Johnny Ciotti's Red Sea REEFER 250
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OP
OP
Can you give me a bit more info on what you're keeping in your aquarium? Personally, with an all Ai Prime setup I'd run heavy into the blue and maybe 10% of that number being white for majority of the day. Usually having a peak for 1-2 hrs of near full intensity (your choice of how high that number is) of the white channel. Red can bump up during that time frame but typically I'm never above 5% as it's so over powering.
Thanks for following along and my apologize for the late response my explanation will be posted shortly.
As for your answer, if you already own multiple Ai Primes I'd stick with those. You never recoup the costs on used LED lighting and having multiple systems is a pain in the butt.
Reefer 450 I'd go with 4x Ai Primes to start and if you really feel like you need more punch down the line then possibly add another. Another option would be a single Radion XR30 flanked with your two Ai Primes. For flow 2x MP40 Vortechs would be spot on. In my experience the Maxspect Pump is a pile of steaming garbage. The funny thing is the knock of Jaebo is better than the original Maxspect Gyre. The Maxspect runs extremely hot and is one of the loudest pumps on the market. It literally sounds broken directly out of the box and would shy away from ever recommending one to someone I cared about.
If you opt for the Reefer 525XL I think you'd be forced into 5-6 Ai Primes. You might want to Look at 2x XR30s and pop your Ai Primes on the ends of the display. But if you are going down that path I'd just opt in for two Quads from Nano Box or even something custom from them. You'd be happier in the long run IMHO.
Any updates @Johnny Ciotti?
Wow, it's been a nightmare of a situation and I'll be updating soon.
Post might get reworked and simply become part of this thread here in the near future.
Research is a must with Bio Pellets and my biggest recommendation is to go slowly. Post a link to your thread when you have a chance and thanks for stopping by.
OP
OP
My long overdue update.
Firstly let me apologize to anyone I didn't respond to very quickly, it's been rough and the last thing I wanted to talk about was my own aquarium.
So I grabbed a few new frags a while back from a person that I'd never gotten corals from before. Well, this just goes to show you that no matter what anyone says and no matter how careful you can be sometimes bad things can still happen to the best of us.
Needless to say I've had a bit of a serious issue here at the house with my personal display and it hasn't been fun. The few frags I'd put in my system despite being dipped and gone through quarantine brought along AEFWs. I'd left town twice for an extended period of time after their introduction to my display and it was enough time to allow them to go wild. Upon returning home I'd lost a good portion of most of my larger colonies and what I didn't lose directly I lost after an aggressive dipping regiment in a painfully pathetic attempt to salvage my system.
(Disclaimer: No living Acropora has left my system to any other system, the person responsible is not a vendor, but this doesn't rule out the vendors or locations that they might have shopped at. Too many variables but at least I won't be contributing to the spread of this pest.)
Obviously the non Acropora corals are more than fine but the layout looks horrendous and will need to be re-scaped before posting any further picture updates. It's been depressing enough that it's driven me away from sharing and or even mentioned just about anything personal aquarium related to anyone.
In about two weeks the layout will be shiny new again and the aquarium will have been moved to a new wall in our home. Stay tuned for version 2.0 and thanks for tagging along.
Firstly let me apologize to anyone I didn't respond to very quickly, it's been rough and the last thing I wanted to talk about was my own aquarium.
So I grabbed a few new frags a while back from a person that I'd never gotten corals from before. Well, this just goes to show you that no matter what anyone says and no matter how careful you can be sometimes bad things can still happen to the best of us.
Needless to say I've had a bit of a serious issue here at the house with my personal display and it hasn't been fun. The few frags I'd put in my system despite being dipped and gone through quarantine brought along AEFWs. I'd left town twice for an extended period of time after their introduction to my display and it was enough time to allow them to go wild. Upon returning home I'd lost a good portion of most of my larger colonies and what I didn't lose directly I lost after an aggressive dipping regiment in a painfully pathetic attempt to salvage my system.
(Disclaimer: No living Acropora has left my system to any other system, the person responsible is not a vendor, but this doesn't rule out the vendors or locations that they might have shopped at. Too many variables but at least I won't be contributing to the spread of this pest.)
Obviously the non Acropora corals are more than fine but the layout looks horrendous and will need to be re-scaped before posting any further picture updates. It's been depressing enough that it's driven me away from sharing and or even mentioned just about anything personal aquarium related to anyone.
In about two weeks the layout will be shiny new again and the aquarium will have been moved to a new wall in our home. Stay tuned for version 2.0 and thanks for tagging along.
Branespikin
Valuable Member
Heres link to my build. Not much movement yet but will be in the next few weeks.
https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/branespikin-reefer-250.239318/#post-2811102
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Yes how's the tank doing now @Johnny Ciotti?
OP
OP
This might be long and believe me it gets "different" pretty quick.
The aquarium was reset post AEFWs. A few weeks into I somehow overdosed Alk solution and nearly killed everything except the fish, still uncertain as to why. Attempting to correct the issue I turned the dosing pump off for a week and did a few water changes to help bring levels back to normal. In that time I didn't think to check the lines to the dosing pump, they had frozen/clogged up from sitting stagnant. Needless to say when I turned the dosing pump back on the tank went the opposite direction and took a massive Alk drop and ph crash. Thankfully all the corals and fished lived, with exception to my ORA Green Birdsnest, but lived is a relative term. Most livestock was in seriously bad shape and in need of a relocation.
Since all of that had gone down I've gifted all the remaining livestock to friends and taken the tank down completely.
This is where it gets good, and you thought this was over.
The tank was drained and then flushed with a garden hose while simultaneously syphoning out the sand. However there were a few Palythoa growing in a mat along the bottom. I decided to use the ol' trusty wet/dry vac to suck them and the remaining sand from the aquarium glass. This is the start of me being very dumb.
After a few passes at sucking up some sump crud, a bit of water from the overflow, little remnants of sand, and all the usual I moved on to the now slimey oozing palys. The palys hit the inside of the hot vacuum and instantly created that recognizable coral funk smell. I quickly urned the vac off to not stink up the house as my other half was in the room and I'm sure she would rather not have to endure that.
Within a few minutes of finishing the bulk of the project and cleaning up I felt flu like and a bit weak. Not assuming that it could have been from the Palys but just the possibility I had been overworked. The sickness must have waited for me to be done with kicking my own behind before setting in.
The fiancee and myself decide it's probably best to grab some Pho and leave the cooking alone for the night as is she needed to be up at 4am for work and it was already nearly 10pm. We head off to grab our dinner and I'm feeling worse and worse by the minute. We get through the meal and head back home, maybe a 10 minute drive at most. We both aren't feeling well and let me remind you she had to be on set very early. Thinking the same thing about how tick poor the timing was to get sick we both just wanted to get home and go to bed.
Once arriving home we took turns showering and getting ready for bed. She's finished up and trying to get some sleep by the time I'm out of the shower and crawling into bed. The term crawling isn't relative in this sense. I'm literally crawling and shaking my way into bed with a massive fever (105f) and chills like I'd never felt before. My heart and head are pounding as I try to keep my racket down, I'm thinking something isn't right. I was gifted a FitBit Blaze for my hiking activities and thought this would be a great time to check my heart rate, just over 130bpm... While laying down? This isn't normal for anyone and especially not me considering I average around 60bpm at rest.
This is all in under 2 hrs from breaking the tank down, finally I had realized that I effed up, not fully knowing the extent of my mistake until now. With a sickening feeling far worse than any that had occupied my head. I thought to myself it was the Palys and now I'm going to die. It's a strange place to be in while you are literally seeing a swirl of rainbow colors behind your closed eyelids and shaking so hard you can't hold your urine in. Oddly enough the idea of being embarrassed doesn't even present itself when your're busy sobbing like an infant in a wet diaper.
Now I'm not exactly sure what happened at this point, I do remember being asked if I wanted to go to the hospital but, referencing in my own head an article I'd read about Palytoxin, saying no. I'd figured even though I couldn't speak around managing the ice chip between my gum line, if I could stay hydrated, if I can swallow, if I don't over heat. I'll probably make it. If not it's way cheaper going out in my own bed than the one at the local ER. Not exactly the kind of bill you want to leave to your soon to be wife.
The next 4 hours were a blur or maybe a kaleidoscope of nausea, suffocation, uncontrollable crying, muscle spasms, unbearable pain, and a deep sense of fear. You really don't know what stupid feels like until it almost kills you for hours and hours on end.
Around 4am clarity came back into the scene. Whatever pain killers and fever reducers I'd taken kicked in. The ice and wash cloths had effectively soaked what parts of our bed my sweat hadn't. Somehow around this time I knew I was in the clear. Being able to stretch out of a fetal position and hold a cup of water was an intensely gratifying feeling of accomplishment.
The headache, most pain in my lungs, and the over all feeling of having every tendon and bone snapped in my body subsided sometime in the late afternoon the following day.
Now I don't know why I felt compelled to tell this to anyone outside of my close circle of friends and family. I'm pretty sure I don't need to stress the importance of being careful in and around your system. I probably don't need to remind you that some of these animals can and will in fact kill you. But this entire story should at least serve as a reminder that everyone can make a mistake and use those mistakes to help you and everyone around you avoid making others. And more importantly beyond the mistakes, just be genuinely grateful for the life you observe whether it be your aquarium inhabitants or your own.
The aquarium was reset post AEFWs. A few weeks into I somehow overdosed Alk solution and nearly killed everything except the fish, still uncertain as to why. Attempting to correct the issue I turned the dosing pump off for a week and did a few water changes to help bring levels back to normal. In that time I didn't think to check the lines to the dosing pump, they had frozen/clogged up from sitting stagnant. Needless to say when I turned the dosing pump back on the tank went the opposite direction and took a massive Alk drop and ph crash. Thankfully all the corals and fished lived, with exception to my ORA Green Birdsnest, but lived is a relative term. Most livestock was in seriously bad shape and in need of a relocation.
Since all of that had gone down I've gifted all the remaining livestock to friends and taken the tank down completely.
This is where it gets good, and you thought this was over.
The tank was drained and then flushed with a garden hose while simultaneously syphoning out the sand. However there were a few Palythoa growing in a mat along the bottom. I decided to use the ol' trusty wet/dry vac to suck them and the remaining sand from the aquarium glass. This is the start of me being very dumb.
After a few passes at sucking up some sump crud, a bit of water from the overflow, little remnants of sand, and all the usual I moved on to the now slimey oozing palys. The palys hit the inside of the hot vacuum and instantly created that recognizable coral funk smell. I quickly urned the vac off to not stink up the house as my other half was in the room and I'm sure she would rather not have to endure that.
Within a few minutes of finishing the bulk of the project and cleaning up I felt flu like and a bit weak. Not assuming that it could have been from the Palys but just the possibility I had been overworked. The sickness must have waited for me to be done with kicking my own behind before setting in.
The fiancee and myself decide it's probably best to grab some Pho and leave the cooking alone for the night as is she needed to be up at 4am for work and it was already nearly 10pm. We head off to grab our dinner and I'm feeling worse and worse by the minute. We get through the meal and head back home, maybe a 10 minute drive at most. We both aren't feeling well and let me remind you she had to be on set very early. Thinking the same thing about how tick poor the timing was to get sick we both just wanted to get home and go to bed.
Once arriving home we took turns showering and getting ready for bed. She's finished up and trying to get some sleep by the time I'm out of the shower and crawling into bed. The term crawling isn't relative in this sense. I'm literally crawling and shaking my way into bed with a massive fever (105f) and chills like I'd never felt before. My heart and head are pounding as I try to keep my racket down, I'm thinking something isn't right. I was gifted a FitBit Blaze for my hiking activities and thought this would be a great time to check my heart rate, just over 130bpm... While laying down? This isn't normal for anyone and especially not me considering I average around 60bpm at rest.
This is all in under 2 hrs from breaking the tank down, finally I had realized that I effed up, not fully knowing the extent of my mistake until now. With a sickening feeling far worse than any that had occupied my head. I thought to myself it was the Palys and now I'm going to die. It's a strange place to be in while you are literally seeing a swirl of rainbow colors behind your closed eyelids and shaking so hard you can't hold your urine in. Oddly enough the idea of being embarrassed doesn't even present itself when your're busy sobbing like an infant in a wet diaper.
Now I'm not exactly sure what happened at this point, I do remember being asked if I wanted to go to the hospital but, referencing in my own head an article I'd read about Palytoxin, saying no. I'd figured even though I couldn't speak around managing the ice chip between my gum line, if I could stay hydrated, if I can swallow, if I don't over heat. I'll probably make it. If not it's way cheaper going out in my own bed than the one at the local ER. Not exactly the kind of bill you want to leave to your soon to be wife.
The next 4 hours were a blur or maybe a kaleidoscope of nausea, suffocation, uncontrollable crying, muscle spasms, unbearable pain, and a deep sense of fear. You really don't know what stupid feels like until it almost kills you for hours and hours on end.
Around 4am clarity came back into the scene. Whatever pain killers and fever reducers I'd taken kicked in. The ice and wash cloths had effectively soaked what parts of our bed my sweat hadn't. Somehow around this time I knew I was in the clear. Being able to stretch out of a fetal position and hold a cup of water was an intensely gratifying feeling of accomplishment.
The headache, most pain in my lungs, and the over all feeling of having every tendon and bone snapped in my body subsided sometime in the late afternoon the following day.
Now I don't know why I felt compelled to tell this to anyone outside of my close circle of friends and family. I'm pretty sure I don't need to stress the importance of being careful in and around your system. I probably don't need to remind you that some of these animals can and will in fact kill you. But this entire story should at least serve as a reminder that everyone can make a mistake and use those mistakes to help you and everyone around you avoid making others. And more importantly beyond the mistakes, just be genuinely grateful for the life you observe whether it be your aquarium inhabitants or your own.
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4FordFamily
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Wow that is really neat!
revhtree
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Oh wow man that is crazy!! Sounds like you had some paly, panic and anxiety mixed in there! Glad you are doing good bro!
DT Prime
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That's terrifying, glad to hear you are OK! Googling "paly toxin reef tank" shows you are definitely not alone and were probably lucky in shutting it off quickly to avoid bothering your fiancee. Hope to see the 250 back in action some day!
MarineDepot
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Thank you for sharing your story!
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Hey @Johnny Ciotti any updates?
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