10000L Coral reef at The Maritime Museum & Aquarium Sweden

[revhtree]

WOW so awesome!

 

[Sallstrom]

WOW so awesome!

Thank you

/ David

 

[Sallstrom]

A new year for this coral tank. The last year! In September we will close the museum/aquarium since we are going to rebuild the whole builing. And we will construct a new building for the new Aquarium! This work will take about 3 years and during that time we will have to move all the corals and the fish(the ones we'll keep) to a smaller room in our building. There we will set up smaller tanks for the corals, and hopefully after 3 years we will have a lot of corals to move into the new Aquarium

The last weeks has given us some extra work due to 2 failing pumps, one skimmer pump and the retur pump. And the power went down in our sump room. This happened at midnight of course, and somehow the alarm didn't work(or we couldn't see anything wrong when the alarm went off). So the water level was 3 cm lower then usual for about 6 hours in the main tank and the tips of some corals died(when the returpump was off). One interesting thing about this was to see what kind of corals who died and what kind who survived. Like we have seen before the Seriatopora species didn't do well and the most of the Acroporas survived. The Stylopora also died. But again, only the tips of the corals, so this failure didn't do much for the whole tank. The water movement was on in the tank etc.

Another thing we see in this system is the difference in the main tank and the 3 smaller tanks connected to the same sump. The nutrients are low at the moment, both NO3 and PO4 are close to 0 when we meassure. I've seen it coming the last months and I wanted to see if we would get cyano or not when the nitrate got really low. In the main tank there is almost no cyano at all. In the smaller tanks(600-1800 L) it has increased. My guess is that it's caused by higher turn over rate (tank - sump) in the smaller tanks and lesser fish there. It's too "clean". But the corals still do fine.

Yes, and a happy new year to all here at R2R!

/ David

Here's an update on the nutrient and cyano situation. The nutrients have been very low for a while now and we have some cyano in the smaller tanks, no cyano in the large display tank. So to do an experiment on how to get rid of cyano in smaller tanks connected to larger systems I started to dos nitrate(KNO3). This could be interesting to see if it could help smaller tanks that suffer from cyano caused(?) by low NO3 since we are planning for the new Aquarium. Our plan is to have a really large coral tank but also have some smaller ones in the same water system. We've seen that this type of system could get cyano problems in the small tanks before in our exhibit.
Of course the KNO3 will after a while spread out in the whole system, but initially it will raise the NO3 in the small tank(and it's possible to decrease the flow from the sump to get bigger effect). Anyway, I've been away for a week from work skiing and came back this monday and found the frag tank without cyano. A week before I clean the sand a bit and it was a lot of red slime. So three weeks of KNO3 dosing has done something. The NO3 was 1ppm in the frag tank and 0,5 ppm in the display tank yesterday. Great

/ David

 

[NS Mike D]

I'm enjoying this thread. Beautiful tanks and informative details about the mechanics, much of which can be scaled down and applied to our smaller tanks. Especially appreciated the PAR mapping. We have a lot of pictures of great tanks with details about their filtration, water parameters and even lights, but without the actual PAR levels, which. IMO, is very important.

 

[Sallstrom]

I'm enjoying this thread. Beautiful tanks and informative details about the mechanics, much of which can be scaled down and applied to our smaller tanks. Especially appreciated the PAR mapping. We have a lot of pictures of great tanks with details about their filtration, water parameters and even lights, but without the actual PAR levels, which. IMO, is very important.

Thank you very much! I'm glad to hear that

Yes, I'm happy we bought the PAR-meter. It's even harder to tell the amount of light in tanks now with LEDs. So it's a great tool.

/ David

 

[Sallstrom]

Corals and bubbles

 

[najer]

Very nice, sorry if I missed this earlier, do you nano bubble?

 

[Sallstrom]

Very nice, sorry if I missed this earlier, do you nano bubble?

Only unintentional There are some bubbles coming from the returnpump and the anti siphone hole. Some days there are more, some days no bubbles.

/ David

 

[Sallstrom]

Something we're getting better and better at is documentation of what we do with our tanks. All changes go into a excel doc, from change of MH bulbs, new fish, power failures to additives. This way it's easy to go back and see what things we have done, specially good when we see something change in the tank.
Also necessary because we are a team working here and everybody sometimes works alone and have to be able to take care of the day to day stuff.

Here is screen shots of first weeks and last weeks "log" for this tank.

The text is in Swedish. And we use a lot of short names for stuff. So good luck translate..

We started this files/documents for our tanks in January 2010, so it's great fun to see how we managed things back then

Anyway, this has help me keep track of a lot of things. So I wanted to share this. Have a great weekend! (I'm working)

/ David

 

[Centerline]

What a great thread. Thanks for posting all of this and updating so frequently. Amazing stuff here!

 

[Sallstrom]

Just wrote a bit on the return pump thread. In this tank the return pump is on 6000 litres per hour, so it's about 0,6 x /hour turnover rate. It has work so far

Here some top down pics from today:

 

[najer]

Loving that info, let the sump / system do what it needs to do, do flow in the "display"!

 

[Sallstrom]

Loving that info, let the sump / system do what it needs to do, do flow in the "display"!

Yes, that's pretty much sums it up!

Todays readings:
PO4 0,01 - Hanna LR
NO3 around 1 - Salifert

I'm amazed that the nutrients doesn't go up. We have 17 Sepia bandensis cuttlefish in this system(small tanks connected to the same sump) and they eat a lot Plus that we are dosing KNO3 every day.

/ David

 

[Sallstrom]

Here is one of the cuttlefish eating a shrimp

We use the water from this coral tank to raise Sepia bandensis. And sometimes seahorses, clownfish and cardinals. Fancy to have a 10000L coral tank as a sump for small breeding tanks!

/ David

 

[Sallstrom]

Calcium reactor down..

The media first got clogged (maybe we run too low pH), and after I rinsed the media something got stuck in one of the pumps. After cleaning the pumps one impeller broke when I got it back together. And the reactor doesn't want to go with only one circulation pump(they use the same pipes). Sooo looking for a replacement impeller right now, found one almost the same. Got some help from a colleague now so I finally could get some lunch. Hopefully everything is up and running after lunch Or we will have to find an other solution while we wait for a new impeller.

 

[najer]

Ouch, hope you get it sorted soon.

 

[Sallstrom]

Ouch, hope you get it sorted soon.

It's up and running now! Fortunately our old large KZ skimmers use the same type of pumps, so we found impellers from an old broken pump. Sometimes it's a good thing to save stuff for spare parts

/ David

 

[Mandelstam]

Here is one of the cuttlefish eating a shrimp

We use the water from this coral tank to raise Sepia bandensis. And sometimes seahorses, clownfish and cardinals. Fancy to have a 10000L coral tank as a sump for small breeding tanks!

/ David

Me: Ooh what a cutie!

Cuttlefish: Bow before Cthulhu, puny human!

 

[Sallstrom]

And this is what happens every time we need to poke around in the media in the calcium reactor!

 

[revhtree]

Man this is such a great reef!