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which is right in line with what I was saying about lifespan compared to the AC on an IC ballast :).

Congrats on entering splitsville.

Yea.. our first split :D

I also see that you are approaching the century mark, post-wise :)

mrcrab
Parrot head

Registered: Sep 2005
Location: Florida
Occupation: recycler
Posts: 999


Congrats yourself :D

Didn't even notice but now that you've brought it up, let's make it and even 1,000. BTW century = 100. ;)

Grats!

ok, time for a bit of an update as we had some "interesting" events with our Vortecs over the weekend, plus some livestock occurrences. No new pictures yet, but when the new bulbs get here tomorrow expect some comparison and also side by side shots (IE: only changing one bulb out to compare the Usions and ACs for intensity and color)

For now here is the update.

This Saturday (while talking to Scott on the phone about the new skimmer body he is working on for us), it appears that one of our Vortecs "ran away" and turned up to 100%/full speed (from a setting of about 75%, give or take). I really cannot tell the exact speed it went to since there is no way to measure it outside of the reaction of your tank's environment. In our case it stirred up a huge sand storm, buried a clam, a couple of rather rare/expensive chalices (Bazooka Joe and Tubs Rasta (Think it was from Tubs)) and just caused general water quality issues. It happened during the afternoon, when nothing else was going on within the tank (IE: no maintenance, etc). I originally thought that a fish had gone to digging except that once I got the tank cleared enough to see what was going on I could see a 2" trough in our sand bed and the sand granules on the surface of that trough were moving with the current (which is not normal for our tank). It is important to note that this has all been set up and running (With the current speed settings) for several months. About 1 month ago I cleaned this particular wet end because it kept stalling. The cleaning did not help with the stalling. I throttled back this one Vortec to about 50% (give or take) and everything again quieted down within the tank. Curiously enough that Vortec has not stalled since then. I find that odd since it usually takes turning a pump speed [i]up[/i] to get it to stop stalling, not down :).

Luckily I was home when it happened, so that I could minimze impact and not lose any livestock (that I am aware of). I shudder to think what would have happened if we had been away for the day, or worse, the whole weekend. :(

The other thing that has happened was our RBTA took to going walk-about. He started this towards the middle of last week (and the sand storm didn't help his stabilty any). We had him more or less segregated on a rock (not touching any of our SPS encrusted base rock) and we turned that rock and moved it a bit to force the nem to travel across sand if it truly wanted to exodus the rock. So far it seems to be holding on the front bottom of the rock.

We also had a bit of an explosion of aiptasia. Right now I am attributing this to the water quality issues introduced by our plumbing changes. Once we get the new skimmer body we should be back in business. But that will still leave the aip's to deal with. Right now I am considering a CBB. I believe that I read Jonathan added one to his tank a while back, but I honestly don't remember the results. I will try to read back through his thread later on to see if i can dig out that information :)

That is about it for the updates so far. If anyone has any experiences or advice, please share :).

First of all, regarding the Vortech, have you taken temp. readings from it? DO you have an infrared thermometer to do so? You are right that typoically they need to be turned up to keep from stalling, but if it is a heat issue, then the reverse is true, at least that has been the case with my system. I had a bunch of stalls a few days ago, cleaned the wet end, and still more stalls. Turned it down and no more.

I have tried everything for aiptasia including Joe's Juice (scam), vinegar, hot water, kalk paste, 50 peppermint shrimp, and finally a CBB. I was very particular to get the CBB before it went into the LFS tanks, and when I brought it home, I QT'd it with a couple of rocks housing aiptasia. I did not feed it anything else. So, this little guy had nothing else to eat, and finally ate them all. Once I was thoroughly convinced that it would eat aiptasia, I released him into the display at night.

He has been very good at ridding my tank of aiptasia. When I put him in, there were hundreds of them all different sizes including some extremely large ones. They are all gone now.

Another thought I have for you is if you are skittish about a CBB eating all your feathers (which it will), you could make a batch of fish food and scrape a bunch of aiptasia into it. blend it up and freeze it. That just might give your fish the taste for them. I know it sounds crazy, but some of my best ideas are! :D

I know about the feathers. We now only have 2 groups) of any size and one of them is on a decent sized Xmas Tree rock (that we have had for almost 3 years now). Both the Xmas Tree rock and one other lone feather duster would have to go into the prop tank until we can determine if the CBB will do the job or not. If it becomes a permanent resident then we iwll likely sell off the rock and dusters. We do have a ton of "hitchiker" dusters, some even coming out of the sand, and like the larger ones, they will be missed, but we need to look at the larger picture.

Feathers aside I am more concerned with the CBB going after our corals or clams, as I have heard they sometimes can/will do. I do plan to house the CBB in the prop tank with some aiptasia infested rocks at first to make sure it gets a taste for them :). How long did you have to leave him in your QT before he ate out the aiptasia ?

About the Vortecs, yes, I have an infrared thermometer and I did note that this, and one other, Vortec had been running a bit hot. Before the cleaning I attributed it to a dirty wet end, but it still kept up even after a full cleaning.

On that note I heard rumors coming out of MACNA about some DIY controllers/drivers for the Vortecs. I wonder if they will pan out into anything worthwhile (and/or beat the wireless drivers to "market"). I for one would be very happy with a wired driver (that would not currently be held up by the FCC and probably would be less expensive also). Although, I think that all motors/electronics need to get FCC approval, but without the wireless components I would expect that approval process to be significantly less complex for both sides.

I don't really follow them any more, but I also heard that Neptune Systems is working on/releasing a controller for the Tunzes ? Sort of the end all be all controller from what I hear (basically would do what we were promised the Vortec Central Controller would do).

Although I really don't want to get this thread mired down in rumors nor do I want to start a Vortec vs Tunze debate either. We are heavily invested in the Vortec line, so that is where we will stay :) (for now)

Tom - this is what I resorted to doing with aiptasia on rocks that I could easily get out.

I took one of those long reach lighters to the aiptasia, and after the aiptasia boiled away I then scrubbed the remnants with a toothbrush while tap water was running over the area. A torch would have been better but the regular sized torches scare me. I have to find a mini butane torch at some point.

Granted I was quite p'oed after I literally changed out all of the rocks only to find several nice sized hitchhiker aiptasia afterwards.

Burn baby burn - Mwa Ha Ha

couldn"t you just get a few of these?
[url]http://www.berghia.net/marketprice.html[/url] heard they work great.

I have purchased from them before, and unless you try a bunch of them (as in more than five - in Tom's case he might need twenty or more) or simply take the affected rocks and place them in quarentine with the berghia's they are pretty ineffective.

not to mention that they don't deal well with the typical current in our tanks (or power heads for that matter). It is not pretty when they cross paths with a powerhead (or strong enough overflow :().

We have also purchased them before, on our old, much smaller, tank. They tend to disappear much too quickly and long before they even put a dent in the aiptasia population. :( They work great if you have a separate QT tank to move the infested rocks to and keep the nudis in there to clean the rock. Several people have such "cleaner tanks" set up, but that still requires the removal of the rocks, which with our is simply not possible. These boulders aren't coming out until the tank itself comes down :)

there is a Neptune controller called the AquaSurf that controls Tunze pumps down to .10 second intervals. It's pretty sweet. There is also a DIY built by Giovanni that combines the AquaSurf and the Vortech. It is a very simple DIY and it works really well. Search for him and check out all his videos.

I had my CBB in the QT for at least a week before I noticed him taking any kind of interest in the aiptasia. They are skittish so you have to have the light down in the beginning too. But mine really spends its day snooping around the rocks.

I have never actually witnessed it eating one BTW, but when I did put him in the display, it went right for my X-Mas tree worms. I yanked them out and gave them to Sherman. My display also had a lot of small hitch-hiker feathers, but I would bet dollars-to-donuts they are all gone now.

[b]Eileen:[/b] Pulling rocks out of big display tanks is extremely difficult, especially when corals have encrusted multiple rocks. I have single rocks that way upwards of 60 lbs.

ditto on the almost triple digit rocks (when wet and encrusted). So any solution really needs to be an in-tank one.

Thanks for the heads up on Giovani. I Am curious to see what he has done :)

Well, the AC bulbs arrived today. At first I was very pleased with their appearance. I only replaced one of our Ushios with an AC to take some side by side comparison pictures. Those shots looked great (for the AC bulb). Then I shut off the lights, let them cool and then swapped out the second Ushio. Here is where it all fell apart for me. After firing back up the lights I couldn't tell any difference between running 1 Ushio and 1 AC and running both ACs. The second AC looked yellow/white compared to the first AC and looked just like the Ushio that it replaced. I only let the first AC run for 5 mins or so before taking the pictures (just long enough to fire up all of the way and stabilize), so it is not like it had alot more burn in time than the second AC bulb. I will let them burn in throughout this afternoon to see how they look at the end of the day tonight. But right now I am not very happy with the general quality control of the AC bulbs. Too much variance between the 2 bulbs. Hopefully they will burn in and stabilize their colors equally, otherwise I can't leave them over the tank like this.

I will work on the FTS that shows the AC and Ushio burning side by side and should have it posted shortly. Our last 2 sets of bulbs never had this problem (XM 10K, Ushio 14k) So maybe I am just spoiled in expecting both bulbs to burn the same color within an hour burnin period ?

One thing I would suggest is to set up a burn in station. WHat I have is an extra ballast in my garage that I burn lamps on before putting them over the reef.

Jonathan, I know that you advocate a burnin station, but we don't have the time, finances or space to consider such an option :(

Here is the FTS from the Ushio on the left and AC on the right. I have not yet gone back down to see how the bulbs are burning in. *sigh*

[IMG]http://tomandjue.com/Gallery/albums/InWall/Tank_FTS.jpg[/IMG]

Tom - I would be very interested in the outcome of the 14k Ushios to these AC's

I'll probably be upgrading the other side of the tank from 250 to 400 and will give myself an option of getting another 14K Ushio or just buying another pair of bulbs.

It is hard to tell from the FTS for a couple of reasons, the cloudiness of our tank being one of them. The picture should auto-size up to 1280 across, which might help with the ability to see the difference. After running for a couple of hours the left one is a bit more blue (or at least they are closer in color). I may let them burn in for a couple of weeks then swap one out for an Usnio to do a true side by side comparison. The thing about their color and current burn in is that most of the time a bulb gets less blue as it burns in, not more. So it will be interesting to see what color these all end up at. And the variance in quality control from one bulb to the next might also explain Sanjay's results. I would have to go back through his articles, but I am unsure how long he let the test bulbs burn in before taking his measurements. Only time will tell :)

Before I go any further I wanted to post that the packaging, etc from IRISSERVICE was top notch. That box could have landed center ice during a hockey match and the bulbs would have still come out unscathed.

I swapped ballasts this morning before they fired up, just to make sure it was the bulbs and not the ballast for some funky reason. And the left side still looks yellow while the right is distinctly blue. I think that I read that the average burn in time is around 20 - 30 hours ? (but I also thought I recalled reading that it can be upwards of 100 hours for some bulbs). Does anyone have any data/information on that ? So for now we will leave it to run as-is into next week to see how (if) the colors even out or not. We had an XM ages ago that burnt in yellow and were able to get it swapped out. I don't see having that option currently, which makes the extra $15 per bulb from Premium Aquatics look that much more appealing :( (since I could return it to them if it turns out to be defective).

YGPM

ok, so time for an update and a couple of pictures to illustrate my lighting description.

I spoke with IRISSERVICE and he clued me in that the German bulbs had a specific orientation to achieve the desired color output. Based on his information I ended up having to take the mogul apart, rotate and reinstall it into the LA III bracket. With this I now have both bulbs oriented the exact same with relation to the base and relfector. With this new orientation I let the bulbs run for an hour but I can see no change or difference in the output.

Here is a picture taken before I changed the second bulb's orientation (yes, the difference is just that distinct and no, I have not edited or modified the picture in any way). Oh, and yes, I do need to clean the second reflector :).

[IMG]http://tomandjue.com/Gallery/albums/InWall/002_G.jpg[/IMG]

and here they are after I adjusted the bulbs orientation, as directed :


[IMG]http://tomandjue.com/Gallery/albums/InWall/007_G.jpg[/IMG]

I will let it burn in tomorrow to see if there is any improvement, but for now I am not seeing any at all :(

im not sure what ballasts you are using but you might want to look at your voltages across the plugings. if one ballast is on one side of the 220 volt leg and the other ballast is on the other 220 leg you might be drawing harder on the one leg than the other. this may or may not give you a vlotage drop to one of the ballasts. if this were to happen you might have a difference in color between the 2 bulbs. if the 2 ballasts are on the same leg of 220 and the ballasts are the same brand and model i would say you have a problem with the bulb then. i have use alot of 20k xm bulbs and they all seam to burn in the same. im not sure why yours wouldnt burn in the same. the only thing i can think of is that 2 bulbs of different k ratings were mixed up in the packaging area or something. its really hard to say what is going on. good luck with this tom.

[QUOTE][i]<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=10848025#post10848025 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by Sparkss [/i]
[B]I swapped ballasts this morning before they fired up, just to make sure it was the bulbs and not the ballast for some funky reason. And the left side still looks yellow while the right is distinctly blue.[/B][/QUOTE]

So it isn't one ballast pulling/pushing harder than the other. :). I am not sure what the issue is Scott, but thanks for your suggestions and well wishes :)

EDIT : Since I have matched the orientation of the bulbs to each other (and to what I was told they needed to be) we are now waiting for them to "burn back in", which I was told can take up to 12 hours before any difference is noticed. It apparently has to do with the salts inside of the arc chamber needed to "re-pool" onto a differet side of the chamber to get the desired color spectrum. If this bears out then we should see some color shift in the second bulb by tomorow afternoon. I will keep updating this as things progress. And since it is obvious from the pictures I will continue to photo-document our progress.