Byron & Reneé's 465g reef - 700g+ total

seth&angelle

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well, I decided to try a consumer DIY dehumidifier -- so I picked up one at Lowe's - 70 pints/day:
de-humid.jpg


it definitely pulls a lot of water out the air!!! BUT... you have to empty it 4-5 times a day or it will quick running when the waste bucket fills... bummer.

Good News: it rapidly fills -- its a very efficient unit.
Bad News: it adds heat into the fish room which is already a huge problem.

HVAC guy quoted $2,400 for the installed Lenox solution, this thing was $250... but, heat is a giant problem so I'm still probably going to have to go with the more expensive solution. It vents to the outside and sends all of the collected water directly into the drain. Is that worth $2,400 to me. At this point, I'm thinking "yes".


I just found this build thread. I'm very impressed, and thank you very much for sharing. I too was having humidity and heat issues in my fish room at home, and now at our retail store. I purchased a Winix dehumidifier, and love it. It comes with a drain pump. I never have to empty a bucket, and it has work flawless for 8 months now. It has made such a huge difference. I believe I paid under $250. Keep up the great work
 
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byron

byron

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sorry I haven't been on in a while but I got totally sidetracked with extraneous stuff... :squigglemouth:
Beautiful Home and Great set-up! Keep us updated!:clap2:
thanks and will do
.
Great build and documentation Byron, thanks for sharing!

Regarding salinity readings, I was very excited to see the recent drop in price of the Milwaukee unit you use along with a similar unit manufactured by Hanna. Unfortunately both have the +/- 2 ppt accuracy, which frankly is too vague for what we want. Good friends of mine that run a retail coral outlet purchased the Hanna unit and have been very unhappy with it, and now use it as a dust collector. I'm not familiar with the brand of mechanical refractometer you're using, but some units available have a better "readability" for the range we want like this unit: Marine Depot Aquarium Pro Refractometer I use that exact refractometer and have been very pleased, just make sure to calibrate it with salinity solution, not RO/DI water.

Live Aquaria and other outlets will ship fish at a salinity of 1.018. This is to save money on salt, it does nothing to lower ability of parasites/bacteria harming fish. Live Aquaria is not to be confused with Live Aquaria Divers Den. Divers Den facility is in Rhinelander, Wisconsin, where they ship out all animals at 1.025. Live Aquaria ships out of LA, California, and generally deal with more "bread and butter" livestock. You are correct in that no water will evaporate out of a sealed bag ;)

Look forward to future updates!
The Milwaukee & Hanna are the same exact unit with different names and case color :) I have my probes from Apex back online and am mostly trusting them. I use the mechanical refractometer from time to time just to see if its in the same ball park with the probes. I have not been using the Milwaukee lately and will likely offer it for sale -- its very easy to calibrate and use, but I don't need 3 different setups :squigglemouth:

I do realize the DD div of LA is separate, but that kind of like saying that Lexus and Camry have different quality from the same company -- oh, wait, they do... :) That said, LA needs to get their s%^t together...

I just found this build thread. I'm very impressed, and thank you very much for sharing. I too was having humidity and heat issues in my fish room at home, and now at our retail store. I purchased a Winix dehumidifier, and love it. It comes with a drain pump. I never have to empty a bucket, and it has work flawless for 8 months now. It has made such a huge difference. I believe I paid under $250. Keep up the great work
I started to get one with a pump, all of the reviews said that systems didn't work well and the pump usually broke in a couple of months... glad to hear yours is working well. Because I pull 4-5 gal a day out the air, I'm wondering if I can use that water with the ATO to feedback into the system. I posted a note over on the Chemistry Board asking that question: Is it OK to do that?
 
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byron

byron

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Well, I gotta start taking some pictures soon...

The power blue and yellow tangs are now of quarantine and in the DT with the blue green chromis :bigsmile:

current inhabitants:
1 PB
5 YT
9 BGC
3 Skunk cleaner shrimp
3 fire shrimp
1 serpent star
1 pin cushion urchin
around 1,100 snails: mix of dwarf cerith (700+), Florida cerith (100+), nassarius (200+), nerites (100+)
around 150 hermits

We have not started to put any coral into the tank -- still want to water to stabilize more first. Thinking about maybe a couple of coral soon... Also still planning to add 7 Lyretail Anthias and maybe 1 Kole -- that would do it for fish. Holding off on the Anthias for now because I don't feel like screwing around with QT again at moment -- taking a break.

BTW, both the BGC and YT are schooling as we hoped... may get a YT problem down the road as they get larger and decide to stake out territory, but its working fine for now. Hoping that the Anthias will school as well when they are introduced... as you can see, we really enjoy watching schools of fish.
 

o2manyfish

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Byron,

My tank has very similar dimension as yours 96x33x29. I always have yellow tangs in my tank, at the moment I have a group of 9, plus a purple, two blues, chevron and an Achilles. If you keep groups of more than three you won't see them getting territorial. Mine range from very small to med large which I have had for several years. Every now and then you'll see a torn fin, but then everything is fine for another couple of months.

Great build thread. Nice job with your plumbing assembly.

I have an Apex with an unstable PM2 and Condx probe. I sent it to Neptune twice before it started working reliably. And its been great for the past 3 months and then last night all of a sudden the Conductivity dropped 3 points over a 90 minute period while the topoff was off. It then went back up 1.5 points. I haven't pulled out the refractometer yet to figure out what is going on with it.

Dave B
 
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Byron,

My tank has very similar dimension as yours 96x33x29. I always have yellow tangs in my tank, at the moment I have a group of 9, plus a purple, two blues, chevron and an Achilles. If you keep groups of more than three you won't see them getting territorial. Mine range from very small to med large which I have had for several years. Every now and then you'll see a torn fin, but then everything is fine for another couple of months.

Great build thread. Nice job with your plumbing assembly.

I have an Apex with an unstable PM2 and Condx probe. I sent it to Neptune twice before it started working reliably. And its been great for the past 3 months and then last night all of a sudden the Conductivity dropped 3 points over a 90 minute period while the topoff was off. It then went back up 1.5 points. I haven't pulled out the refractometer yet to figure out what is going on with it.

Dave B
thanks for sharing your experience, greatly appreciated...

I'm running 3 conductivity probes now. 1 in fuge, 1 in sump and 1 in QT when its active... they all now appear to be stable and functioning correctly... the fuge & sump (obviously in the same system) usually are with 1 ppt of each other, not bad for consumer grade equipment.
 
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sitting here with not much to do as Hurricane Sandy passes overhead... so I finally got around to taking a few tank images:

Mr PB
pb1.jpg


Mr Urchin
urchin1.jpg


and a couple of more tank shots showing a few of the YT, BGC, shrimp, snails, etc
tank1.jpg


tank2.jpg


tank3.jpg


I apologize for the mediocre image quality. I shot them handheld, sitting in front the tank: ISO 800, 1/125, f5.6 with just the tank lighting

Tank currently is home for 5 yellow tangs, 9 blue green chromis and a powder blue tang.
 
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we have 1 male and 8 female Anthias in QT at the moment. After reading that hypo does nothing to combat marine velvet, we decided to use copper this time for QT. The Anthias have about 5 more days of copper treatment to go...
 

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Wow Byron you have a great setup. Kept an eye on your thread in RC southern tier but this thread has so much more to it. What kind of corals do you plan on keeping in the tank?
 
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Wow Byron you have a great setup. Kept an eye on your thread in RC southern tier but this thread has so much more to it. What kind of corals do you plan on keeping in the tank?
thanks for the kind words... we have just been swamped on other things and have not turned our attention back to the tank yet. We have to do a bunch more research before settling on our long range coral plan. We had worked out the fish plan a year ago, so that hasn't taken much thought -- just a matter of moving the QT process a bit at a time once the system came together.
 

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Are you planning on QTing your corals as well? I struggle to find good infromation on that topic so if u find any good sources of info that would be great to share :)
 
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Are you planning on QTing your corals as well? I struggle to find good information on that topic so if u find any good sources of info that would be great to share :)
the short answer is yes. We are still researching what method we will use. That is another component which has slowed us from putting coral in the tank, we have not yet decided on the method we will use to bring them in, but we have decided that we want to do what we can to prevent pathogens from ever getting into the DT. I read a recent ebooklet on the subject by Steven Pro & Mr Saltwater Tank, but we have more research to do. That ebook was mostly about fish, "No-Nonsense Guide to Saltwater Fish Diseases, Treatments and Quarantine", but its what moved us away from hypo to copper for the current QT effort. Turns out hypo does nothing against marine velvet, but copper will eradicate both ich and mv.

Also what type of female Anthias are you keeping?
both the male and the females are Lyretails. BTW, they guys are real leapers. During acclimation, I had a female leap completely out of the container and land down on the floor. I gently scooped her up, put her back in the container and slower brought her around -- I was afraid for awhile that I might lose her. I had a hard time coaxing the male to begin eating, but they are now all doing fine (as best I can tell). I'm feeding them frozen Mysis shrimp soaked in garlic and Selcon, but I hope to wean them from over to Spectrum Thera+ eventually. My long term feeding plan for all of the fish is a combination of: Thera A+, Formula One flakes, Formula Two flakes and sheets of seaweed (absolutely loved by the YT).
 
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we moved the Anthias over to the display tank, so all of the fish are now in... we now have greens, blues, golds, reds, yellows -- colorful tank. Stay tuned for the start of coral additions.

a couple of iPhone pics:
fish1.jpg


fish2.jpg
 
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I've been away for the forum 4 a bit...

I finally decided that the system was (at least mostly) stable, so we ordered in 9 SPS frags from LA. They shipped in from the WI location and arrived yesterday. We currently have them sitting in the sand bed for a couple of days to relax and will move them up into location onto the acquascaping over the weekend. After acclimation I gave them a coral dip before putting them into the DT.

We ordered a 4 Pack and a 5 Pack to get started. According to the invoice, the 4 Pack is included: Canary Porites, Rose Stylophora, Sunburst Pavona, and Purple Polyp Green Birdsnest. Seemed strange, but the invoice didn't list the names of the frags in the 5 Pack??? I send an email requesting a listing of what was shipped to help identify what we have.

I forgot to bring a camera home this evening, but I will post images of the frags soon, and maybe some of you knowledgeable folks can then help us figure out what we have.
 
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on the hardware front, one of the Radion XR30W LED units in the 6 unit array began blinking off and on periodically. Reprogramming it seemed to help some, but failed to correct it. After about 5 days of that, I called EcoTech support yesterday and we determined that the power supply was the culprit -- so I boxed that ps up yesterday afternoon and RMA'd it in to be verified and corrected. I was hoping they would turn it around quickly and have a unit back to us tomorrow -- but no shipping notice from them yet. That LED unit sits directly above where the majority of the current SPS fags will likely reside -- and I hate to start them out in their new home with less than ideal lighting.

BTW, I run the 6 Radion array in NATURAL mode. The 2 units at the right (east) end come on first in the morning and the lighting slowly brightens and moves to the left (west) to mimic true earth lighting -- they shutdown in the evening in the same fashion. It is also programmed to be stormy and cloudy about 20% of the time.
 

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I'm glad they are fixing the light. Can't wait to see the new coral.
 

Mastering the art of locking and unlocking water pathways: What type of valves do you have on your aquarium plumbing?

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