Building Big Bertha: 800G

[bbrantley]

Originally posted by Me No Nemo
Do keep an eye on those white spots as those could be flukes. They often line up on the edges of fins like that. A freshwater dip will have them lifting off and falling to the bottom of the dip container if the spots progress or don't disappear soon. They look like tiny white potato chips, are fairly common on tangs and angels and are often thought to be lymph or ich. Gorgeous tank and fish! Good luck to you!

Thanks, those white spots seem to have cleared up. All the tangs look great, at least to my amateur eye. Everyone seems to be happy to eat flake and pellet food, to pick at the algae but not really make much progress with it, and to ignore Selcon-coated nori. Go figure!

Ben

[aclos3]

You can feed them lettuce too. Our yellow and purple tangs love green lettuce rubber banded to a rock. That was a colorful sentence!

[dsandfort]

I need to know the color of the rubber band.

[NewMariner]

Wow! I just spent the entire afternoon reading this thread...Nice tank.

Im kinda curious though, did you jump right into this monster? How long had you had the 225g tank? As you said it wasnt setup prior to that. Any prior Saltwater experience?

Ive always heard that Purple tangs are very agressive when adding new tank mates to the tank. How are you going to stop or curve their agressiveness? If you also would soak your nori in some liquid garlic that would help them be attracted to it. Or at least in my experience with a Naso and Copas Tang...

[bbrantley]

Originally posted by NewMariner
Wow! I just spent the entire afternoon reading this thread...Nice tank.

Im kinda curious though, did you jump right into this monster? How long had you had the 225g tank? As you said it wasnt setup prior to that. Any prior Saltwater experience?

Ive always heard that Purple tangs are very agressive when adding new tank mates to the tank. How are you going to stop or curve their agressiveness? If you also would soak your nori in some liquid garlic that would help them be attracted to it. Or at least in my experience with a Naso and Copas Tang...

Hey Tony,

I pretty much jumped right in. I had a 225G that I got set up in my living room and left up with LR and a couple fish for about eight months. During the second half of those eight, I was trying to figure out where I could house all the noisy equipment I needed to make that tank work really well. In the end, I concluded that I would just make a dedicated fish room, oh, and while I'm at it, increase the tank by 4x. I did have a 75G freshwater planted tank in a previous life that did well for several years. One of the things that we got addicted to with it was silence. I live in a very quiet house and work from home, so I try to go to great length to only introduce things that don't raise the noise floor so much. Think of it as a bit of a long-term health and sanity investment. (I guess I have a little more SW experience: I've been diving quite a bit all over the place.)

I suppose it remains to be seen how aggressive the purples will be with newcomers. We'll know in about... oh, 36 hours. I've got more fish on the way this week!

Ben

[jnarowe]

I haven't had any problems with my purple tang. I release into the display at night which seems to help ease new fish into the herd.

[NewMariner]

Originally posted by bbrantley
Hey Tony,

I pretty much jumped right in. I had a 225G that I got set up in my living room and left up with LR and a couple fish for about eight months. During the second half of those eight, I was trying to figure out where I could house all the noisy equipment I needed to make that tank work really well. In the end, I concluded that I would just make a dedicated fish room, oh, and while I'm at it, increase the tank by 4x. I did have a 75G freshwater planted tank in a previous life that did well for several years. One of the things that we got addicted to with it was silence. I live in a very quiet house and work from home, so I try to go to great length to only introduce things that don't raise the noise floor so much. Think of it as a bit of a long-term health and sanity investment. (I guess I have a little more SW experience: I've been diving quite a bit all over the place.)

I suppose it remains to be seen how aggressive the purples will be with newcomers. We'll know in about... oh, 36 hours. I've got more fish on the way this week!

Ben

Well congrats on truly a beautiful build. Im impressed. Im in the planning stages of a system about the size of your sumps, resevoirs, and fuges Hopefully my smaller scale will look half as good as yours...

What do you do for a living? And are they hiring? I need a job like you got

[Me No Nemo]

Originally posted by jnarowe
tangers: encouraging a fellow reef keeper to put Mexican Turbos in their tank is like handing someone a handgranade with the pin pulled and telling them it will fix a fuel leak in their car. They are NOT captive reef appropriate by any stretch of the imagination.

As much as I have to agree that turbo snails are not the answer to algae control in a tank, I do believe they help to get the problem under control...but they are just a band-aid for other problems. I always keep a couple in my reefs (6-175 gallon tanks that have been described as "pristine") but the need to have lots means there is some type of nutrient problem that needs to be addressed as well. As an LFS owner, I do recommend them in small numbers, but also take them back in trade for smaller ones or other inverts once my customers get their problems under control. Especially in smaller tanks, they can knock corals over and large numbers should never be necessary as they are great grazers. In cases where hair algae becomes a nuisance, I highly recommend cleaning off rocks and continuing to do so on a regular basis as an intricate part of good husbandry. Take a small pump or turkey baster and blow off the rock. Most folks can't believe the amount of detritius that comes off when doing this. (Also helps keep zoas and other corals from developing bacterial/fungal problems on their connective tissue). But, just getting it suspended without removing it from the tank does little good. Use a sock or filter pad to catch the debris and rinse these frequently. Conchs, ceriths, trochus grazers, nassarius snails, Atlantic cucumbers and one or two small turbos should be able to keep your tank clean and algae free if the other issues are attended to. Find an LFS willing to swap out larger snails for smaller ones if they get too large and one that won't try to sell you 50 snails and crabs for your 50 gallon tank You can do more to add to your bioload when all those inverts start dying off from lack of food then the good those numbers will do you. Just my two cents after battling this stuff for a good part of the 32 years I've been in the hobby and finally winning the war Good luck, Marcye

[jnarowe]

Good points Marcye. I realize my comments were perhaps a bit combative, and although not pointed at you in particular, I can see how a responsible LFS owner would take issue with what I wrote about Mexican Turbos.

It is few and far between that we as hobbiests encounter an LFS that has the best interests of the reef keeper as well as the animals under their charge.

As a recent example, take a look at this thread: new member

A bit of a knee-jerk reaction by myself, but this is what we see on a daily basis. Just like any business, there are responsible merchants and those willing to tell the customer anything to separate them from their money.

I wouldn't choose to put Mexican Turbos in my system again. While I did keep them alive for a long time, I consider them to be a ticking time-bomb, particularly in a system like mine that is evap. cooled and has significant temp. swings on a daily basis. And BTW, they were NOT sold to me as Mexican Turbos, but as "Vietnam Turbos" and as babies, I couldn't tell the difference.

Thanks for posting your policies on dealing with cleanup crews. I find it very refreshing to be in contact with someone who really cares about their customers and their captive reefs!

[Me No Nemo]

Kudos to you and your group for promoting quality aquacultured inverts to the hobby. I have to admit that I do get frustrated when all LFS are grouped as "the bad guys." There are stores that really do care and I appreciate the kind words. I've sent you a pm with some info...let me know if it's something you'd be interested in. Marcye

[jnarowe]

Thanks Marcye. I am sure we can do something with that!

[erics3000]

Ben we need some pics.

[crab0000]

I second the motion!

[bbrantley]

Hi folks,

Well, I apologize for not bringing you pictures this evening. However, my excuses are good: I've been doing a lot of Bertha cleaning, and each cleaning leaves her in a very not-so-picturesque state for the rest of the day. While I was gone for nearly three weeks, the tank didn't get its daily magnet treatment, so now I am paying the price as I go diving for 15 or 20 minutes a day and scrape off a portion of the very bottom parts of the tank. It's hard work and, while I have many scrapers of different lengths, none of them really give me incredible leverage. I also am blessed with bad wrists, so I can only scrape a foot or two of bottom-edge-of-tank in one pass.

Fortunately, that leaves plenty of time to do other things. I've been sucking up and blowing away hair algae like it's going out of style! I'm about to replace all the MH bulbs (they're almost eight months old now) and I'll have a reactor for GFO to cut down on the phosphate real soon, too. I suspect these two will knock down the algae pretty good. We'll see.

I ordered several new fish from LiveAquaria this week. Alas, it was somewhat of a shipping/stocking disaster. I ordered:

1. 40 more chromis
2. 3 stars
3. 1 fire fish
4. 1 majestic foxface
5. 1 zoa colony
6. 3 lawnmower blennies

Alas, the foxface was out of stock, I was shipped 36 chromis instead of 40, there were 16 dead chromis on arrival, and Fedex banged around one of the containers so I received a sloppy, wet box with a dry zoa colony inside it. Whew!

The rest of the bad news is that most of the rest of the chromis died over the course of the next day. I think maybe the temperature is the culprit, even though the other fish and inverts seemed to come through okay. Very weird.

The good news is that DFS/LA were really good like usual. They've credited me back for all the dead fish as well as the shipping. I don't have the luxury of letting them ship me a backordered fish (the foxface) whenever they get it in; I have to schedule my pick-ups since they don't deliver priority to my house out in the boonies. But now I can wait until they have it in stock and order it separately at no additional charge. So I guess that's okay.

In other news, the water parameters that I can measure are looking great. Undetectable nitrates, pH 8.2, dKH 7, Ca 385ppm, etc. I have yet to do a water change on this tank (I kind of can't yet) and things still seem good.

In OTHER news, I've ordered almost all of the rest of the "primary equipment" Bertha will need for the long haul: Deltec calcium reactor and kalk stirrer, media, tubing, regulator, CO2 tank, GFO and carbon "reactors," phosphate colorimeter, GFO, magnesium supplement, two 160-gallon plastic storage cylinders, and all kinds of assorted plumbing bits. Fedex and UPS will be busy delivering boxes of all shapes and sizes to my house in the next few weeks! Now if I can just find time to plug it all in.

Tomorrow I will try to take some pictures before I do another cleaning pass. No promises anymore; I'm too flaky for those.

Ben

[MikD_reefer]

Can we get a FTS please

[chris wright]

Good to see alls well, with the exception of the fish of course. Sounds like you have a reputable source for the fish though which is a nice change

Looking forward to the fts when your ready

Cheers

Chris

[Bax]

Going away for even a week freaks me out with my little system. Leaving a beast like Bertha for a few weeks, yikes!

I am sure you have your hands very full, so ... we'll patiently await your FTS

[reeffish964]

Some times I think hermit crabs do harm to corals.

[bbrantley]

Hey,

Well, an update is long overdue. It seems like I start every post with that these days, though. The good news is that I have actually been doing stuff... I just haven't felt like I've had time to go back and document it all as it happens. Here are some miscellaneous updates.

First, Bertha was completely on her own for the first time a couple weekends ago. I know, it must be kind of like leaving your little baby with a sitter the first time... such concern and guilt washed over me, let me tell you. Not!

The interesting thing was that we had our first real snow of the season over the weekend we were gone; we came home to about five inches and... the generator on outside when we pulled in! Of course, my immediate focus was to walk straight inside, tracking snow and all, and see how Bertha was doing. Great news: everything seemed fine. Best I can tell, the power went out about 6am Sunday morning; we arrived home around 1pm to a tank in fine shape. (I do wish the Aquatronica would record not only the length of the outage but also the time of it ... with my generator, the length is always about 45 or 50 seconds, which is meaningless. I was able to guesstimate the outage time by the time on one of my clocks in the kitchen this time.)

The second interesting thing was that we had our first real windstorm earlier this week. We live on the top of a mountain ridge, so we get some serious breezy days from time to time. This particular day we were getting a steady 30mph with gusts to about 75... plenty to knock you over. I made the mistake of leaving my new 165 gallon storage tanks outside... they were blown halfway down the mountain by the time I realized what was going on! Anyway, that's not the interesting thing. Here it is:



This is a plot of tank and Bertha room ambient air temp over the course of our morning windstorm. For the first time since I started Bertha up, the controller starting beeping and whining about tank temp around 10:30am. You can see there that the temperature fell to about 76F -- the 750w of heaters were on all morning, but they could not keep up with the room, which was getting colder and colder. And the reason that was happening was because I have been leaving a tiny crack in my window so I could stick my RO/DI waste tube out into the side yard. (I figured I'd just run it there instead of through the septic system.) The wind was strong enough that it was pushing cold in through that crack and making the room too cold!

I guess it's not all that exciting when you read it, but the good news is that the controller did its job: it alerted me to the first out-of-whack situation Bertha has endured so far. Of course, I closed the tiny crack in the window, and you can see how the room warmed up nicely at that point.

On a normal day, Bertha oscillates between 78 and 80 with occasional heating or cooling (evaporative with one small fan) and the room temp oscillates between about 70 and 80 depending on sun load. I don't expect that to change much in the middle of winter, because the room still has radiant floor heat. And, as long as the room is within 5 to 7 degrees of Bertha, my little chintzy heaters and fan do a fine job regulating the water.

More updates in the next post; RC will block me if I keep typing.

[bbrantley]

The third item of business is that I've decided to renege on my plastic auxiliary tank stands. They're pretty cool because they were so easy to install and because they are impervious to the harsh saltwater environment... but I am concerned about the bowing I observe when I load the tanks full with water. I don't think they would catastrophically fail, but they might... and I'd rather not take that chance. Also, with my new pair of 165-gallon storage cylinders, I really should rearrange the room a little bit while I can take advantage of my laziness in not having everything plumbed yet. I really want to put the cylinders on the exterior wall of the room right where the floor joists rest on the foundation of the house... that way the extra 300 gallons won't add much load to the floor.

So, I found these fantastic steel stands at Costco for, interestingly, the same price as my plastic ones. I bought one pair to test out, and it looks like they will work perfectly. They are exactly 18 inches in depth, which is the size of both auxiliary acrylic tanks. They are only 4 feet long, though, so I'll need to make a trip back and pick up one more pair of stands. I have a tentative room arrangement planned (in my head, of course -- this paper stuff is overrated), but clearly I have another good three or four days of solid effort before everything can be arranged the "new way."

The fourth item of business is that all the gadgets have arrived except the phosphate colorimeter. I really want that test device to get here, because I want to measure the phosphate before I start wiring up the GFO reactor. I have a secret desire to confirm that phosphate is the source of much of the green algae in the tank, and it would be un-fun to do that just by watching it disappear over a few months... much cooler and more satisfying to measure it, right?

So, anyway, I've got a big giant calcium reactor and a pretty big kalk stirrer, plus all the assorted appetizers that go with them, ready to wire up. I'm going to have to wait to install them until I get the major room rearrangement finished, however. No biggie -- there aren't any corals of note in the tank yet anyhow.

The item of interest is that the fish (the ones that didn't die in that last DFS shipment!) and zoos are all doing fine. I even got the tangs to start eating the nori off a rock today... just a little bit. There is hope, I suppose.

I have to go out of town for the entirety of this coming week, but, if I get lucky, I really will try to take a few snapshots of the tank for the curious before I leave. I'm batting about 2-for-5 on actually doing that when I say I will, so you takes your chances... but I did scrape the whole tank down yesterday, so the acrylic is at least sparkly clean!

Ben

[jnarowe]

Great update Ben, and it's always nice to see the controller doing its job.

[miwoodar]

Wow - first snow and the generator has already come in handy. I'm glad to hear it kicked in and ran as planned.

I agree with jnarowe - great update. It makes up for the pics. I guess I'll just have to keep looking at my puny tank until they come.

[bbrantley]

Originally posted by miwoodar
Wow - first snow and the generator has already come in handy. I'm glad to hear it kicked in and ran as planned.

It's weird. We don't usually lose power in normal snow events. I think it was just bad luck or maybe the first significant snow dislodged a transformer or a line or something. In any event, we proceeded to lose power two more times that day for a few hours at a time. Each time it seemed to step in with no trouble.

A side benefit of the generator is that it keeps the internet, computers, and TV online... so as not to miss out on any electronic gadget-using fun.

[Elliott]

very nice build, looks like your having fun, as it should be! good move on the genset, a key piece of equipment where you are, good luck and keep the pics coming

[Bax]

I guess a backup generator is mandatory in your neck of the woods, with or without a reef. Great that it worked perfectly for you!