FRONT VIEW - July 13, 2002
| The Sump I have moved the two SEN 900 pumps to the outside through a 1-1/2" bulkhead fitting. The object was to remove as many heat generating things as possible. Since the Sen's are Internal/External they were an obvious choice. You can also see the chiller coil hanging on the front and the new protein skimmer setup. The white bucket that the tank return drops into has a bunch of 1" holes around the bottom. About 4" off of the bottom is a piece of eggcrate that I use to support a filter pad from time-to-time. Generally I do not use mechanical media in the tank unless things get cloudy (not very often). |
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| Top-Rear View I leave the top open now. This is to allow evaporation for cooling, reduce maintenance and allow more light into the tank. From this view, you can also see the new standpipes, wave maker and lights. I have changed to 10K Ushio Metal Halides and Coral Sun Actinic/Day bulbs in the fixture. I changed 1 bulb per week to minimize stress. This has made a major difference for my stony corals, but I had to lower the mushrooms to the bottom because they needed the distance Notice the large glass center rib on the top of the tank. This is a real pain to deal with - especially since I have to work from the back of the tank. If you are getting into the hobby, don't buy a tank like this - I guarantee that you won't like it. I actually use this to my advantage now. I let the algae grow on it and put my low-light corals in the shade of it. When both surge tanks flush, the water actually comes up over the top of this. |
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| Chiller From Dehumidifier During a heat wave in April, the small room that the aquarium is in got really hot and the tank started to overheat. The only thing that seemed to mind was the Anemone and the Colt (which starts to wilt pretty badly when temp changes are more than 2 degrees in a 10 hour period). So after doing some research and not finding anything I liked at a price I wanted to pay, I tried something new. This project was a real payoff! It took me about 6 hours and cost $60 plus the cost of the dehumidifier (which you can get for $140 brand-new). |
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| Turbo Skimmer Conversion My Red-Sea Berlin Classic Skimmer was doing OK, but it needed occasional venturi cleaning to remain efficient and I had a feeling that it was not the best skimmer for my system because the foam was very wet and it did not skim well when I adjusted it for drier foam. An online store had a sale on the Turbo conversion so I bought it as a last resort before changing to a higher end skimmer. The Turbo model uses a pump with air porting that allows air into the impeller. A special impeller whips the air and water into a nice froth before it gets to the skimmer. The bubbles are much smaller and denser than the classic model. Although the classic is a nice skimmer - I recommend the turbo hands down. I ported the output of the pump right through the side of the sump with a bulkhead fitting for efficiency and made new outflow piping. The difference is quite impressive - I have noticed a significant increase in dry skimate - the most nasty, disgusting smelling stuff you ever want to come in contact with. I thought changing diapers was bad! |
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| Surge (Wave) Maker I thought this was an original idea when I built my prototype in the garage. I soon found out that the Waikiki Aquarium has been using an identical system on most of their reef display tanks for years. The object of this device is to create large water currents closer to those that occur on shallow reefs. The concept is pretty simple but getting it to work takes a lot of tweaking and patients. Basically, there are two 7 gallon tanks (vinyl wastepaper baskets) that have an upside-down "P-Trap" connected through the side and down to the bottom on the inside. A pump continuously fills the tanks. When the water level gets near the top of the tank, a siphon is created by water running into the Aquarium, and the whole 7 gallons flushes into the Aquarium in about 5 seconds (that's a 5000 gph burst!). The siphon is broken when the water level drops below the end of the pipe, and the process starts all over again. NO MOVING PARTS! Check my WebCam and watch it go! |
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| Overflow Standpipe One of the problems with a surge device is that my overflows have to be able to deal with the potential of 14 gallons of water dumped into the tank in about 5 seconds. I can tell you that the first time I saw both surge tanks flush at the same time, I had a major adrenaline rush because the water level came up to about 1/8" below the top of the trim! Another gallon and it would overflow for sure. Problem #2 is that corner overflows are very noisy because, if you use standard equipment, the water level in the overflow chamber is only a few inches deep. The water running over the top and down into the chamber sounds like a waterfall. This is normally not welcome in a living space. The object of this device is to raise the level of the water in the chamber, but keep the intake under water to eliminate the "sucking and gurgling" noises of the water going down the pipe. This is a modification of a design credited to R. Durso and appropriately called the "Durso Standpipe". I had to doctor it up a little to deal with the enormous flow of the wave maker. |
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| Refugium I started to have Phosphate and Nitrate problems. They weren't too high, just not low enough for real healthy corals. To deal with the situation, I wanted to convert my system to a deep sand bed. Unfortunately, the Rock structure and placement of some animals in the tank prevented me from getting the 3-4" of sand in the display tank. To deal with the situation, I converted my 10 Gallon quarantine tank to a refugium. First I emptied and cleaned the tank. Then I built an overflow out of PVC (design is here!!). Finally, I added 4" of sand (YardRight Tropical Play Sand), a little live rock and some grape and short feather Calurpa. I took a few hermits and snails out of my main tank and bought refugium starter kits from IPSF.COM and Inland Aquatics. I pump water from the main tank and let the overflow drain back to the sump. Eventually, I want to raise this tank so it drains back to the main tank and the live copepods feed the coral before being ground up in the return pumps. I converted the main tank to a sand bed as well, but I only added about 1" of sand and left some of the gravel in place to seed the sand. All is well now. It took about 5 weeks for everything to settle in, but nitrates are now about 1.5 and phosphates are undetectable. Along with the new skimmer, the biological capacity of the tank is astounding and I have been doing less frequent water changes (every 2 weeks instead of weekly) |
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| Controls This is the first time I am showing the finished control panel. The space is tight around the sump, so the switch bank here gives me the ability to turn everything on and off without crawling around. It is also rigged up to some level switches in the sump to prevent overflows. I described the operation in earlier pages so I won't go into it again. Everything is working reliably, some some times I forget to turn things on after I turn them off so I've made it a habit to check everything just before I go to bed each night. Eventually, I hope to salvage some PLC controls from obsolete equipment where I work and completely automate the system including safety situations and connection of statistics to my web server. Someday..... To the right is an old heat controller that I salvaged from a plastic molding machine at work. It works great controlling both heat and cool. I rigged it up with a 20 amp solid-state relay to handle the load of the heater and I leave the heater adjusted to a few degrees above the tank temperature as a safety measure. Since I built the chiller, I have never seen anything but 78 on the display. |
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| WebCam When I first started this sight, I thought I would get a lot of questions about the aquarium equipment - and I have. However, for every question about my tank setup, I get two about the WebCam. Let's face it - it's cool. I can check on and enjoy my tank at work, on vacation, when I travel. Sometimes, I can even see my family members though the glass on the other side. The top picture is the camera mounted to a stud beside the tank. The camera is connected to a modulator that converts the signal to Cable Channel 122. The output from the modulator is combined with the cable signal coming into the house with a splitter/combiner available at Radio-Shack. My cable company only transmits up to channel 91, so this works fine. Finally, my desktop PC has a TV tuner card hooked up to cable that I set to cable channel 122. The cool part is that I can watch my fish from any TV in the house! I have a very extensive home network which includes a dedicated 1.5mbs Internet connection. My web site resides on a web server in the house. Currently, I use a program called WebCam32. It has many features. I use the server push feature, and the FTP upload feature. If you go to my WebCam page, you can see a demonstration of both. On the first page, you will see a still image that changes every 30 seconds. This is actually FTP'ed to my web server every 30 seconds by WebCam. The server push kicks in when you push the remote button to see a live video stream. In this case, you are connecting through my firewall directly to my desktop PC. This took a little Java programming and creative firewall configuration - but I'm a geek and had fun doing it. If you want to do this and have an Internet connection that does not leave your only phone off hook, WebCam32 and a PC camera is all you need. It is not hard to do if you have ever created a simple web page. In fact, I believe that WebCam32 comes with pages you can use without doing any authoring at all. Another cool possibility would be using one of those wireless cameras from X10 (no, I am not getting paid to tell you that). If you have a video input card in your PC, this would allow you to be quite a distance from the tank to the PC without a bunch of wiring. |
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