Week three update
Hello everyone! This week has presented a couple of changes. This is the first week that I ran a small protein skimmer, and made a surge tank modification. I am happy to report that the surge tanks are almost 100% hands-off at this point. 1 of them ran all week without hanging up, and the other one hung up only1 time.
Power usage for the week was 22.25 KWH, or an average of 3.17 KWH per day. The increased power usage is coming from the additional Maxi-Jet 1200 on the skimmer. Still, this is very acceptable power consumption for each day.
As shown in the picture, I have continued to add corals. Everything in this greenhouse is a cutting from my indoor system, so it is taking a little time to fill it up. For example, today I added 3 pom-pom xenias, 5 mushroom rocks, and 15 green leather cuttings. I can add this much stuff about 2 times per week.
Diatoms are remaining under control. I have not had to manually remove any algae's or clean any submerged surface yet. I do have about 20 Blue lag hermits, and 30 small turbo snails in the system.
Temperatures have not risen above 85 degrees. I have added a couple large RO/DI ice cubes on really hot days to accomplish this. Otherwise, evaporative cooling is doing the trick.
Here is a current event for ya............... A picture of my greenhouse was recently used at IMAC. The presenter actually downplayed the durability of my budget system. For those of you just starting to read this post, I must clarify.............This greenhouse is aluminum framed with polycarbonate panels. The tanks are "nested 2 layer" polycarbonate swimming pools. The presenter who downplayed the durability of my system had glass tanks in a plastic film greenhouse. I will just let common sense convey the point of this rant.
Next updates may be spaced further apart since new progress will be slower from this point on. However, I will continue to respond to any question that I see here.