Gilroy 425g Build Thread (All Apex, all the time)

[Toomnymods]

You want a simple calcium reactor Lifereef is the answer. Same design for almost 20 years, you can use it with any pump, and nearly everything can be repaired in a pinch with parts available at any local hardware store.

love my lifereef..

 

[nitro]

Love mine also

 

[Terence]

The next new thing on the 425.

It seems that for some reason I have been having issues growing corals in the top 10" of the SPS side of the tank lit with the CoralCare light. I have not been able to figure it out. PAR has been checked and always been in range - I have never run them much higher than 54% on "blue" channel and 35% on the "white" channel. Flow is good. I've been just baffled. And then it occurred to me. My application is unconventional in that my lights are about 3" off the surface of the tank! Maybe some of the channels are not blending correctly and my corals up there are getting blasted by certain wavelengths in out of proportion amounts. The cone of light is 60 degrees on each LED, so it stood to reason. I contacted @Luc Vogels at Philips to see what he thought. His response I will post below rather than me try and poorly paraphrase his response.

Hi Terence,

In our manuals we advise to hang the fixture at least 15cm from the water surface.

This has mainly to do with safety and reduction the maintenance (salt crystals on the glass plate), but also to ensure homogeneous lighting (in both intensity and spectrum).

For this reason we also never experimented with fixtures that are that close to the water surface and advise you increase this distance if possible.

Regarding the effect for your corals.

Having Corals close to your water surface is not an issue or a root cause for coral mortality.

Here an example in my own tank:

These corals are about 1-2 cm below the water surface:

But the distance between the light and the water surface is 18cm!

(practical example: you can see the light distribution pattern in the left backside of the image), tank width is 70cm).

The water surface (and especially a turbulent one) will act as a light ray distributor, scattering the light.

If the source is very close to this surface, the amount of scattering is drastically reduced.

This will lead to high peak intensities what go beyond the photo saturation level of most corals

In the middle point (at 25cm distance) the peak level is still around 1100 PAR.


But this does not seem to be the only cause of the coral mortality, you also suspect spectral uniformity.

The beam angle of the CoralCare fixture is about 60 degree (in practice even a bit more due to the light guide that has a Gaussian pattern.

So 7.5cm from the source, 15cm of LED’s overlap with each other (very rough calculation).

The complete balanced spectrum is achieved at total heights of about 10-20cm (depending on the angle between fixture and coral).

Together with the university of Wageningen we studied the effect of individual wavelengths (specifically 450nm (blue) and 665nm (red)

http://images.philips.com/is/conten...7_001-UPD-en_GB-Photophysiology-of-corals.pdf

To high irradiance of red (or in the Coralcare PC-amber) wavelength drastically reduces growth and eventually leads to Coral mortality.

So in theory a non-uniformal spectrum (due the insufficient distance between source and coral) could result in a “death Zone”

(what depends on the height between the lamp and Coral, but also the angle between them, perpendicular below a PC-amber LED would be the worst case position)
​

After doing some additional simulations (they are rather accurate, but the randomness pattern of the water surface plays a big role in the end result) I really advise you to increase the height to at least 12-15cm.
​

So, it seems my next step will be to re-design my hood somehow. I wish before I had mounted these that Luc or someone else had pointed out what now seems so obvious to me. Oh well. This is what it is to be a reefkeeper.

I still have the ultimate confidence in these lights, I just need to figure out a way to use them. For now, I think what I will do is modify my existing hoods to put the lights on top of the hood itself. I will cut "windows" in the plywood tops slightly smaller than the lights, and then fashion some clamps to hold them around their edges.

Something else will have to ultimately be done though. I do not want to hang them from wires as the lights themselves need to be hidden as they are not exactly "lookers" and I do not want something coming from 15 feet above!

Long term I think I will have a two part hood. I will remove these, make a simple hinged panel with the lights mounted as described above. This will come down and have supports that rest on the tank braces in the front/middle braces. Then, for each side I will build the decorative facade that will be the side and front mounted together with a side hinge at the back. In this way, I can swing the facade out and away, and then lift up the light panel.

So, today I am going to hopefully take on the remount and get them six inches higher from the tank, ultimately 9" total or about 23cm. I might have some shadowing from the 1" rear and right side canopy frame but I think it will be minimal.

​

 

[don_chuwish]

Love the very technical response. Really shows how much engineering expertise has gone into those lights.

 

[Terence]

OK, so after mulling over this and procrastinating for a week, today I took action and moved my CoralCare LED from the inside of my hood to the outside. I did this by simply cutting "windows" into the top and fashioning some hold-down brackets out of simple 2"x2" angle brackets. It wasn't too hard all-in-all but I had to not think about cutting into that nicely finished inside hood. Argh! Oh well, the hobby is all about learning and I certainly learned something here - read the manufacturers recommendations - and then follow them!

Now my lights are sitting 10.5" or 26.67cm off the water. Before they were 1/3 that distance at 3.5" or a little under 9cm. The manufacturer recommended 15cm.

Of course I now had to turn up the light percentages. I used the PMK to measure PAR to get it to be just about the same as before where I was measuring 270 PAR at about 10" below the surface (13.5" under the lights). I had to raise the power about 50% from where it was before, up to 80/65 B/W. Now we will see how everything does now that the spectrum should be more uniformly distributed (mixed) at that distance.

Ultimately I think I will redesign a light tray for the lights that hinges up, and then a front facade that hinges (swings) out and away on each side. For now this will have to do.

Next up is to replace the MH on the right side with the CoralCare sitting in the boxes and then also put a ReefBright XHO Actinic strip in as well. Maybe two (front and back) since I have them anyways.

 

[locito277]

Terrence throw that Deltec in the trash and buy a Geo. I've owned 3 different reactors, and I've seen 10 different reactors in person...the Geo is the simplest and easiest I've yet to see. Mine has been running like a clock for 2+ years. (I did swap the noisy Panworld pump for a sicce). The design is simple and works great. No Co2 gets trapped like other reactors, and I man handle mine all the time and have yet to break it.

They aren't as fancy as the Dastaco or their brands, but imo the simpler the better.

Which Sicce pump do you use? Does it fit in the pump part easily? Also is it much quieter. I love my GEO as well! Pump is loud though as previously mentioned.

 

[Terence]

Which Sicce pump do you use? Does it fit in the pump part easily? Also is it much quieter. I love my GEO as well! Pump is loud though as previously mentioned.

I don't remember what pump off the top of my head - it is on one of the pages a few months back. I really do not think the Sicce is loud, but where I have it there would not be any concern for low-level noise as it is under the house.

 

[Terence]

So the tank has been running a couple of days now with the new height for the lights and this light set up:

Edit: Weird, the copy-paste did not work for the image evidently - trying again the old fashioned way.

 

[lactose]

(Can't delete) this message is a reminder to lock your phone by little kids

 

[Terence]

(Can't delete) this message is a reminder to lock your phone by little kids

This is one of the reasons I really like using the new Apex Fusion iPhone app - it requires fingerprint login. Imagine if instead of simply posting something on the forum, they shut off the Email outlet and you did not notice. Ouch.

 

[Terence]

So I took the plunge yesterday and reworked the lighting on the right half of the tank. Good thing I waited a few weeks too - in the interim I found out that the ones on the left were too close to the water and had to move them up. If I hadn't waited, I would have had to take it down and redo them.

They went in very easily. Basically the same approach as when I moved them on the left side. I simply measured out the offsets on the top of the canopy, cut the holes with my jigsaw, fabricated some hold-down brackets, and screwed them down.

I know these lights will not be for everyone due to their size and that they are not super attractive. But one of the really great parts about them is that all the power supplies are in the lights themselves. That means a much cleaner area below and just one plug to plug in. No power supplies to mount. No worries about overheating them. The dimming is super simple too. Just two wires on each light goes to their dimming controller. Now there is a bit of a downside here if you like to play around with having each individual light dimmable on your Apex for whatever reason (livestock, sequential sun-up/down, etc.). You could do this, but you would have to have a separate controller box to make that happen. Despite me not having those options, I am very happy with the look and performance of these lights. Total tank coverage for about 600W at the dimming I am running them at.

Here are a few unedited (just cropped) crappy pics from my iPhone6 yesterday. Amazing uniformity of light.

 

[tcarter1936]

This is one of the reasons I really like using the new Apex Fusion iPhone app - it requires fingerprint login. Imagine if instead of simply posting something on the forum, they shut off the Email outlet and you did not notice. Ouch.

Too bad they never did the Android app that was talked about. Apple wins again[emoji53]

 

[hybridazn]

Too bad they never did the Android app that was talked about. Apple wins again[emoji53]

No app needed, just use fusion mobile

 

[tcarter1936]

No app needed, just use fusion mobile

Do you have. Link cause I've been trying for some time.

 

[hybridazn]

Www.apexfusion.com

Then log in and your set! You can then create a shortcut and put it on your phone for one click access

 

[tcarter1936]

Thanks and sorry terrence. Back to your thread. [emoji16]

 

[jml1149]

Just curious, how goes the sulfur denitrator and the ORP probe? Mine seems to have railed at 10.0, never higher. I know the pH port can measure the pH of kalk accurately, have you seen yours jump above 10.0?

 

[Terence]

Yes. It has gone above 10. Right now it is totally out of whack though. I upped the flow and screwed it all up. Got to reduce the flow. Going to do that now. Thanks for the reminder

 

[57buick]

First off, I cannot remember if I posted on the thread or not, but a couple of months back I broke off the bulkhead on my RODI storage container. Soaked me actually. Well I started to repair it and just can't seem to get the bulkhead tight enough. I wanted the long brittle part to be inside the tank this time, which means the nut is in there. I need another set of hands to help me. I tightened it, but it still had a slow leak. Maybe @RussM will make a trip over and help me out if I bribe him with a good meal from Nancy!


Have you looked into a better bulkhead like these? They have left hand thread and nut for one person installation. I've used them before and they are much stronger and easier to install.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00CG4BFIE/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Hayward BFA1020CES 2-Inch Gray PVC Socket by Thread BFA Series Bulkhead Fitting

 

[Ditto]

Quick Question:

Did you reverse the ORP probe for the readings to work?