to. I took some tonight of some of the corals and fish (OK, a lot of the fish!) and so here they are... tons of them...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[davelin315]

And more...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[davelin315]

For reference, the squamosa clam is about 6.5" from end to end, that gives you some relative sizes of the fish.

 

The black teardrop maxima is the one I just picked up from Russell Wiley (thanks, it looks great in there!).

 

 

 

[davelin315]

In one of the shots (can you tell I overdo it with the digital age?) you can see 6 different kinds of tangs in there, plus the Imperator, to boot!

[El Camaron]

nice pictures.

[davelin315]

My pH probes have become very unreliable, will be calibrating them soon, but discovered that my pH is below where I want it anyway so I decided to tap into outside air for the feed for my protein skimmer. I ended up using 3/8" hosing to create a single feed for my 3 pumps on my skimmer and this is routed through the wall of the house. I tapped the top of my silencer with a John Guest push fitting and then ran the line outside (drilled through the Verizon Box on the side of the house - whoops!). It's attached there to a small PVC "capsule" which contains some filter floss, carbon, then more floss, then back into another John Guest push fitting to the feed. The pH, which was registering 7.6 last night on my probe (very unreliable since my calcium reactor is registering 4 and yet all of the media is rock solid) is now up to around 8 so there's obviously something awry somewhere in the probe or the controller.

 

Question for everyone out there - do you use more than simply the carbon to "dry" the air you pull from outside or should I add on room for it to run through some DI resin as well? I was thinking that I've got the filter running through about 2" of 2" PVC and could double or triple the size of this without compromising the air flow and have it filtered through DI resin as well. My thinking is that it will probably absorb moisture and contaminants as they pass through, but I don't know if they only work in water or out of water as well.

[davelin315]

Here are some pictures of recent mods and added equipment.

 

First, here's a picture of the changes I made to the air supply for the skimmer. The tube on the top of the skimmer air intake leads to outside. Since I'm once again wasting my sleeping hours and doing fish stuff, I didn't go outside to take the pictures...

 

 

In the back you can see the new reactors I added, a phosphate reactor and a carbon reactor from Dan. Since I was sick and tired of rinsing the media, I opted to put the output for now into the protein skimmer to skim any dust out. The output of the skimmer also is now going through a fabric filter bag as well to catch whatever doesn't get skimmed out.

 

The even crazier manifold...

 

 

Which goes through 15' of flex PVC to another manifold...

 

 

Which in turn leads to the reactors...

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here's a question for those of you running carbon and phosphate reactors. I'm using some Filter Fine Aquatics GFO phosBgone and I have it turned up enough where it's churning a bit but doesn't look like it's shredding at all. How fast do you run the flow through a phosphate reactor?

 

Also, for the carbon, I'm using Black Diamond and I noticed that about 1/4 of it floats... normally I just pour this floating part off, but since I've got such a large reactor, I wanted to fill the puppy up. Will this floating stuff soak up enough moisture and sink? Also, how much do you pump through the reactor? I pumped 15' of 1" hose full of air into the reactor and it kicked the carbon up and made the bottom screen lopsided so the carbon is all over the reactor now, but it's not exiting it at all. That said, most is on the bottom except for a 1-2" layer that's floating at the top. Will this settle down?

[dandy7200]

The phosbgone should just dance in the reactor. When you have the flow dialed in it will "roll" in the bottom of the reactor. You shouldn't even need that nylon top filter pad on the reactor, I include 2 but I have honestly never used the top pad for phosbgone. Give your carbon reactor a jiggle and it will settle, it is the air trapped inside the pours of the carbon that causes it to float. After it has been in the water for an hour and you shake it, it will fall to the bottom and begin to fluidize.

 

Other than that, looks good. Time to update your signature though

[davelin315]

Done! Forgot about that signature...

 

I'll take a look at the media in the morning and see how it's doing. I figured the carbon would settle down eventually. I was going to soak it in tank water overnight before adding it but that would have meant needing to be patient and not hooking up the reactors until then!

[davelin315]

As I posted in another thread, I've been struggling with water chemistry issues (Salifert Calcium test read out at 460, Salifert Alk test read out at 5.2 meq/L, Salifert Nitrate test read out at over 50ppm) so I've been trying to get this under control. I took my Kalk and Calcium reactors offline, I added the GSA media reactors for phosphate and carbon, I did a huge water change and will soon do another huge one (around 100 gallons each time), and I also added some modifications to try and clean the tank a bit more due to how much I feed the fish.

 

The first modification was done the other day and it was basically adding a filter sock and a filter sock holder to my overflow. I have a herbie overflow which feeds my skimmer and then another overflow to handle the rest of the flow. This "overflow" overflow runs out of the tank through a 2" bulkhead into a 2" true union ball valve into a length of 2" flex PVC and then into the new filter sock holder.

 

 

 

This is basically made of a 4" to 6" PVC reducer which is perfect for holding a filter sock and then it runs down into a length of 4" PVC that ends in a closet flange at the bottom. The closet flange holds the pipe in place and the pipe itself has three holes drilled in it to allow the water to flow out while air bubbles get sucked up towards the top and not released into the sump. There's also a small hole drilled in the 6" portion of the reducer so that if the filter sock gets clogged it comes out that hole instead of simply going over the top. I placed a 90 degree elbow onto the 2" flex PVC and it makes the water swirl around like a whirlpool which also is helping the detritus to get filtered out.

 

The next thing I did was to add a Remote Deep Sand Bed (RDSB). I have debated this addition for a long time and have had pretty much all of the supplies for it so I finally decided to do it. I spent a lot of time reading Anthony Calfo's thread on the subject over on RC and after getting through about 15-20 pages I decided to give up and simply do it. I couldn't find any references to how deep to make the bed itself since it's a remote one and built up detritus should not be a big concern so I went ahead and added 270 pounds of Carib-Sea Aragamax sugar sized oolitic sand. This amount of sand created a 17" deep bed in a 32 gallon Rubbermaid Brute garbage can. The Brute garbage cans were something I debated for a long time ever since Mike Henley came back from SECORE and reported the presence of a fungicide injected into the material that killed off all of the larvae they collected. I made some phone calls and couldn't verify anything with Rubbermaid (they said that these types of cans don't have anything added to them since they are food grade) and since I've been using them to mix saltwater and store RO/DI for the past few years I opted to simply go ahead and use one. The 32 gallon Brute is about 27" tall so I drilled a hole behind one of the handles, put in a 2" Uniseal and then stuck a piece of 2" PVC through the hole and on the outside it ends in a 90 degree elbow which points straight down to the sump and is only about 1" above the water.

 

According to the RDSB theory, these types of sand beds do not require any real maintenance and should never crash or fuse together since the goal is to maintain enough clean water flow over the top of the bed to keep detritus from settling and going down into the sand. The recommendation for making one of these is to use Aragonite sand (which I did) and to not rinse the sand at all in order to produce the right grain size for this to work. The feed for this comes directly from my skimmer and goes through a final filter sock (I believe it's somewhere between 100-200 microns and is a mesh filter sock) before entering the RDSB. This should deliver clean water and the amount of flow is the max flow through a 1" PVC pipe as the herbie overflow goes through 1" PVC before entering the skimmer and then all of this exits through a 1.5" piece of PVC right into the RDSB. I placed a single 4"x4" tumbled marble tile under the skimmer return to keep the water from gettin churned up. Within a couple of minutes the RDSB was completely clear thanks to the influx of fresh clean water and also the fact that the clearest water was coming from the skimmer.

 

 

Unfortunately, as I added the sand to the RDSB, each time I added the sand the water level would go up and then overflow into the sump which in turn clouded up my whole tank...

 

 

This is, of course, after the lights are off, but you can't see a thing through the front which illustrates the cloudiness of the water.

 

Again, all of these things were done and will be worked on in order to reduce my nitrates. I will test nitrates every couple of days to see how this RDSB develops. My hope is that this will remove all of my nitrates in the long term. Most reports on RC had results in about 30 days but I'm thinking this bed might take longer to develop because of the volume of sand and the depth of it.