Continuous "natural" feeding

[JCTewks]

a what type device?

[Biffer]

ok, here it is. I designed this to be compartmentalized for a couple of reasons.

1) It's easier to remove individual parts for when (not if) there is some contamination and one of the cultures crash. (I've also designed them to allow for purging from the bottom of each culturing vessel for easier cleaning out of detritus and what-not)

2) Redundancy in each type of culture - you have a source to restart a culture when one crashes eventually.

Each of the culturing vessels has an air exhaust that has to have some type of filter on it, because when the surge drain happens, air will get sucked in and again, opens the door for contamination

[H20ENG]

LOL, yeah, an odd name but I'll give him the credit.
Biffer, nice work

[Biffer]

Did I kill this thread?

[Biffer]

Did I kill this thread?

[Biffer]

H20ENG,

the idea for that particular system came from both the "Geosapper" culturing piece, and from that long thread called "DSB heresy". I kind of tossed around the idea of daily small water changes with continuous feedings. Originally, it was (like I said before) intended to be used to culture rotifers for keeping Mandarins, but then it occured to me why not for SPS, Clams, etc... and then this thread popped up about continuous natural feedings...

Sorry my posting picutre skills aren't great - I can't seem to find a way to transfer a jpeg into something "postable". If anyone wants me to email the original image, send me a pm - it's more detailed and I have a few variations on the design.

[H20ENG]

Nope I think its a great addition to the thread.

I had one of those 4' x 10" x 10" segmented tanks from a pet store display system. I thought about doing multiple siphon feeders, but the contamination was too great a factor. It turned into a multi chamber refugium instead.

I like that yours are all seperate for cleaning and such.

["Umm, fish?"]

Hey, your design doesn't show up on Word for a Mac. Can someone save it to a jpeg or something and repost it (or email a copy to me and I'll post it)?

Thanks!

BTW, I never quite understood the Geosapper design. It always looked to me like it would be way too much of a pain to get into the lower compartments. Much better to make it modular, IMO. I started working on one a year or so ago but made the tube for the siphon of too small a tube. The siphon couldn't break the surface tension and it wouldn't start after the first time. I don't know why I never tried again....

[ddoering]

Hey Biffer,

If you are feeding fresh saltwater into the culture containers for the microalgae, what is the microalgae feeding on? Or are you planning on dosing the saltwater with iron and other fertilizer before going through the UV sterilizer?

If you took your water from your main aquarium, and ran it through filters to remove particulate matter, and then ran it through the UV sterilizers and used a dosing pump to feed the drip rate to the micro algae cultures, you would be reusing the nutrients already in your system to feed your algae cultures.

This would also make it so you don't have to worry so much about salinity, just use the normal auto top off of pure water to account for evaporation.

I'm not sure how slow of a flow rate you would need through the UV to try and get 100% kill rate to sterilize.

I suppose you could put the dosing pump through a millipore filter that is smaller diameter than any of the algaes you are culturing before going to the UV to try and keep any algal cells from fouling your cultures.

Cheers,
Doug

[ddoering]

H20ENG,

Why do you think that you ended up with such a contamination problem? I was actually trying to see if I could pick up some of those store display tanks for the very reason of using them as multi chambered for doing different cultures.

If that is a lost cause I can stop cruising craig's list looking for fish stores that have gone under etc.

Cheers,
Doug

[H20ENG]

Hi Doug,
Because the algae cultures get eaten up by "contaminates" (other species).
Once a drop of water containing phyto gets in an algae culture tank, they take over immediately. the same is true with different types of algae.
In the end, the segmented tanks are just too close together. They make great chambered refugiums though, or ATSs so dont give up on them

["Umm, fish?"]

Here are the designs (thanks for sending them):

[Biffer]

ddoering - I had thought about using the a kind of "culturing closed loop" for the culture source water. I think the reality is that the you aren't going to get a 100% kill ratio with any UV light.

Contamination hasn't been a huge problem for me, it's just that I would rather have more control over what goes into the cultures from the very beginning than hope something doesn't get through the UV light and filter screen. I was planning on low dose of fertilizer (micro grow, or some such variation) to be added to the source water. I also thought about adding a small circulation pump (an old maxijet) at the end of the manifold, sending the water back into the storage water tank - this way the UV light doesn't overheat, but all the water being fed to the cultures gets zapped by UV...

I know this means keeping a close eye on salinity and top off water, but the extra work that imposes seems worth the trade of of a more sterile medium feeding the cultures and a small water change on a daily basis.

If you guys see any holes in this, please fire away. I would rather get some good criticism than not.

[jnarowe]

I have one concern about doing the 24/7 feeding. I have been giving this a lot of thought for some time, particularly on how to feed food with large sized pieces and keeping it chilled. I make all my own food and there is a marked health benefit, but the issue I have a hard time with, is that it's my belief that soaking it in water releases nutrients into the water. I typically soak the frozen mixture and shredded nori in tank water with vitamins, and then drain it into a fine net.

What I seem to have observed is that during a period of about 2 months, I forgot about the net and my watre quality suffred substantially. Now I know it's hard to pinpoint causitive factors in a reef, but I think there is some validity to that theory.

So how can we dose food 24/7 but leave the extra "nutrients" like PO4 and nitrate behind?

[ddoering]

Hi Biffer,

If you are just going to use new water with fertilizer to feed the micro algae cultures, why not just buy the concentrates and drip feed them into your rotifer/pod rearing tanks?

I remember reading somebody who converted a dorm fridge specifically as the aquarium feed station, they drilled some feed line tube holes through the side of the fridge and used a dosing pump to drip feed the concentrate into well stirred rotifer/pod tanks.

You have to buy algae concentrates, but you don't have the ongoing expense for the lighting and the uv and the initial costs of the culturing tanks for the different algae strains. The iron/fertilizer is also an ongoing costs for growing your own cultures, along with the constant new saltwater you are mixing up. Basically is the ongoing cost of new concentrate cheaper than growing your own?

The dripping in of new saltwater into a system that is also losing water to evaporation is going to make it more challenging to keep salinity constant as you will have to constantly be figuring out how much freshwater you need to add in addition to the amount of saltwater you are removing to keep up with the new saltwater that is dripping in.

You can just use filtered tank water back to the copepod / rotifer tanks to control the overflow rates back to the main tank if you direct fed concentrates to the copepod/rotifers.

Another thing to keep in mind is that you should ensure you have adequate overflow protection. If you have some water source constantly adding to the total tank volume (as this new water from the feeding will do) you want to make sure your sump has the extra capacity to hold all the additional water without flooding if you have some failure in your feed setup. Say a valve gives loose and drains out into your main tank, or you have some power outtage, or you simply forget about the drip feeding for a while and it drains into your tank, make sure you have calculated in the extra capacity your sump needs.

Y

[ddoering]

bah... I hate when I fat-finger and web pages submit unfinished stuff.

I was going to add if you are constantly adding to the system, you need to balance your exports, you are probably already doing this in one way or another, but if you can recycle the nutrients already in the tank to feed your cultures, that is more appealing to me. I have no idea if it is realistic but that is what I want to try and set up. I was actually going to consider a couple of uv's in series to give the contact time to really try to make sure that the only stuff gettnig back in the cultures is dead "fertilizer"

Cheers,
Doug

[reptoreef]

Hope you all don't mind if I jump in... I have begun to use a self dosing plankton reactor that doses approx 1 cup of rotifer, tigger pod, and some uneaten phyto ever 12 hours directly to my display tank(a 120 w/a 55 gl fuge and a 28 gl equipment/skimmer sump). This includes 3 vessels: a reservoir of sterile sea water, a light reactor for the phytoplankton, and a rotifer container that overflows into the main display. To help maintain proper salinity, I simply syphon 1 gallon of tank water when the reservoir is looking a bit low and boil it, I then put it into the reservoir and let it cool with the existing water(5 gal covered bucket-dark green in color). The pump comes on for 1 minute every 12 hours and feeds the phytoplankton in which overflows into the rotifers and finally overflows into the display. Everything appears to be working really quite smoothly. If I see that the light reactor is able to sustain a good amount of growth to keep the rotifers(and tiggerpods) fed and reproducing well, I may increase the feedings to 1 cup every 6 hours. Has anybody else tried something similar? BTW the phyto and rotifer reactors are clear 2 liters.

[jnarowe]

I would love to see a picture of your set up if you can. It would be cool if all of those posting here with current systems would post pics. I am really interested in continuous feeding and need some guidance. I don't want to dose phyto into my tank as the resulting PO4 would be difficult to handle, but dosing tigger pods, or even just my own frozen food mix would be nice.

What about a reservoir held in my refrigerator and plumbed to a dosing pump? And then a small power head in the reservoir to stir the mixture?

[reptoreef]

The phyto should be ok so long as it's alive...

[jnarowe]

well, my skimmer is a phyto busting machine anyway...

anyone have any thoughts on my idea for for frozen food?

[JCTewks]

I think that if you had the fridge within a foot of the tank, and no more than 12-18"total distance from the fridge to the tank you could do it. You could try having the frozen food in phyto instead of just water...would enrich it a little too. just thaw 3 days worth, strain the water off, and put it in a phyto liguid so the dosing pump can move it.

[GreshamH]

Eeeks....You ever leave thawed seafood in your fridge for three days? I have, not good

[JCTewks]

okay...i see your point. Just trying to make it so your not having to refill with newly thawed food daily....anybody got any better suggestions?

[dendro982]

Let take a small break form the phyto culturing :

Do you know anything small (less than a dorm fridge) and inexpensive for dosing multiple day feedings, for a small dry foods like cyclop eezy and golden pearls?

When it comes to continuous feeding of the frozen food - we are still limited by necessity of refrigeration, right?

Although Jens Kallmeyer described somewhere using the centrifugal tube with fine frozen food, placed in the tank and slowly thawing for a few hours, and, if I remember right, ldrhawke with drilled upside down fish food bottle with small hole in the lid, placed upside down and contacting water - the fish has possibility to pick itself, if wants to. Something like DIY continuous fish feeder.

[LegendLand]

i used a constant feeding method once, didnt do too good, consisted of a feeding unit with some cyclop-eeze positioned directly over the coral, but it only worked short term, after a while it stopped putting food into the tank. & it never put all the food in the unit into the tank either, just locked up.