Aaarrrggg's 144g Half Circle Dream

[Aaarrrggg]

The "Live Sand Activator" bag had been floating in the tank all this time and to my surprise I found a bunch of Zebra Hermits scrambling around on the surface of the gravel! It was time to take the plunge and I tried (unsuccessfully) to pour the LSA onto the more hidden parts of the sand...



Noooooo! My beautiful sand! Hopefully I can mix it in a bit later on.

I sat down to admire my new critters, feeling pretty pleased with order. My gaze was drawn to a tiny piece of algae floating by ...with what looked like a tiny aiptasia anemone!!! ARGH!!

By the time I managed to grab the net and a ladder (its a tall tank!) it had drifted away. Thank goodness for Vortechs! I cranked them up to dislodge it from wherever it was hiding. After about 5mins got lucky and managed to net it. Now I can't say 100% if it is an aiptasia, but it looks highly suspicious.

Extreme closeup (it's reeeeally tiny! I only really saw it thanks to the magnifying effect of the bowed glass!)


Whatever it is, I didn't trust it, so I'm afraid it went down the sink. I hope it wasn't an aiptasia, and if it was that there aren't any more. I think it came from the LSA bag which had some bits of loose algae in it. Bit of a downer to the end of an otherwise satisfying order. The whole point of paying a premium for these critters is to avoid pests like this. Only time will tell I guess...

In other news... I think I might have been paying too much attention to my tank. My husband came home with this today...

[bmullikin1]

Yea, my wife wishes she was a fish too.

[BRISK495]

tagging along....

[defchild84]

Originally Posted by bmullikin1

Yea, my wife wishes she was a fish too.

hahaha, I wonder how many times my exes have told me that...

Your tank is unbelievable. From the mechanical start to your introduction of life, everything has been thought out and meticulously carried out, with fine attention to detail. As mentioned earlier, the location which you have selected for your tank is spot on. I enjoyed reading about the shower poufs to cultivate and increase pod population- I will pick some up tomorrow!! Thanks for a great read, and will be looking forward to updates and further introduction!

[Johanv]

Any updates? been some time since last sets of pics.

[Aaarrrggg]

Crikey has it really been 2 weeks?! A local reef club member and I have been working on the watercharge system this week... well, I mean he has been working on it and I've been bothering him. I need to take some more piccies, but I'll be back with a big update about that soon.

In the meantime I had fun with a little experiment...
I saw a thread a while back where someone asked if clowns might take a fake anemone as a host. Most of the responses came back "no," which got be wondering. I mean, if a clown will readily accept a powerhead host, then why not a rubber nem?

As my nano has just been sitting there with my clowns, I thought I'd give it a go. I ordered a big (9") "Penn Plax" anemone ornament from eBay and added it to the tank.



TBH I didn't have a great deal of hope for it. Both clowns are captive bred and are happy to spend most of the day begging for food at the waterline. The B&Ws in my first tank took a couple of months to accept an actual RBTA; so at best I thought these guys might accept this fake one a few months down the line. You can imagine my astonishment less than a week later when I came downstairs to this...



Please excuse the poor quality pic. As soon as she sees me she comes rushing up to the surface (she's such a brat!) I had to commando crawl across the floor with my phone to catch this!

A couple of days later she started sleeping in it:

http://youtu.be/yPa-2ds4qRk

Guybrush (male domino) still sleeps in the corner, but I find him in there occasionally and I haven't actually seen her chasing him away so I think he's just getting used to it. I often find them both snuggled up in there in the morning.

The real test will be when I move them over to the 144g. I'm hoping that they'll recognize the nem in the new environment and continue to associate with it. In 5mths time when the tank is mature enough I can swap in a real RBTA and fingers crossed, they'll jump right in! I know it looks rather unsightly in the meantime, but I just see it as their "training wheels" until they can have the real thing to play in. It certainly looks more natural than having them begging at the surface all day long.

BTW, I've just started a ReefCentral blog: http://reefcentral.com/forums/blog.php?u=141198 ...so feel free to follow my progress there instead if you prefer.

[Lynnmw1208]

awesome! I'm glad to see so much progress!! I really liked your order of the inverts too! The only thing I don't like is the hermits as zebra hermits don't stay micro and DO get quite aggressive, just watch out for that. I used to have one and he literally tried to dig into my jawfish's hole because he ate some mysis shrimp! I took him to my LFS lol

LOVE LOVE LOVE! those radions!! you're write-up is one of the best I've seen on them! It's nice to see the actual program and the different ways the light changes. I really liked the purple one! so cool!! Some day I will have these... some day...

Keep us updated! You're tank is absolutely amazing!!! I am definitely subscribed!

[Aaarrrggg]

Oh yikes, thanks for the warning! I didn't know that about zebra hermits!
I'll keep an eye on them. I know hermits in general can be little terrors, but I must admit I'm a bit of a sucker for them. I'm becoming an expert with my grabber claw though, so if any of them step out of line I can snatch them out of there.

[Aaarrrggg]

I thought I'd have some fun and cartoonize Guybrush and Marley...



I must say pairing them has been a breeze (so far; touch wood!) There was a bit of aggression a few weeks ago but they've been best buds since then. Fingers crossed for some hybrid babies!

[Aaarrrggg]

Time for the update I've been teasing you all with... the automatic water changer is finally ONLINE!
But first... a belated Merry Christmas FTS!




My husband surprised me with the Christmas Tree aquarium ornament. He put it in the tank when I wasn't looking, knowing it wouldn't be too long before I spotted it!
(You can't tell from the photo, but it's actually glittery!)



For Christmas I'd asked for LiveAquaria vouchers, but my husband and father-in-law took that wish to a whole new level by making me some fish vouchers! I'd been rabbiting on and on about wanting to get a pair of Banggai Cardinals and a Blue Spotted Jawfish, so my hubby secretly drew them for me and, with his Dad's help, made them into cardboard tokens! So cool! (...and it shows they've been paying attention to my aquarium ramblings!)




I'm now stalking Divers Den for the perfect specimens... so everyone else stay away from them!

The aquatic-themed pressies didn't stop there though! He also went above and beyond with a kickass caricature of mer-me and my 2 mer-doggies!

[Aaarrrggg]

There are still no fish in the tank... just a few more snails and some scarlet hermits. I'm still holding off adding Marley & Guybrush until the nitrate comes down. It's still hovering around 30... which tbh the clowns would probably be fine with, but they're my little preciouses so I'm being overly cautious. I figure the delay is probably helpful for the IPSFs critters to get established anyway.

Around Christmas I got a population explosion of tiny hydroids on the glass. They must have come over from my nano on one of the small pieces of LR.



As i found out previously, (after panicking when they showed up in my nano,) they're a harmless type of hydroids that will die back on their own. There were a crazy number of them for a few days, so many in fact, that it looked like there were snowflakes all over the glass! Yay festive tank!

Another hitchhiker from my nano is teeny tiny flatworms...



I'm not sure where I first picked them up from, but they've been in my nano for a while. I had hoped to keep them out of the big tank, but I guess they had other ideas. As soon as I saw them in my nano I ordered some FlatWorm Exit, bur further research suggested that they are in fact a tiny harmless pod eating flatworm (Amphiscolops sp.) http://www.wetwebmedia.com/flatworms.htm. I don't want to risk hurting anything by nuking them, so I'm going to leave them be for now. Apparently their populations boom when there are abundant pods to eat. So I guess that's a good sign(?)

Another curious new critter I spotted are these white/clear tubes:



They're sprouting all over the place in the shadows of the left most rock tower. At first I was worried they might be colonial hydroids, but as I've never seen a feathered crown or any movement, I think they must be some sort of sponge. The place I first noticed them is the same spot where I tipped the LS Activator from IPSF, so I figure whatever they are must have come from that. Pretty cool!

[Aaarrrggg]

Ok time for the watercharger update I've been teasing you all with! This is going to be a biggie so hang in there. I wanted to get as much information up as possible so it might help others set up something similar.

Let me start at the beginning...

My previous water-change routine went something like this...
Put 5g jug in sink and fill up with RO. Remember (= forget!) to set stopwatch for 2hrs so I don't waste a ton of water. Fill Rubbermaid trashcan with 20g of RO water and add salt. Let mix for 24hrs with pump and heater. Do water-change by manually siphoning out old water and adding new water -ie a lot of lugging of 5g jugs and potential for spillages(!)

This was all fine for my nano, but not really the most efficient procedure for a 144g. I started researching online and found some inspiring threads about water storage tanks and automatic water-changers. I knew I wanted in!!

I have a large cupboard next to the sink in the utility room which had just been used to store random tank related stuff -mostly 5g jugs. As you can see it wasn't a great use of the space:



I thought this would be a great place to put 2 water storage tanks; the only problem... it is quite far away from the aquarium! I needed some way to move the water from the storage tanks to the DT.



Lounge:


View from in gym into lounge:


View from lounge into gym:


I looked at the RENEW Automatic Water Change System, but in the end the LiterMeter III was a better fit for me due to the distance the water needed to travel. Both companies have excellent customer service! Well worth shooting them an email to see if they can figure out a system for you too.

I asked on the local reef club forum anyone knew a creative handyman/plumber. I struck it lucky when Grim, one of the members, offered his services!

With Grim and Scott at SpectraPures guidance, I ordered all sorts of goodies!



- SpectraPure LiterMeter 3
- SpectraPure Water eXchange module
- 2 x 55g water tanks (from eBay. I would have liked to go a little bigger, but any wider and they wouldn't have fit through the cupboards skinny doorway)
- Black Float Switch (didn't end up being needed)
- Auto Shut Off Kit for Reverse Osmosis Systems
- Dual Inline TDS Meter
- SpectraPure Top Off Controler
- 1/4" Red and Blue RO Tubing
- PanWorld 40PX External Water Pump

Not pictured:
- SpectraPure Remote Pump (forgot to put it in photo! Posted Image)
- Plumbing for water containers
- Black and White 1/4" RO Tubing (bought separately from Lowes)

[Aaarrrggg]

Grim took out the weird wooden step I had at the bottom of the cupboard and made a stand for the water drums:



Then he did all sorts of clever plumbing!



The RO/DI unit is plumbed in under the sink on the other side of the wall. Water travels through the black line to the RO unit. (Waste water from RO unit goes back to the sink drain via the yellow line.)



As the water goes through the unit the TDS is checked before the DI cartridge (blue "OUT") and after the water leaves the system (red "IN.") This lets me keep an eye on how the cartridges are doing. The water leaves the unit through the white line on the left.



The water goes into the freshwater tank via the Auto Shut Off Kit for Reverse Osmosis Systems. This float switch cuts off the RO/DI unit when the freshwater tank is full. Whenever the water drops below that level, the RO/DI unit kicks in automatically and fills the tank until it's full again. No more setting (and forgetting!) my stopwatch for 2hrs to make 5g of RO!



Now comes lots of plumbing!



I can move the water around by opening different valves and turning the yellow pump on/off.

To move the RO water into the salt tank:
CLOSE: 1, 2, 4, 5
OPEN: 3, 6
PUMP: ON

Once the RO water is in the SW tank I open the lid and pour in the correct amount of salt.

To mix SW tank:
CLOSE: 1, 3, 4, 5
OPEN: 2, 6
PUMP: ON

The plumbing continues under the water lvl inside the SW tank. This makes the mixing nice and quiet when the tank is full. All I can hear is the slight whirr of the pump. The brown stuff is from the Oceanic Salt. It did the same thing in my nano SW mixing bin. I'm thinking of switching to Instant Ocean salt instead to save a bit of money and hopefully get rid of these horrible (clay?) deposits.

[Aaarrrggg]

The other taps are used for draining the system or taking out a little SW or RO for my nano.

Draining tank water into sink using pump (it was regular tap-water that we'd used to leak test)



Draining last drops of water out of pipes (no pump used.) There was a tiny bit of water left in the bottom of the tanks which was impossible to get out, but hopefully that shouldn't matter in the grand scheme of things.



Pumping 5g of SW out to do a water-change on my nano.

[Aaarrrggg]

Next up was getting the water from the 2 tanks to the aquarium. Both the SW and RO tanks have tubing inside that extends to the bottom.



The tubing comes out the back of the tops of both tanks and through a hole in the wall



Grim found some electrical wire hiding stuff at Lowes that worked perfectly to hide the colored tubing. (It even has sticky back plastic backing for easy installation!)





Through another wall... (the black line you can see is for waste water; more on that later)



Nearly there! (Aquarium on left)

[Aaarrrggg]

Now comes the LiterMeter magic!



Here's the email Scott at SpectraPure sent me explaining how everything should hook together:

If you want to do both ATO and water exchange, get the LM3, the TCM, one RPM and one WXM. It would be best if they were all installed under the tank.

See the manual here:
http://spectrapure.com/manuals/PRINT...Meter3J-PF.pdf

I'll suggest a different scheme than shown in the manual.

You can run a bundle of three, 1/4" poly tubes any way you want to, generally along your blue dotted line. High, low, inside, under, around, it won't matter. #1 - let's call it white - will take new salt water from the closet and deliver it to the sump. #2 - call it black - will take old salt water from the sump and send it to your sink drain. #1 and #2 are for the water exchange. #3 - blue - will take fresh DI water from the closet and deliver it to the sump for ATO. You could use one color for all three, if you keep them straight.

Install the sensor tube for the TCM in the constant-level side of the sump. It will guard against a sump over-fill, as it will shut off the LM3 if the over-all sump level gets too high. Use the built-in Pump A to take water out of the sump and send it to the drain on the black line. This line is only one-inch into the constant level part of the sump, so it can't possibly accidentally drain the sump.

Use the RPM as Pump B to put new salt water into the sump, using the white line. Set the LM3 to move the same number of liters per day for Pump A and Pump B. Easy Water Exchange!

Use the WXM (with its own sensor tube level control) as Pump C to do the ATO. Set it for a little bit more than you think you are evaporating, and the sensor tube (in the evaporating part of the sump - usually a bit lower than the constant level) will keep that level constant.

I've seen people build a 3-sided wood "cover" for the bundle of tubes to hide them on the wall. Also, a 45-degree piece of wood can cover them up along the baseboard. There are also rubber "doorway sills" for computer cables that you could run in front of the doorway along the floor.

The LiterMeter plugs into the Top-Off Control Module which is then plugged into a power socket.



The funny tube is a water level sensor. It's placed in the constant lvl of the sump to guard against overflowing. If the water rises it will shut off the LiterMeter and all the attached pumps. (Oh, I almost forgot to say... we flipped the sump around so the water now runs from right to left.)



The LiterMeter has a built in pump (Pump A). It draws water from the tank via the white tube and carries it outside through the white/black line. The tip is held 1" under the water by a magnetic clip so if something ever did go wrong, it couldn't drain the whole system.



There is a tiny hole drilled in the wall next to the dog flap so the water can empty into the garden.



The water is replaced by the Remote Pump Module (Pump B). It pulls water from the SW holding tank via the red line and delivers it to the sump.

[Aaarrrggg]

Finally there's the Water eXchange Module (Pump C.) Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of this one before I installed it, but it looks exactly like the previous pump, but with a water lvl sensor (like the top-off control module had.)

This pump sends water from the RO storage tank to the sump. The water lvl sensor tube is in the variable lvl of the sump so when the water reaches the max lvl, the pump shuts down and cannot deliver any more RO until more evaporation occurs.



Here's how it looks altogether!



(I have the Top-Off Control Module stuck to the back of the stand so it's well away from any splashing.)

Side Note: I discovered these things are awesome for sticking components onto the inside of the stand! MUCH stronger than velcro! Highly recommended!


The next step was calibrating the 3 pumps. This involves putting the LiterMeter into calibration mode for each pump and letting it time how long it takes to move 500ml. Button wise it's very easy; push button to start... wait for 500ml to pour into measuring jug, push button to stop... easy!



...but it gets a little bit more complicated when one of the lines goes outside! I ended up going outside with the measuring jug and phoning my husband to tell him when to push the buttons!



Once all the calibration is done, all that's left is to tell the LiterMeter how much water you want it to move. My nitrates are still pretty high, so I decided a 20% weekly WC would be prudent for the time being (eventually I'd like to get it down to 10%.) I set up pump A and B to move the same amount of water per day; 5g (18.9 liters) and pump C to deliver around 4g (15 liters) per day (a little more than I've been manually topping up, but the water lvl sensor tube will prevent it from adding more than is actually needed.)

So that's that! I'm going to be monitoring the SG, water lvl, nitrates and general CUC "aliveness" very carefully over the next few days/weeks to make sure everything is working correctly. It is rather nerve-wracking having something drawing water automatically to and from my tank, but luckily there is some wiggle room with such a large tank. Even if it messes up it can't do THAT much damage... and I still only have CUC in there so nothing too serious can happen (sorry CUC!)

[Lynnmw1208]

wow!!!!...... will you come do my house now? lol

[TheFishTeen]

Do i see yet ANOTHER tank in the gym?

[Aaarrrggg]

Originally Posted by TheFishTeen

Do i see yet ANOTHER tank in the gym?

Hehe yup! But that one is on the way out to CraigsList. It's a 72G bowfront which was where the 144g is now. It was going to be a baddass fancy goldfish tank...



Unfortunately it turns out that fancy goldfish are idiots. The damn things kept killing themselves and it was a nightmare to keep clean. We decided to cut our losses and started the 144g tank instead.

I really hate freshwater! So much harder than marine IMO!

[Want2BS8ed]

Wow thanks Aaarrrggg, that has to be one of the best write ups I have ever seen on an ATO/Exchange system.

I'm not having much luck on finding similar tanks on eBay. Were they purchased from a vendor you could share?

Thanks,

Mike

[Aaarrrggg]

Originally Posted by Want2BS8ed

Wow thanks Aaarrrggg, that has to be one of the best write ups I have ever seen on an ATO/Exchange system.

I'm not having much luck on finding similar tanks on eBay. Were they purchased from a vendor you could share?

Thanks! I tried to make it as thorough as possible because I know how much a write up like that would have helped me when I was trying to figure it all out.

Which tank are you after?

The 144g Half Circles are tricky to find because Oceanic don't actually make them anymore. I got lucky and spotted it for sale on the local reef club board. They pop up from time to time on CraigsList as well. If you're looking for something new, there are quite a few other companies that make this shape tank, but in acrylic instead of glass like mine is. Googling "half circle aquarium," "semi circle aquarium" and "half moon aquarium" will usually tur them up.

The 72g FW bowfront I just pictured is a "Fluval Vicenza." Our LFS ordered it in for us from Hagen. It's drilled with a canister filter underneath, which is quite novel for a FW tank. It would make a great FW community tank, but sadly the canister filter didn't prove enough for those fat old goldfish.

[jlylec]

awesome build...I love the attention to detail! Are you running a controller?

[Aaarrrggg]

Thanks guys!

No controller at the moment. I'd like to get one at some point but as everything I have generally comes with it's own controller it hasn't really seemed necessary.

The only thing that really needs controlling are the heaters as I know they have the potential to cause some havoc. I have 2 though so if either one got stuck off/on they hopefully couldn't do too much damage. (*cross fingers*)

I'd definitely like to get an Apex or ReefKeeper one day, esp if I can hook it up to an app and keep and eye on everything! I've spent waaaay too much money of late though so I'll probably leave it off the shopping list for the time being. (It's dangerous being a girl reefer! Easier spend money ) Maybe next Christmas?

[pscott99]

Stunning !! And super great informative posts !!