Another Build Thread You Won't Read

[FishLvR]

@Reef By Steele Have any pointers?

 

[Reef By Steele]

@Reef By Steele Have any pointers?

Hard to say as to the clumps. It will clump as you culture it. Under the microscope you will see them as cells stuck together. We strain ours to eliminate as much of that as possible. As for the tube out of the top i would avoid an open hole unless it is really small, or maybe tape gauze over it to avoid any airborne contaminants from finding their way in.

 

[Bohemian Waxwing]

I recently went to a LFS and the items were also priced insanely. The end of the LFS is near, and then the online prices will be much greater and the health and size of frags should collapse into the nubs we love to watch fade away.

Places ship so well these days I kinda of agree. I like going to my LFS but it’s just so dang convenient to order online. Better selection and pricing too.

 

[FishLvR]

Hard to say as to the clumps. It will clump as you culture it. Under the microscope you will see them as cells stuck together. We strain ours to eliminate as much of that as possible. As for the tube out of the top i would avoid an open hole unless it is really small, or maybe tape gauze over it to avoid any airborne contaminants from finding their way in.

I put in an order with you. I will gauze over the holes. The clumps were in the bottles, but I am guessing it is something I did. I'm going to give it one more try than consider myself too hopeless to get it right.

 

[Reef By Steele]

I put in an order with you. I will gauze over the holes. The clumps were in the bottles, but I am guessing it is something I did. I'm going to give it one more try than consider myself too hopeless to get it right.

So the clumps were not in what you bought but in your cultures? Depending on the size of the clumps, again the Phyto will clump cells, but larger ones may indicate some organic matter or bacterial activity. Sterilization and bio-security are important.

We go IMO way overboard, but since we sell it I feel it is justified. We run really slow through large UV, then bleach after adding to sterile vessels with our nutrients sterilized as well. Then our air is pre filtered, plus inline filters and liquid air gaps. But it doesn’t take much to make a mistake. Sneeze while adding something, forget to change gloves, there are literally thousands of ways to mess it up. But once you get a feel and rhythm it can be easier.

 

[FishLvR]

So the clumps were not in what you bought but in your cultures? Depending on the size of the clumps, again the Phyto will clump cells, but larger ones may indicate some organic matter or bacterial activity. Sterilization and bio-security are important.

We go IMO way overboard, but since we sell it I feel it is justified. We run really slow through large UV, then bleach after adding to sterile vessels with our nutrients sterilized as well. Then our air is pre filtered, plus inline filters and liquid air gaps. But it doesn’t take much to make a mistake. Sneeze while adding something, forget to change gloves, there are literally thousands of ways to mess it up. But once you get a feel and rhythm it can be easier.

Nope in the bottles I bought. Both bottles were clumpy. I shook them and the clumps remained. I shrugged then tossed them in the culture vessels. Those clumps remained then on the day they crashed the clumps disappeared the cultures turned yellow. I think I missed your deliver dates since the holiday.

 

[FishLvR]

So I have dino. Checked under the microscope. Thought for a second about the waste away method, but I have corals and fish I don't want to lose. I know it came from the old tank. I am surprised it hasn't popped up sooner. So I am treating it with MB7, MB Clean, Probiotics Red Sauce, Silica, and dosing nitrates and Phosphates. I have a UV somewhere but can't find it, so I will probably buy a cheap amazon internal of some sort. When I broke down the tank to move, it did run through my head to get rid of EVERYTHING and start completely new, but given my luck it would not have mattered anyway. If I get tired of treating the tank, I might resort to the waste away method or Royal's method. But let's see what happens if I just keep it consistent.

 

[FishLvR]

UV is up and running. One in display and one in sump. On the plus side my phyto is doing great. The cultures from reefs by steel were not clumpy or stinky so I think that was helpful.

This is 3 days.

 

[FishLvR]

Success! Tomorrow I harvest. I'm so happy!

 

[Red_Beard]

Success! Tomorrow I harvest. I'm so happy!

That looks good and clean too! Awesome

 

[FishLvR]

Success! Tomorrow I harvest. I'm so happy!

That looks good and clean too! Awesome

Dude it is! I have it set up now where nothing dirty gets near the dang things. The pains I took!

 

[Red_Beard]

Dude it is! I have it set up now where nothing dirty gets near the dang things. The pains I took!

Looks like it is paying off though! Gives me hope, i did the same thing you did and started with mercer last year. I got 1 harvest out of it and then it went yellow. I may have to try again!

 

[FishLvR]

Dude it is! I have it set up now where nothing dirty gets near the dang things. The pains I took!

Looks like it is paying off though! Gives me hope, i did the same thing you did and started with mercer last year. I got 1 harvest out of it and then it went yellow. I may have to try again!

Mercer was a bad culture. It came clumpy and smelly. Crashed on day two after zero growth. I thought at first it was me, but I'm thinking I had a bad culture. I used their f2 on this culture so that rules that out as a contaminate.

 

[FishLvR]

So about the dynos. It has been 4 days of me actively fighting against them. So I am doing the most counterintuitive thing ever, but I think it might be working. I am using a combo of Red Sauce 100mL daily (smells like a petting zoo), MB7 20mL daily, MB Clean weekly, AND dosing nitrates and phosphates. I keep the nitrates at 10 and the phosphates at .02. The UV has been going this whole time except when I dose. Lots of gunk in the skimmer and filter socks. Last night I stirred the sand bed and blew off the rocks as best I could. I expected this morning to see it all back on the rocks and sand. Nothing. Where I stirred and cleaned the rocks, nothing grew back. The strings of dinos are still there but they are very white and thin. So maybe this is a good sign.

 

[FishLvR]

Ah yeah! Look at that haul! I'm going to need more bottles.

Second round lets go!

 

[FishLvR]

Time to do battle. Got the uv fired up

 

[FishLvR]

So my phyto cultures are doing so well I have WAAAAAY more than I can use. So I am going to do one more batch then refrigerate and hold off until I start to run out. Reefs by Steel had such a great phyto for culturing. I mean this stuff is bananas!

 

[FishLvR]

So three day black out and the sand and most of the rock looks great but there are hold outs. I am SOOOOO tempted to use waste away to be the final nail in the coffin, but unsure if that is wise. I have a bottle of DinoX too. It's soooo tempting. But last time I used DinoX it nuked the tank. So I am going to do a 30% tonight WC and then on Friday another 30%. I am not turning on the lights yet. I'm going to let ambient light creep in and call it a day. I am also replacing the carbon in the reactor and keeping the UV going.

 

[FishLvR]

On day three, a few days ago I removed the cardboard and garbage bags and just let the ambient light hit the tank. There is not much ambient light in here. That allowed some of the hold outs to die off. They turned white over the course of the next few days and floated off. I still have hold outs on the one rock where it all started. I tested another area and it was positive for dino. This section I looked under the microscope and it is dino but another kind. It's adhered to the rock so much I am unable to remove it. It does not blow off like the other stuff did and looks like turf but under the scope not even close. NOTHING eats it, not even the urchin. I could remove this rock but would have to remove all the rockwork in the tank to do so since it is on the bottom.

Today I am going to hit it with H2O2 and let it sit for 20 minutes or so. I will do this every day and hope it works. I though about spot treating dinox on these areas, but unsure if this would be effective or safe. I turned the blues back on two days ago on 15% only. I am also entertaining the IDEA of the one two punch used in freshwater. You hit it with the H2O2 then excel. But in my case I would use just straight glut. I havn't decided yet.

I might raise my temps to 82. Again not sure how to get rid of the hold outs.

 

[Imrahilwjz]

University drop out old lady here that picked the wrong year to stop drinking. Nobody cares about my stupid tank, but here it is. My build thread. It's like losing weight, if you don't tell people you are trying to lose weight then you have no accountability and you stay fat. Right? Or something like that.

I have had this 90 gallon Custom Aquarium Brands tank and a Trigger sump for years. They were free. However they didn't come with a stand. So for years it just sat there.

At this point most everyone has tuned out. Not enough photos, too much talk. Let me tell you something if you haven't moved on. Custom Aquariums Brand tanks are U G L Y. This thing is sooooo ugly. I hate it. It's the stupidest messing thing you have EVER seen. Their overflow is stupid, the intake is stupid, the frame is stupid, their sumps are stupid. I hate this tank. However, this thing is a freaking ugly butt TANK tank. Like inch thick glass, aluminum frame, 3 inches of globbed on black silicone RTV40 in their stupid ugly thick frame. I hate this tank in equal amounts of the peace of mind I have that I could shoot a Blackhawk with 454 casull at it and probably be OK. If Custom Aquarium Brands read this, they won't, but if they do, your tanks suck and your sumps suck, and could you make your intake a little bigger and uglier? I mean it already looks like toilet waste plumbing I'm sure you could up your game and make it even uglier.

I rest my case.

If you willingly bought this tank and it's not in an office building, I would like to know what your drug of choice is and ask you to share it with me.

Why use this tank? Because it was free and knowing what I know now I would have never loaded this 200 pound chunk of silicone and toilet plumbing into my car, then this thread would have never happened, and maybe I would have a life.

First things first I removed the toilet plumbing. Since the man who bought it before me had it plumbed like a literal toilet there is only one bulkhead for a 90 gallon tank. So I am forced to use undersized overflows. Which I don't know what happened in the last 6 years, but there is like 2 companies now? So go with undersized crap that looks good or flushing toilet. So I got the Eshopp Medium. Will it clear the MASSIVE BLACK ALUMINUM 2 INCH WIDE RIM? Probably not, but that's for another post.

So the Trigger Sump is a Ruby. It was abused. Man who had it before had that bad boy straight piped like a Ford trying to run a 6 in a redneck's backyard race track. Imagine Niagara Falls. Now imagine Niagara Falls in your living room. I bet they were hoarse from all the screaming. So he cut out the acrylic. It looked like a small muskrat got caught in a trap and tried to make their way out. Or maybe not a muskrat, maybe just a dude that didn't own a Dremel and only had a chisel and a will. A will to have the world's loudest aquarium. So me being stupid decided, oh all these scratches and defects, I'll just buff them out with all this crap I have lying around the garage. Realizing about 3 hours in I'm closer to death then I have ever been, I gave up. I also decided cordless drills might not be the best for the job at hand. Maybe if Tesla had his way we would never need to charge these things.

This is what defeat looks like.

I got on the world wide web and surfed on over to Trigger and bought the same sump but the Crystal model. Now, I dunno if it's the red color or what. But there is a MASSIVE difference between a 9 year old Ruby Trigger sump and a brand new Trigger Crystal sump. There are more defects in the acrylic, nothing structural, but just ugly spots throughout. And whatever wax they use is just one giant lube mess. I had to wipe this thing down with a microfiber every time I touched it. It's got cloudiness, scratches, crazing, all sorts of garbage. But it was cheap so there is that, and it came with socks so WOO HOO!

I had this old JBJ 45 that I sort of liked, I do like some things, but learned to hate the AIO. It was always a challenge to do anything. I have man hands OK? This last crash I almost gave up. After tearing it down I found my MP10's magnet has been rusting into the tank. And the ATI test shows that. So maybe that was it who knows. I live in a tiny house so I have to make room which meant getting rid of this old tank. I put it on Facebook market place. I don't know why. Maybe because I like to hurt inside and have lost all self respect. After weeding through all the bullcrud people asking stupid questions I found a normalish person.

The guy who came to get it looked so bewildered. He had NO CLUE what he was picking up. All he knows is his wife wanted a "small" tank. He looked scared. He said, "I wasn't expecting it to be this nice, or big." It was LITERALLY in the ad. Here is what he got. For free. It's like The Ring. You remain cursed until you, oh wait if you haven't seen the movie skip this, /spoiler you have to make a copy of the video and give it to someone else. Same with tanks, I was cursed with Custom Aquariums custom crap tank, so now I have to pass it on. He is what he got.

I think he got the better deal.

So now with that gone we took all the furniture out of the room, painted, and today an engineer is putting in a 2,000 dollar beam so this giant messing glass box and aluminum frame don't fall through the floor, and then keep falling through the floor, down through the crawlspace, the ground, past the earths core, right on to the other side of the earth. So essentially I'm not protecting the aquarium, I am protecting my house from the aquarium. So next week new flooring goes in to cover this new massive beam.

I have some fish and some corals from the old tank. I threw the corals in the macro tank and they hate the Tuna Sun, cause it's not Tuna Blue so fingers crossed they don't all die one buy one. Fish and the old rock, snails and urchin live in a Tupperware. They have a window for light, a sponge filter, heater, and a skimmer. And dang it, that's what they get for the next month and a half. And they better like it.

It is the best scape I have ever done.

Equipment is two MP40's and one MP10. Yes, I ordered a new wet side. Sheesh. I got the stupid outdated Ecotech live box thingy to control them all too. Two reef breeders 24inch because I already have them so yay. Bubble magnus that came with the 90 gallon and was surprisingly not in crappy shape. My Loop DC return pump. My stand is custom because stupid Custom Aquarium Brands puts the world's largest rim on their tanks with the thickest glass ever it won't fit on a standard 90 gallon stand. It's aluminum just like the frame of the tank. I stood on it to paint. I have no idea how I am going to skin it yet. I can tell you right now it won't be with fabric, you all know who you are. Stop it.

Oh and because I am generic in life without any single unique vision or will, red with gray plumbing. JUST LIKE EVERY ONE ELSE. At this point places should just charge double for those two colors.

Stay tuned for all my failures.

I admit I was impressed that you mentioned 454 Casull