Blaxsun's Abyss: Red Sea 750XXL

[Susan Edwards]

Nice!! What is your total now?

I want to add more fish so bad. I'm going to try the plastic bag trick on the damsels but need to do a day before I can take them to the lfs. They are such pains to catch, they will go right into a tub with a lid and air stone! Don't want to have to deal with them in the 45g

 

[blaxsun]

Nice!! What is your total now?

I want to add more fish so bad. I'm going to try the plastic bag trick on the damsels but need to do a day before I can take them to the lfs. They are such pains to catch, they will go right into a tub with a lid and air stone! Don't want to have to deal with them in the 45g

Officially? 46. But there's 1-2 that I can't presently find...

 

[blaxsun]

Oct 1. Trials and Tribulations
Busy week - I've been busy with fall cleaning and neglecting the tank. And the fish have let me know in no uncertain terms how "displeased" they are with my lack of progress. So random updates (in no particular order)...
..........

Helio. The IM Helio system continues to amaze, although there was a brief anomaly last week when the Neptune Apex woke me up to a low temperature alarm. On investigation it revealed a "E07" error code, which is a remote sensor error. There was some detritus buildup on some of the heaters (more on this below), so I dusted them off, disconnected the remote sensor, rebooted the controller and reconnected the remote sensor again. This seemed to solve the issue. If IM ever decides to add wireless capability in future upgrades this would be really slick (that way I could diagnose and remotely resolve the issue).



ReefMat. Overall, I'm very pleased with the Red Sea ReefMat - especially the upgrade to the 1200 (this has probably reduced my fleece roll expenditure by 50% and now lasts an entire month). The only downside is that it's 200-microns, so there's still a lot of crap that makes its way into the sump. I've been noticing more and more detritus buildup than normal along with a bumper crop of baby snails to drive the point home. Hopefully Red Sea will offer a finer 100-micron fleece roll in the future for those of us with anal retentive tendencies...

Corals. The corals are doing good, overall - particularly xenias and mushrooms. I'll have to perform some serious clear-cutting with those infernal xenias as they've spread to three adjacent rocks and a barnacle cluster. I have a sun coral which has never done well for some reason and I think it's finally nearing the end. The two surviving anemones (bubbletip and condy) continue to behave bizarrely - alternating between puffing up massively and shrinking down to the size of a quarter. Some of the fish let me know their displeasure at my lapse feeding schedule by nipping at one of my space invader pectinias. Bad fish...

Fish. 4 fish entered - and I can only regularly find 2 of the darned things (the green wrasse and neon dottyback). The green wrasse spends most of the time hanging out around one of the wavemakers (what is it with fish and their strange attraction to these things?) but the dottyback has fit right in and can be found exploring all over the place. I did manage to track down the green clown goby last week when I spotted this blue eye staring back at me in the sump (apparently it went into the overflow and down the emergency pipe). This was when I was troubleshooting the Helio - but I haven't seen it since (there are so many places to hide that it could literally be anywhere). I have yet to find the starry blenny, but as he's a teeny guy and blends in perfectly he could very easily be hanging out on a rock directly in front of me and I'd still probably be hard-pressed to spot him.

Tank. Overall the tank is still doing well - and I'm coming up on almost a year and a half of no water changes and a year of no quarantining whatsoever. The ozone system still seems to be working good - and the amount of skim I'm harvesting every week is significantly down. I'm long overdue on water testing, though (oops).

 

[Susan Edwards]

Glad to see you back. Life does often get busy. Holidays will make it worse. Diid you get your guy out of the sump yet?

 

[Innovative Marine]

Oct 1. Trials and Tribulations
Busy week - I've been busy with fall cleaning and neglecting the tank. And the fish have let me know in no uncertain terms how "displeased" they are with my lack of progress. So random updates (in no particular order)...
..........

Helio. The IM Helio system continues to amaze, although there was a brief anomaly last week when the Neptune Apex woke me up to a low temperature alarm. On investigation it revealed a "E07" error code, which is a remote sensor error. There was some detritus buildup on some of the heaters (more on this below), so I dusted them off, disconnected the remote sensor, rebooted the controller and reconnected the remote sensor again. This seemed to solve the issue. If IM ever decides to add wireless capability in future upgrades this would be really slick (that way I could diagnose and remotely resolve the issue).



ReefMat. Overall, I'm very pleased with the Red Sea ReefMat - especially the upgrade to the 1200 (this has probably reduced my fleece roll expenditure by 50% and now lasts an entire month). The only downside is that it's 200-microns, so there's still a lot of crap that makes its way into the sump. I've been noticing more and more detritus buildup than normal along with a bumper crop of baby snails to drive the point home. Hopefully Red Sea will offer a finer 100-micron fleece roll in the future for those of us with anal retentive tendencies...

Corals. The corals are doing good, overall - particularly xenias and mushrooms. I'll have to perform some serious clear-cutting with those infernal xenias as they've spread to three adjacent rocks and a barnacle cluster. I have a sun coral which has never done well for some reason and I think it's finally nearing the end. The two surviving anemones (bubbletip and condy) continue to behave bizarrely - alternating between puffing up massively and shrinking down to the size of a quarter. Some of the fish let me know their displeasure at my lapse feeding schedule by nipping at one of my space invader pectinias. Bad fish...

Fish. 4 fish entered - and I can only regularly find 2 of the darned things (the green wrasse and neon dottyback). The green wrasse spends most of the time hanging out around one of the wavemakers (what is it with fish and their strange attraction to these things?) but the dottyback has fit right in and can be found exploring all over the place. I did manage to track down the green clown goby last week when I spotted this blue eye staring back at me in the sump (apparently it went into the overflow and down the emergency pipe). This was when I was troubleshooting the Helio - but I haven't seen it since (there are so many places to hide that it could literally be anywhere). I have yet to find the starry blenny, but as he's a teeny guy and blends in perfectly he could very easily be hanging out on a rock directly in front of me and I'd still probably be hard-pressed to spot him.

Tank. Overall the tank is still doing well - and I'm coming up on almost a year and a half of no water changes and a year of no quarantining whatsoever. The ozone system still seems to be working good - and the amount of skim I'm harvesting every week is significantly down. I'm long overdue on water testing, though (oops).

An E7 alert error code means that is a temperature difference between the sensors in the elements and the remote sensor. The most common reasons for the E7 alert are the following: A. Dirty sensor, B. Remote sensor out of water, C. Remote sensor placed below ATO return water, the cooler water from an ATO return will also trigger this alarm.

Thanks,
IM Team

 

[blaxsun]

Glad to see you back. Life does often get busy. Holidays will make it worse. Diid you get your guy out of the sump yet?

I'm still trying to track him down. You'd think being green/blue would make him easy to spot... I have to change the fleece roll on the ReefMat later today, so maybe I'll take the opportunity to scout around. I also have the UV bulb/GFO-carbon replacement slated as well (arghhhh...)

 

[blaxsun]

An E7 alert error code means that is a temperature difference between the sensors in the elements and the remote sensor. The most common reasons for the E7 alert are the following: A. Dirty sensor, B. Remote sensor out of water, C. Remote sensor placed below ATO return water, the cooler water from an ATO return will also trigger this alarm.

Thanks,
IM Team

Good to know! The ATO is in a different chamber and it was completely submerged (which rules out B and C). As I mentioned, there was a lot of detritus buildup on the heaters for whatever reason - so I'm going to chalk it up to that (I may need to upgrade the small Sicce Voyager pump I have in that sump chamber for circulation to a larger model (maybe a Tunze). But now that I know what to potentially look for I'll just make more of an effort to perform periodic sump inspection/cleaning. Appreciate the additional info.

 

[Susan Edwards]

Did you see my post about Dave being a filter feeder sand sifter!

 

[blaxsun]

Did you see my post about Dave being a filter feeder sand sifter!

I did - does he have tentacles for feeding like my guy?

 

[blaxsun]

Oct 22. Pretty Much the Poster for UV
Over the past month or so I've really been having trouble keeping the glass clean. It seemed like I'd scrape one day just to find new growth in 24 hours. I thought it was an issue with my ozone, so I'd been tweaking the levels up to 0.5 and down to 0.1 (but not really noticing much of a difference). Here's what I was faced with (note: the Tunze scraper which normally excels at this couldn't even make a dent).


This is the right side of the tank after only a week...


And the left where you can see I gave up after an hour and called it a day.

Then I remembered what I'd been putting off for a few weeks... (oops)



If there was a mental image for why UVs should be part of your mandatory equipment, the top two images would surely fit the bill. I didn't take a "before" picture, but the tube inside the UV was literally brown. This is what both ends looked like after a night of soaking in hot water and EzeClean.



I also took the opportunity to cleanse my sump of the Blair Snail Project and scrape off probably thousands of the little suckers. I use a Sicce Zero for this and ran the output through a 100-micron sock filter back into the sump (so it's like a water change - but without the water change).



Surprisingly enough - the sump was actually quite clean. What got filtered was mostly sand, grit and the aforementioned corpses of my unholy snail army (which will certainly come back with a vengeance). So the ReefMat seems to be doing a bang-up job (despite being only 200-microns). Hopefully Red Sea will offer 150 or 100-micron rolls down the road for those of us anally retentive about the cleanliness of our sumps.

Since I had to remove everything to gain access to the UV, I'm also cleaning/replenishing the reactors and will probably do a cursory clean on the skimmer as well for good measure. Minor footnote: while trying to remove the Ozone tubing to the Nyos Quantum silencer (so I could remove the skimmer and more readily access the UV) I managed to break the plastic tubing that connected it. I will probably implement some sort of valve or breakaway in the future, but for now Gorilla Glue to the rescue!

 

[EeyoreIsMySpiritAnimal]

What is the backstory to the Blair Snail Project? (Feel free to point me to the post# )

 

[jsker]

Great build thread @blaxsun. I am liking some of the graphic is posts and thank looks awesome.

 

[blaxsun]

What is the backstory to the Blair Snail Project? (Feel free to point me to the post# )

Once upon a time, our hero let several small trochus snails migrate down into the sump (they went through the weir into the emergency overflow and straight down the pipe). "Awwww, how cute. Baby snails!" Sometime not long after, the Great Spawn of 2021 occurred - and every snail in the tank went, well - nuts. After that point (and with no natural predators other than my handy dandy scraper) - the snails proliferated. Then again, and again...

Before long I had probably several hundred teeny tiny baby trochus snails roaming around and generally gumming up the mechanics. I'd managed to cull the population back to a few dozen snails (at least from what I could see), and figured things were somewhat in-check. Imagine to my surprise when I cleaned the sump today and found literally hundreds of little white snails (about the size of a grain of sand) all over the place. They're also all over the main return overflow, so I scraped as many of the little suckers off that I could and sucked them out through the Sicce.

The tank must obviously doing well to provide such an abundant nutrient supply for the snails to so thoroughly flourish. Two of the reactors are cleaned and just need resupply and they'll be bank in the tank tonight; the skimmer will probably go back online tomorrow. Minus the ozone - as I wasn't able to get any kind of glue to adhere to the stem I need to attach the hose to (and even if I was successful, I'm not confident that it would've adhered with the strength required to reattach the tubing).

 

[Susan Edwards]

I did - does he have tentacles for feeding like my guy?

Not as big. Tonight he is in my cave... I actually caught him moving and doing something!


Not sure if he is a sand sifter or filter as he has never gone into the sand

 

[EeyoreIsMySpiritAnimal]

literally hundreds of little white snails (about the size of a grain of sand)

These sound more like spirobids.

I've never been lucky enough to have trochus breed in my system, but at one point I thought they had... turns out my "baby trochus" were actually collonistas

 

[blaxsun]

Not as big. Tonight he is in my cave... I actually caught him moving and doing something!


Not sure if he is a sand sifter or filter as he has never gone into the sand

He's a sand sifter. The black ones I have also have those "feelers" to help dig. This is Absolem - a bonafide filter feeder (sorry, the system is back to rendering my images in a purple sheen again).

 

[blaxsun]

These sound more like spirobids.

I've never been lucky enough to have trochus breed in my system, but at one point I thought they had... turns out my "baby trochus" were actually collonistas

You could very well be right. I'm only finding them in the sump and in the very dark recesses of things. In any event, there's a lot less of them now! I do have lots of baby trochus snails, still. They grow very, very slowly though (the largest has matured to maybe 3/8" max).

 

[blaxsun]

Blaxsun's Tips. Keeping The Rubberband Thieves at Bay
What you need: Colored rubber bands

For those of you who rubberband your seaweed to small rocks (in order to more naturally mimic the natural feeding for herbivores), I've actually heard of the rare occasion where a fish rips off a rubberband and drags it off somewhere in the tank (and I know of at least one very rare instance where a large tang ate the rubberband and perished). I'm not sure if it's the texture, coloration (etc.) but after tracking down and removing at least a half dozen of the skin-colored rubberbands I switched to something different.



I found a bag of assorted colored rubberbands at my local Staples and sorted them into various sizes. I use the smaller ones for wrapping green seaweed and the larger ones for wrapping larger chunks of red seaweed. So far this seems to be a success. The fish (for whatever reason) ignore the colored rubberbands, and the odd one that one of the reef inhabitants has managed to dislodge has been incredibly easy to find under the LEDs.

 

[blaxsun]

Blaxsun's Tips. Retrofitting Your Nyos Quantum for Ozone
What you need: Nyos Quantum Skimmer, ~1" of the semi-rigid DOS tubing

So during routine skimmer maintenance I was trying to remove the Ozone tubing from the bottom of the silencer, and low and behold managed to shear off half of the pipe that's glued into the silencer (@#$%). Glueing unfortunately didn't work (it appears to be the type of plastic that doesn't glue), and so I was preparing to have to order a new silencer from EcoTech on Monday. Fortunately, my wife was nearby and offered a suggestion to retrofit the silencer with flexible tubing (and thus avoid this in the future). Eureka! I remembered I had some spare DOS tubing tucked away...



The diameter of the bottom air intake wasn't wide enough to accommodate any tubing without seriously restricting flow, so I opted to retrofit the air intake at the top instead. This has yielded two benefits. First, the ozone tubing now runs over (as opposed to under) the braided UV hose on the left. The second is that being on the top (as opposed to the bottom) it's much easier to remove (since I have more access and things to work around).

The titanium screw is still required as nylon ones will eventually deteriorate, and since we want a good flow of ozone (and possibly even more ozone than air) - this works out ideally. The semi-rigid nature of the DOS tubing also ensures that it's not going to collapse under tension (cutting off ozone flow). So if you're going the ozone route for your Nyos Quantum - I'd recommend opting for this method to ensure you don't repeat my mishap.

 

[EeyoreIsMySpiritAnimal]

Blaxsun's Tips. Retrofitting Your Nyos Quantum for Ozone
What you need: Nyos Quantum Skimmer, ~1" of the semi-rigid DOS tubing

So during routine skimmer maintenance I was trying to remove the Ozone tubing from the bottom of the silencer, and low and behold managed to shear off half of the pipe that's glued into the silencer (@#$%). Glueing unfortunately didn't work (it appears to be the type of plastic that doesn't glue), and so I was preparing to have to order a new silencer from EcoTech on Monday. Fortunately, my wife was nearby and offered a suggestion to retrofit the silencer with flexible tubing (and thus avoid this in the future). Eureka! I remembered I had some spare DOS tubing tucked away...



The diameter of the bottom air intake wasn't wide enough to accommodate any tubing without seriously restricting flow, so I opted to retrofit the air intake at the top instead. This has yielded two benefits. First, the ozone tubing now runs over (as opposed to under) the braided UV hose on the left. The second is that being on the top (as opposed to the bottom) it's much easier to remove (since I have more access and things to work around).

The titanium screw is still required as nylon ones will eventually deteriorate, and since we want a good flow of ozone (and possibly even more ozone than air) - this works out ideally. The semi-rigid nature of the DOS tubing also ensures that it's not going to collapse under tension (cutting off ozone flow). So if you're going the ozone route for your Nyos Quantum - I'd recommend opting for this method to ensure you don't repeat my mishap.

Sounds like you owe your wife dinner