The inwall 380 starfire reborn

[Sparkss]

yea... that would totally suck (and is a little to much on the possible/probable side for my tastes).

One other concern for us is that the wall below the viewing pane is more or less held up by the sheetrock, so the last thing I would want was someone putting a ton of downward/outward weight on that wall (like someone using the counter/ledge as a support for their body weight)

[jnarowe]

the one I am planning is 2" thick and built into the wall. My tank is actually behind a 6"+ deep wall and has that window frame look already. The bar would just be an extension of the box.

[mrcrab]

You also have an acrylic tank.

[jnarowe]

but it is a good point. I certainly don't want scratches on it and that is much more likely than a tsunami.

[nasotang]

Finally got caught up. This thread was full of links to goodies.

Can't wait to see pictures once you have the lighting finshed up.

How did the replacement of the Vortec go?

[Sparkss]

not so good. The replacement ran fantastic.. full stream, for about 12 hours, then fell victim to the dreaded code corruption (even though our wavemaker has a 15 minute duty cycle). I tried swapping drivers with the old pump (since I had not sent it back yet.. I was waiting) but that driver aparently was bad also (just blinked red/green, right from the get go). I shipped both pumps off to Icecap this afternoon, now I need to wait for them to receive them then ship yet another pump back to me. So now I am out the $345 for the first pump, another $345 hold is on our credit card, and we still don't have a working pump.. I can understand why others express such frustration when dealing with a bad pump. I will say that when they work they are truly a thing of beauty. When they don't, they are enough to make you want to scream (loudly).

on the tank front the Seachem ammonia badge is reporting levels back in teh Good range. I need to break out a real test kit and see where everything stands. I will likely do that tomorrow afternoon, as tomorrow morning I am picking up the second sump and possibly some frags from a fellow reefer down near hte South Bay.

Once the cycle completes (or gets close enough) I will connect the tank to the current, shared sump and filtration setup (which will involve merely turning on the tap for the tank on the return manifold.. although I do need to run a short bit of 2" drain to finish up to the sump)

The lighting rack is bascially finished, except for the 24" VHOs, but I still haven't decided on those yet. I have a spare 660, 4 sets of water proof endcaps and some new 24" URI actinic white bulbs. I wanted to use it to extend the viewing time (not really for supplementation purposes), but don't know if they will be enough to provide enough coverage to be worth the trouble (to design and implement their addition to the current rack). I haven't had the time to play around with them to see how much light they provide.. possibly next week I will have the time and then will decide if they are worth it or not .

I am glad that you found many useful links.. that is what RC is supposed to be all about.. sharing information

[zemuron114]

there are some anthias who will load themselves up on food at one feeding (bartletts, bicolor, coopers - a few more)

there are some anthias who wont school as tightly as others. A few that come to mine are bicolor, bimacs etc...

However, everyone i talked to that have bartletts (and having experience holding them) they always school no matter what. they are probably the easiest anthias to get to eat and to keep long term. they should even school without larger more aggressive fish. This is just how they behave IME. and you can feed them once a day after they settle in! - i highly suggest bartletts

[jnarowe]

I will say that when they work they are truly a thing of beauty. When they don't, they are enough to make you want to scream (loudly).

No kidding. I have one that is now screeching. Lately they have been falling off too. There are times when I am really exasperated and wish I had just done closed loops, but as you stated, when they are running correctly, the flow is truly amazing.

[mrcrab]

Hey Jonathan,

I'm having the same problem with one falling off. Any suggestions? It's set on 1/2" on half inch glass. I was thinking of just removing the boot.

[jnarowe]

I have no idea. I don't mess around with the boots since my glass is 3/4" but I did get a small washer way back when that made the magnet fit closer to the glass.

[Sanjay]

I had to remove the boot too, for the 3/4" glass.

sanjay.

[mrcrab]

Yes, no boot for the 3/4" but mine is 1/2" and is falling off with the boot set at 1/2 inch. I'll ask on the IC forum.

[Sparkss]

well, I am down to 1 working Vortec now.. *sigh*, although I hope that the 2 taht died today are easy to fix . To explain I will need to back up a bit

Ammonia was down to 0, trites were through the roof and I had an appt to go pick up the second sump. While I was there they were tearing down 2 180g tanks that had been up for cloes to 8 years and getting ready to through out all of the sandbed. I had brought 2 empy salt buckets with me since I knew they were tearing down some tank and I had planned to "beg" for some of their aged LS . Well, long story short, and a trip to the Home Depot around the corner and I left there a long while later with the sump and 12 buckets of sand. There were ceriths, strombus, nassarius, worms, hermits, I even saw some small peppermint shrimp (but I seriously doubt that they made it packed in all that sand). I put 9 buckets into the tank, almost tripling the sand bed. I would have liked to have set up one of the sumps to keep the sand bioactive, but that was just not an option, so the only way to "salvage" the life in the sand was to dump it into the new tank.. which I just finished doing *uugghh*.. cue the sore back now . The plan is to get the new sumps set up sooner than later and siphon out several inches of sand into one of them for a RDSB (which that end goal was always in our plans.. the journey to get there just got a little more complicated ). I just hope that we didn't shoot ourselves in the foot by doing it this way.. I guess only time will tell, and it won't be the first time either

Of course I turned everything off while adding the sand, and I let things setlled down a bit before turning anything back on. But when I fired the pumps back up only 1 would stay running. The other 2 would run for a couple of seconds, make some funny noise and then get the blinking red light... then a couple of seconds later start running again, then wide down to the blinking red light, and so on. I took one out, took it apart and cleaned it top to bottom, but it still wouldn't run. I swapped wet end with the working pump, and sure enough it is the wet end. I can only guess that some small particle of sand made it's way into the wet end, but I took it completely apart.. so what am I missing ? Guess I will do some reading on it tomorrow online. One thing I did note was that one of the "dirty" wet ends also fell off while I was trying to get it to run. Just before it fell off I thought I saw it twist as is the whole wet end were spinning and not just the propeller. Maybe the prop got stuck and the whole wet end spun on the magentic field and that caused it to fall off ? Could that also be what is happening to your pumps ?

Well, I will check it all in the morning.. the fluval and skimmer are still runing, along with 1 Vortec... hopefully we will see some improvement in the morning

[mrcrab]

Don't think so as mine will run for days before it falls off. Other times it will start to slide down the glass off the dry side, believe it or not.

I'll get up some mornings and the dry gasket is where it should be but the motor (dry side) and the prop side will have slid down the glass 3 inches.

[jnarowe]

Ok, now that is strange. You don't use the cable keepers?

[mrcrab]

I have them draped over the top rim at the moment as I haven't decided on their final spot.

[jnarowe]

believe it or not, you must use those or the pumps will float around on the glass, IME.

[Sparkss]

well got an Email from ETM/IC and they found the issues with the 2 pumps that I sent back in (like maybe they wouldn't and I was just batty ?) . They should be shipping the replacements out tomorrow so likely by next week we should have all of our Vortecs back in action.

We ordered 2 battery backups for the Vortecs, so that we can put them back onto our wavemaker without fear of the code corruption issues. They are also sending along some spare BB connection cables so that we can put 2 pumps onto each BB.

The water is pretty clear now and the trites are reading between .5 and 1 ppm (day before yesterday they were way over 5 ppm, so they are coming down fast). We are heading out tomorrow to pick up a 300g rubbermaid tub to move a large portion of the LS back out of the tank and hold it until we get the sump/fuge set up and ready for the RDSB. We will end up causing another storm in the tank and may even spawn another mini-cycle, but such is life. And speaking of life there was a ton of stuff to come out of the sand that we got, including, but no limited to, 3 different types of hermit crabs, a horseshoe crab (a bit bigger than a quarter), an emerald crab (still to be trapped out.. as I am anti-crab and definitely anti-mythrax), some sort of "zebra cerith" (looked like a regular cerith but with white and black concentric stripes), some smaller nassarius snails, possibly a fighting conch, lots of different worms, and many different pods and other microfauna.

Once we move the extra sand out we will start on the final aquascaping. Then once we are confident that all cycles are finished (bacteria cycles anyways.. algae cycles are likely still to come) and the water chemistry is stabilized we will begin moving the corals from the prop tank and tearing it down in preparation for placing the sumps in the same spot in the "fish room" .

This will optimitsically mean more pictures to come within the next 1 - 2 weeks. The weekend after next being a 3 day weekend I hope to have the prop tank torn down by then so that I can focus on building out the new filtration setup (sumps, skimmer, etc).

*wish me luck *

[jnarowe]

GL!

[GreshamH]

Wow, you lugged all that sand back from Max's? SCORE

I took care of him today and checked on what is left (in storage). He's got a lot left Tom, sure you don't need anything else?

[Sparkss]

yea.. scored all of that sand, but not sure if I am regretting it or not quite yet. There were alot of critters and mucho life in taht sand.. maybe a bit too much (we found some worms that I have yet to ID and are not really comfortable with).

We took over half of the sand out yesterday nad let the "storm" settle down over night with only the skimmer and fluval running (with freshly cleaned filter pads). I checked the trites before we started and they were a rock bottom 0, so we are good there (going to check them again today when we are all done, jsut in case we stirred up a mini-cycle). When we took the sand out I tried to mix the old with the new, so that there was about half and half of each. They were of a slightly different gain size, so I could tell the larger sections of each one from the other.

We will be tackling the final aquascaping this afternoon, if time permits.

The more I think about it the less likely we are going to be to connect the old nad new systems together, but alot will depend on when the skimmer gets here too.

At what point does the sand bed become aenarobic (more or less a DSB) ? IS it @ 4" or 3". What is the maximum "good" SSB depth ?

[mrcrab]

Don't take this as gospel but I believe:

1"-2" = SSB
2"-4" = MSB
4"-6" = DSB

[quy_nquyen]

im really excited to see what happenes next. waiting to see some final pictures of your aquascaping

[Sparkss]

got quite a bit done, but we stirred up so much sand that we had to stop for the day and let the filters take the "dust storm" back out of the water column . We did let the RO/DI unit run and top off the tank a bit.. brought it to within an inch of the bottom of the overflow combs. So far it is shaping up to be a pretty open "floorplan" and while we both have a few ideas about the end result, I really can't say exactly how it will all pan out until we get the rocks all settled into place .

One thing I will say is that the biggest challenge so far is not to put too much rock too close to the surface of the tank. That is a negative for 2 reasons... first being that not much coral would like being that close up under the lights and secondly, the higher up the rockwork the more it blocks the spread of the light. Tomorrow will be another day and we should be able to come real close to our first "draft" of the aquascaping (yes, and more pictures !!! Finally !!)

[jnarowe]

I went with mostly low-lying rock with a wall at on end of the tank based on advice from Steve Weast. Essentially he said that too many of us build our reefs out of rock instead of corals.