2000g System overview

[cbui2]

great updates

[Sparkss]

How is the skimmer holding up ? Any observations on it's efficiency and/or performance ?

[nyvp]

Originally posted by Sparkss
How is the skimmer holding up ? Any observations on it's efficiency and/or performance ?

doing great still working on my voltage in my house( anywhere from 109v-123v) with the new neck 8" and the new buble plate. Spazz(scott) also was nice enough to redo my plumbing so thats better as well.

[matt & pam]

Is the hot pink coral a lace coral?

[korbynlehr]

What is your fish total up to?

[spazz]

i like the additions to the tank. its looking very nice! i take it that you found that overhang rock over at coral reef farms? they had some awesome stuff when i was there. sorry to hear your still having problems with the electrical in the house.

[dgasmd]

Originally posted by nyvp
doing great still working on my voltage in my house( anywhere from 109v-123v) with the new neck 8" and the new buble plate. Spazz(scott) also was nice enough to redo my plumbing so thats better as well.

Voltage fluctuations are a pest in S Florida! They are appliance killers, especially when it comes to the rainy/stormy season having tons of power outages for seconds back to back.

Post some pictures of the difference in the skimmer between now and before. How is the new plumbing improving the performance? How is the new plate different?

Things are looking great.

[jnarowe]

we found out that our electric company actually lowers voltage available to certain areas to spread it out and cover demand. They also specifically cut the power to a particular area when there are storms. How did we find out? measuring voltage during a large construction project...an entire neighborhood was getting low voltage and a couple residents got the info. out of the linemen.

[bstone]

Fish list as of today(36):
Tangs:
1-Show Size Male Naso
1-L Blonde Naso
1-XL Red Sea Sailfin
1-M Mimic
1-M Orange Shoulder
1-M Atlantic Blue

Adding Tomorrow:
3-M Yellow Tangs
3-M Purple Tangs

Searching for a Dussumier Tang

LiveAquaria has this listed as a Acanthurus bariene, but I think it is a Acanthurus dussumieri. I could be wrong. But it looks exactly like mine and I am 99.9% positive mine is a Acanthurus dussumieri.

Here is the LINK

Here is a PICTURE of a bariene.

And a PICTURE of a dussumieri.

[TheSaltwaterGuy]

Beautiful tank, man.

Your making me jealous!

I'm supposed to be getting a 480g shark tank this summer. So I'm looking forward to that.

Btw, awesome tank!!!!

[PRINCE_NAMOR]

Does anyone know of any tank builders in the Atlanta area?

[jnarowe]

I'm not crazy, I just need each other.

funny...is that original or did you pull that from something?

[PRINCE_NAMOR]

Original me and my brother have been saying that to each other since we were kids...lol

[nyvp]

bstone :
yes he's a duce should be a nice fish when he gets older.
TheSaltwaterGuy:
thanks for the kind words
dgasmd
I hope your move went well. the skimmer is more consistent and I need to fiddle less with it. almost set it and forget now.
PRINCE_NAMOR exotic in miami that built my tank ships all over the country


Update:

The 3 tangs with lateral line are starting to look better I basically ran through the gambit of checking stray electric, feeding ect. I think it was a changed to seachem carbon and phosphate remover and was using to much and striped the water to much to fast.
update pics new corals

[nyvp]

.




Finally adding my calc reactor











Notice the UPS That I got yest. so my skimmer runs off of the battery 24/7 much more steady now.





Built a stand for the reactor the bottle and the surge protector







.

[nyvp]

.






Moved the airpump up to the new shelves and cleaned up the skimmer plumbing

[mbunaman]

Are you pumping air into the air intake in that picture. If so do you notice better skim output from the protein skimmer.

[nyvp]

Its a dart needlewheel. The air pump is an alita 80 that adds cfm and help push the water up the 6 foot skimmer. with out it the dart cant handle the head pressure well. when you add the wattage of them together you get huge cfm at only 185 wattage

[Sparkss]

Not to mention if you run the dart w/o the alita it pulls over 225w (at least ours does). and pulls darned little air in the process. We actually backed ours down to an Alita 40, trying to find a "sweet spot" for our skimmer. I thought that you had to bleed off some if you were running an 80, like you are ?

Our custom calc reactor should be here this week or next. I need to follow up with Scott to see if it shipped yet.

Looking good NYVP

I was wondernig why you needed to use carbon and phosphate remover though ? I would have thought with the Volcano skimmer that you would have had more than enough "cleaning" power. Did you try dosing sugar for the phosphates ?

How long did it take your Volcano to break in and slime up ? Thanks

[jnarowe]

That is one hell of a Calcium reactor! Be careful that you don't raise the alkalinity too high.

[nyvp]

I thought that you had to bleed off some if you were running an 80, like you are ?

>>> yes if you look at the air hose there is a valve for the bleed off


Looking good NYVP


Why thank you 8 )

I was wondering why you needed to use carbon and phosphate remover though ? I would have thought with the Volcano skimmer that you would have had more than enough "cleaning" power.

>>> one has nothing to do with the other. I think I just added to much carbon and over did it



Did you try dosing sugar for the phosphates ?

>>> nope they are zero was doing more preventive


How long did it take your Volcano to break in and slime up ?

>>>> hmmm let me see seconds after I started it up

[nyvp]

Originally posted by jnarowe
That is one hell of a Calcium reactor! Be careful that you don't raise the alkalinity too high.

will do . How are you doing? saw your tank, it look amazing as usual.

[jnarowe]

saw my tank...how?

It's doing OK but I have taken my kalk stirrer off-line and have to keep reducing my CO2. I am not sure what is happening but it may well be due to probe malfunction as I am starting to not trust my parameters. Perhaps when I calibrated the pH probe I messed it up...I have hit 8.50 twice in the last two days.

So my alkalinity is still 11 - 12 dKh and my Ca, after being rock solid at 420 - 425 for a year suddenly jumped to 475 ppm last week.

The tank looks great except for the losses of montipora. All other corals are doing extremely well, growing fast and with very nice colors. I am starting to see a hint of what it will look like when mature because many of my corals are now larger and filling in the reef. Got a couple new cool corals in but I haven't found the time to take pics. And looking for a source of TMPCC!

Teardrop clams are growing much faster than the crocea and a couple are in the 10 - 12" range now. Fish are all in excellent health although the Sailfin still has the lateral line issue (I got it that way as a "rescue" fish). Down to just 5 blue/green chromis with only 2 - 3 really active in the water column, so I am now looking for a new school.

OK, so more info. than you probably wanted!

[Sparkss]

Scott mentioned that he built one of these reactors fo Energy's tank and it spiked his Alk in a couple of days and freaked everyone out. They are powerful and you really need to be careful with them. We talked about them a bit in our build thread, IIRC. Mainly about ways to tune them and set them up without risking spiking the tank parms.

As for the alita bleed off, I didn't look closely enough at your ball valve in the air line to notice that it was partly open.

Our skimmer, which I think is just about the same size as your, maybe slightly bigger due to the mixing box and other adjustments we asked Scott to include, started spitting out foam less than an hour after hooking it up (at least that was when I got back down to check on it after turngin it on finally). But I still don't feel that it is truly broken in, due to several factors (IE: bubble size consistency, truly skimmate versus some "dirty bubbles" and general flow patterns within the main body of the skimmer). Right now our biggest challenge is that the skimmer being so tall (6.5' + to the top of the collection cup) that the top of the cone is actually above the level of our "run off" drain, so we would never be able to raise the water level to the top of the cone/bottom of the twist lock (which is where most skimmers say to tune their water level to, with the air/recirc turned off, IIRC). Where do you keep your water level currently ?

[Sparkss]

Originally posted by jnarowe
saw my tank...how?

I was going to ask the same thing I thought maybe you posted some picts that I just missed Jonathan