How’s the tank doing!?!?
I'm a reasonable man. I do reasonable things.
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DigitalFishAquariums
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Much better, some stable frags, torches acros and zoas, some good gonies. Hair type Algea all but gone, snails breeding constantly, no fish diseases I can spot.
OP
OP
DigitalFishAquariums
Community Member
Welcome Home:
update on why i don't update:
I gotta get better at taking pictures. I know this is a bad angle, and obviously my phyto experiment on the counter is unsightly, but when the whites are on, it's always so blue and lacks nuance. and when i try to take pictures under blues, they have nuance, but they're SO BLUE.
anyone got tips?
full fat in profile shots with an orange filter only manage to show how much i REALLY have to prioritize hanging these lights because of the hot spotting:
and there are some blues
Update on what im up to:
Anyway system update i've managed to add filter socks to the game, my original plan of "a bucket of floss with holes in the bottom" did filter out finer particles, but wooowww it clogged fast. I did cut the rest of the bottom of the bucket off and I DID manage to match all my plumbing up from my spare parts bin, so that was nice.
It looks like I've no idea what schedule or color I wanted to use though:
update on why i don't update:
I gotta get better at taking pictures. I know this is a bad angle, and obviously my phyto experiment on the counter is unsightly, but when the whites are on, it's always so blue and lacks nuance. and when i try to take pictures under blues, they have nuance, but they're SO BLUE.
anyone got tips?
full fat in profile shots with an orange filter only manage to show how much i REALLY have to prioritize hanging these lights because of the hot spotting:
and there are some blues
Update on what im up to:
Anyway system update i've managed to add filter socks to the game, my original plan of "a bucket of floss with holes in the bottom" did filter out finer particles, but wooowww it clogged fast. I did cut the rest of the bottom of the bucket off and I DID manage to match all my plumbing up from my spare parts bin, so that was nice.
It looks like I've no idea what schedule or color I wanted to use though:
Orange filter for your camera helps with the blues. They sell the attachments for phones pretty cheap on amazon.
OP
OP
DigitalFishAquariums
Community Member
yeah one of my example pics i have that, I'm not super happy with it, yet.
Mine is hit or miss whether or not it decides to cooperate with making the colors look right. I figured it was likely user error
Get different color gel filters. They sell them in rectangle sheets pretty cheaply and you could probably fab up a lens cover with a cheap cell phone case. You may need to play with the color filter for your spectrum of lights. I had a Kessil that needed a yellow filter before... orange looked horrible when I tried to take photos.
OP
OP
DigitalFishAquariums
Community Member
so very much like a typical sump with chambers, but the chambers instead of being acrylic or glass are big black feeding trough. the top is a Rubbermaid 50 gallon, the bottom is a Rubbermaid 100. There are 3 2" pipes to a second Rubbermaid 100 on the right, which is the "pump chamber" and I run stuff like my algea reactor off it.
The overflow drops off in the 50 on top, it falls through some filter socks i jig sawed holes into to fit, and when they fill up the water level rises until the orange 5 gallon bucket lid allows it to overflow.
Pipes in and out, wires, i dropped all the heaters in the hole, I piped the external skimmer/pump through the bucket.
I'll do a more in detail post with pictures once i've finished plumbing the way i like it, etc.
OP
OP
DigitalFishAquariums
Community Member
Not every story is a success story, dear reader.
Sometimes, we have things to learn.
Sometimes we have to learn a lot.
So, in four years, recap:
The bottom of the tank cracked (my fault).
Velvet come in on (probably?) a net or some shrimp (nearly total loss of fish, i was being pretty careful but i hadn't been fallowing my frags and inverts)
Skimmer overflow, this was maybe before the velvet? It's all a blur. Earlyish, on, about the time I added my original collection back into the tank. The skimmer, being large and external, was plummed to a drain. The top off was plumbed into my RO/DI resevoir, and made the tank basicaly fresh water. This resulted in a near total loss of fish and corals. (neptune's salenity monitor managed to somehow missed all this, so i gave my neptune away and replaced it with GHL)
One day, one way or another a soft tube return from a cannister of carbon ended up out of the sump and drained the tank to zero. I couldn't hear the flood alarms I had from my room so over night a heater burned through it's acrylic bracket. Good news! it was on a marine pure block so it didn't rest on the sump wall, i had thought of that. Bad news! the garage is on a sliiiight incline so the heaters slid on a raft of growing corium down off the marine pure block and destroyed a lot of equipment, from pumps to sensors, to burning through the sump itself. I had to do emergency replacement of the entire sump system, with a near total loss of corals. (ghl's water level sensor and leak stuff managed to miss that, maybe it was confused as all its probes melted to dust, maybe it happened to fast, but the whole system went offline before It warned me. So I gave it away, and replaced it with hydros, more modularity and redundancy, I thought)
We had a random super toxic sponge take over the entire tank, with a near total loss of fish and corals (it's... just gone now? i guess? it was a bad time) i got a few fish taht were supposed to eat spounges, and they did, and had a STARTLING mortality rate.
This was very discouraging, and it really took the wind out of my sails. Tens of thousands of dollars of livestock, rare and valuable animals that (while I heavily favor captive bred) were basically irreplaceable, the suffering, and to say nothign of the loss and replacement, cleaning of equipment. Three years of the project and I had never hit the "good" stage, where colonies were well established and happy. I just kept getting to the the "well i mean i guess if you look you can see some corals, they should grow soon!" stage over, and over again. I never made or sold a single frag in those three years. I never was able to share my corals or sucess in any meanginfull way as the death toll and expense mounted.
But then, for most of 2024, after about a year, the sponge had died out, or been missing, parameters were stable, and the fish were mostly happy, with some tang infighting. I decided for the holidays i'd get some more fish and corals, and actuall start keeping the glass clean, so as not to have a humilitating stinky whirlpool in the living room.
So I did. I went out and got a few corals and for 2 months it was fine. It was good even. my one or two surviving tester acros and euphilia had company, I had some new fish get through quarentine, we had progress. I had a great trip out to visit a friend and had spent again, a pretty reasonable sum for a decent collection of frags and fish, I'd had one or two let go but they were mostly all happy on the racks on the glass.
And then, Yesterday, a union that... for the first four years at least, hadn't leaked, just decide it was no longer water proof, and yet again, the top off freshwatered the tank.
So yet again, having had all major brands of monitoring fail me, on my fourth near total loss of fish and frags in as many years, after basically replacing every peice of equpiment once or twice. after an astronomical amount of fish and frags, we find ourselves, at square one.
I do struggle to remember a time in my 30 years of reefing having been so discouraged. I have largely been fortunate, with my parents keeping some of my tanks as i went to college, and my small experiments going largely wrong, or right, that I never REALLY suffered a total loss I can recall except once, in an 80 gallon, to dinos. But back to back (to back to back) total tank losses have got me needing a break.
I am sure this is not the end, I am unfortunately still afflicted with having built a 5 ton monument to my hubris in my living room in such a way that it cannot be removed, but it has returned to its status as a monument to failure.
And for today, for now, for the first time EVER, since I dad bought me my first aquarium when I was 4, I am dry.
Sometimes, we have things to learn.
Sometimes we have to learn a lot.
So, in four years, recap:
The bottom of the tank cracked (my fault).
Velvet come in on (probably?) a net or some shrimp (nearly total loss of fish, i was being pretty careful but i hadn't been fallowing my frags and inverts)
Skimmer overflow, this was maybe before the velvet? It's all a blur. Earlyish, on, about the time I added my original collection back into the tank. The skimmer, being large and external, was plummed to a drain. The top off was plumbed into my RO/DI resevoir, and made the tank basicaly fresh water. This resulted in a near total loss of fish and corals. (neptune's salenity monitor managed to somehow missed all this, so i gave my neptune away and replaced it with GHL)
One day, one way or another a soft tube return from a cannister of carbon ended up out of the sump and drained the tank to zero. I couldn't hear the flood alarms I had from my room so over night a heater burned through it's acrylic bracket. Good news! it was on a marine pure block so it didn't rest on the sump wall, i had thought of that. Bad news! the garage is on a sliiiight incline so the heaters slid on a raft of growing corium down off the marine pure block and destroyed a lot of equipment, from pumps to sensors, to burning through the sump itself. I had to do emergency replacement of the entire sump system, with a near total loss of corals. (ghl's water level sensor and leak stuff managed to miss that, maybe it was confused as all its probes melted to dust, maybe it happened to fast, but the whole system went offline before It warned me. So I gave it away, and replaced it with hydros, more modularity and redundancy, I thought)
We had a random super toxic sponge take over the entire tank, with a near total loss of fish and corals (it's... just gone now? i guess? it was a bad time) i got a few fish taht were supposed to eat spounges, and they did, and had a STARTLING mortality rate.
This was very discouraging, and it really took the wind out of my sails. Tens of thousands of dollars of livestock, rare and valuable animals that (while I heavily favor captive bred) were basically irreplaceable, the suffering, and to say nothign of the loss and replacement, cleaning of equipment. Three years of the project and I had never hit the "good" stage, where colonies were well established and happy. I just kept getting to the the "well i mean i guess if you look you can see some corals, they should grow soon!" stage over, and over again. I never made or sold a single frag in those three years. I never was able to share my corals or sucess in any meanginfull way as the death toll and expense mounted.
But then, for most of 2024, after about a year, the sponge had died out, or been missing, parameters were stable, and the fish were mostly happy, with some tang infighting. I decided for the holidays i'd get some more fish and corals, and actuall start keeping the glass clean, so as not to have a humilitating stinky whirlpool in the living room.
So I did. I went out and got a few corals and for 2 months it was fine. It was good even. my one or two surviving tester acros and euphilia had company, I had some new fish get through quarentine, we had progress. I had a great trip out to visit a friend and had spent again, a pretty reasonable sum for a decent collection of frags and fish, I'd had one or two let go but they were mostly all happy on the racks on the glass.
And then, Yesterday, a union that... for the first four years at least, hadn't leaked, just decide it was no longer water proof, and yet again, the top off freshwatered the tank.
So yet again, having had all major brands of monitoring fail me, on my fourth near total loss of fish and frags in as many years, after basically replacing every peice of equpiment once or twice. after an astronomical amount of fish and frags, we find ourselves, at square one.
I do struggle to remember a time in my 30 years of reefing having been so discouraged. I have largely been fortunate, with my parents keeping some of my tanks as i went to college, and my small experiments going largely wrong, or right, that I never REALLY suffered a total loss I can recall except once, in an 80 gallon, to dinos. But back to back (to back to back) total tank losses have got me needing a break.
I am sure this is not the end, I am unfortunately still afflicted with having built a 5 ton monument to my hubris in my living room in such a way that it cannot be removed, but it has returned to its status as a monument to failure.
And for today, for now, for the first time EVER, since I dad bought me my first aquarium when I was 4, I am dry.
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JumboShrimp
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"The top off freshwatered the tank." Uggg. So sorry for that-- and all the series of tragedies. Back on the horse, I suppose. Such is this hobby.
billysprout
Well-Known Member
i’m so sorry friend
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