Innovative Marine 150

Sprin001 · Oct 20, 2020

airmotive said:
I travel a lot for work (well, used to) and take the Mrs for a nice trip every year (well, used to), and so my last tank (70 gallon mixed reef) was set up specifically to be left alone for up to three weeks at a time. (Which it did successfully on several occasions. Without an Apex or any other purpose-built automation). Of course, my new IM-150 build has a couple Grand worth of grey and orange doodads that I have yet to figure out.

But I digress...

The only component that ever consistently tried to kill my tank was the dosing pumps. The Jabaos worked amazingly well for a long time...and then decided it was time to siphon all of my two-part into the tank. Replaced the pump head units and just kept getting more of the same. So I spent lots more on the Bubble Magnus set-up...only to have those consistently pull their tubes up into the pump heads and dump two-part all over my dosing cabinets. Again replacing pump heads ($25 a piece?!?). All the lubricant and adjusting in the world never fixed that issue for more than a couple months. I'm hoping the Apex Dos units address this, but I haven't reached that point yet.

Return pumps? I'm a Jabao fan. Buy them three at a time for less than the cost of one of the "premier" pumps, then swap them out every six months. I will ALWAYS opt for a spare over a warranty. And being able to simply swap pumps and clean the old pump at your convenience is far better than shutting down your entire system for a rushed pump maintenance schedule.

Ultimately, the only failures I've come home to after an extended time away were dosing pump related. My setup is deliberately easy for routine maintenance so that I don't put off the routine maintenance. (Pump swaps)

When I leave for an extended time, I put a heater in the display tank in case of return pump failure. The display has enough circulation to carry on without the sump as long as the temperature is maintained.

Thanks for the response. Pro-tip on the heater thing, I would've overlooked that. I like my return pumps and will likely keep an additional on-hand at all times. I'm more focused on the dosing systems and finding one that isn't overly complicated but also covers all the bases. I'm guessing most people dose Ca, Mg, Trace, and ALK. Is there anything else commonly dosed? -JS

airmotive · Oct 22, 2020

I just dosed B-Ionic 2 part, Magnesium and vinegar. In the future, if leaving the tank for several weeks, I’d probably disconnect the dosing unless I find a more reliable means of dosing. If the Apex Dos system proves to be less failure prone than Bubble Magnus, I may consider leaving it unattended. At least I can shut the Dos pumps off remotely.

Sprin001 · Nov 27, 2020

Growing sea lettuce in the refugium and running the elite 200-int skimmer. This was my first skimmer and the instructions were worthless but surprisingly it is fairly plug and play. This was the biggest skimmer I could fit in the trigger 44 triton sump.

Sprin001 · Nov 30, 2020

Recycling the shipping box for a 1st edition controller housing.

Sprin001 · Dec 4, 2020

Roughing a floating canopy to see what I actually feel is most functional and protective on the short peoples eyes.

shoelaceike · Dec 23, 2020

Looks great! I just set up the 100 INT...kind of wish I went with the 140 lol...only issues I have are the doors are kind of a pain to open and close and the return standpipe needs to bend kind of awkwardly to get into the locline bulkhead....I was just concerned about the stress on the bottom glass from that bend....

Sprin001 · Dec 23, 2020

Yes, I had a similar offset and just made sure I left slack in the portion between the bottom glass and overflow. I can't imagine the stress of the offset will result in any issues but I guess I plumbed it and never looked back. Up ~4 months and no issues there. I'm now hitting all the newer tank issues and trying to balance nutes. I initially ran GFO/Carbon but I think I'm going to move to a biopellet system and give that a go. Most of the newer filtration and dosing stuff I've never done before so it'll be some trial and error - but that's half the fun.