Mike's 260g Rimless Build

[revhtree]

Can you come and organize my wiring?

 

[MBSL55]

Sure, I'd be happy to but I'm not sure you'd want to pay my hourly billing rate from my day job plus travel time :bigsmile:

 

[Davesgt]

This is one amazing build!

 

[MBSL55]

Thank you!

 

[revhtree]

HA maybe not..

 

[seth&angelle]

Great build! You sure have put in a lot of hard work!

 

[MBSL55]

Thank you!

Sent from my SGH-T999 using Tapatalk 2

 

[reefin101]

Very nice looking rockwork. gonna be sweet when it grows out. Also i love the grounding bar idea for the breakout box. I will have to do that as I redo my float switches and all. Also wiring looks nice and clean too.

Good stuff!

 

[MarvinsReef]

very cool build. following!

hope the fishies do well in hypo. good luck.

 

[MBSL55]

Very nice looking rockwork. gonna be sweet when it grows out. Also i love the grounding bar idea for the breakout box. I will have to do that as I redo my float switches and all. Also wiring looks nice and clean too.
Good stuff!

Thanks! I actually decided to get some split loom the past weekend and hope to clean up the wiring next week to make it look a little better. I'd do it this weekend but I'll be out of town.

very cool build. following!

hope the fishies do well in hypo. good luck.

Thanks! This is a good time I guess to update how those guys are doing in QT.

Feeding & Fish Status:
I have been feeding the tangs Nori twice a day and they now all come up to the tank when they see me as they recognize me as the provider of the Nori. They are all eating well and have full bellies. I would like to see the Powder Blue put on some more weight though. He tends to just get the little pieces that float around rather than go directly for the larger pieces. What I've done for him is break up some of the Nori in the water so that he can get lots of little pieces quickly. The others go after the sheets of Nori aggressively. I also add a 1/2 cube of PE Mysis every other day.

Because they all come out for feeding, it is pretty easy to regularly check them for ich. As of last night, I saw one spot on the Powder Blue and just a couple of spots on one fin of the Blonde Naso. They will stay in hypo until the 8 weeks is up or for 6 weeks after the last spot is seen, whichever is longer, before I will bring the salinity up and do a Prazipro treatment.

Filtration & Water Parameters:

First thing I've added to the QT is a SeaChem Ammonia Alert so that I don't have to constantly test for ammonia every day.

I've got the doser setup to just deliver Alkalinity supplement to help keep my Alkalinity up to maintain stable pH. I am using BRS 2-part Recipe 1 and am dosing about 0.5ml of Alk per gallon to maintain an Alkalinity level of 8.5 dKH. I need a new pH test kit to make sure pH is stable and am seriously thinking about just getting an Apex Jr. or Lite for this system for pH monitoring and other purposes.
I am planning on doing a water change today so I'll post what I find in terms of amount of Alk needed to bring up a hypo saline solution to 8.5 dKH so others can use it as a guideline if they go this route.

I was surprised to see my skimmer is generating a little skimmate despite the hyposalinity conditions. Obviously it is not enough to provide proper filtration but anything helps. The macro in my fuge seems to be doing fine under the hypo conditions so I hope it is still contributing to nutrient reduction. I also have a filter sponge on the overflow box and filter floss. The sponge gets cleaned daily and takes care of floating Nori and other food that gets sucked in and the filter floss will be changed out twice a week when I do water changes. I did test for nitrates earlier in the week and they came back as undetectable despite my feeding schedule. I guess the sand, rock, and macro are still doing their thing. I'm not worried about and will not test for phosphates for now as there won't be any corals in QT for a while.

I will also say having an ATO is the only way I would try to do hypo from this point forward. Changing room temperature and humidity can really affect how much top-off is needed and it would be too easy to go over the 1.009 level without an ATO if you just tried to keep up with manual top off unless you had a very high volume.

I am using a JBJ ATO and Aqualifter as earlier and have done a couple of things to ensure it works property as there are known issues with using a JBJ and Aqualifter. First, I opened up the ATO and set the stuck float switch timeout to the maximum time (14 minutes) as the sump can easily hold the 5 gallons from the container if something goes wrong with the switch. If anyone wants to see how to do this, there are instructions on JBJ's website under the FAQ's for the ATO. Basically, just remove the four screws on the back cover, find the blue potentiometer at the top, and turn it all the way counter clockwise. Second, I put the JBJ on a timer that shuts office twice a day for 15 minutes as that was the smallest increment available on the mechanical timer I picked up. This will reset the JBJ twice a day in case it decides to act up with the Aqualifter's low current draw. Another work around others have done is use a light bulb on the circuit that powers the aqualifter to increase current draw. I have not had any timeout or reset issues for the past few days after doing the above.

 

[MBSL55]

Quick update for anyone who may be considering hypo treatment or find this useful:

I've been keeping my Alk at about 8.5 - 9.0 dKH and mixed up some water for a water change yesterday. Here are the numbers for a 10g water change that can be scaled up or down as needed to hopefully save someone a bit of time and experimenting:

- 10g RO/DI at 79 degrees F
- 1.75 cups Red Sea Coral Pro salt to make a mixture with a salinity of 1.009 S.G.
- Alkalinity reads 4.2 at 1.009 S.G. as measured with Red Sea Pro test kit
- BRS calculator calls for 31 ml of 2-part Recipe 1 to raise Alk to 8.5 dKH
- Added 31 ml of Alk to water and Alk then tested at 8.5 dKH

 

[scottkel]

Awesome Build! Following along...

 

[lawnman]

Wow what a beautiful tank. We needs some new pics.

 

[MBSL55]

Wow what a beautiful tank. We needs some new pics.

Thanks! Yeah, I know I've been bad about updating recently due to work. Bit I did borrow a macro lens and will get some more pics up this weekend

Sent from my Samsung Galaxy SIII

 

[zibba]

Really beautiful tank and I'm learning a lot from your QT procedure. Thanks for the detailed updates and explanations!

 

[MBSL55]

Really beautiful tank and I'm learning a lot from your QT procedure. Thanks for the detailed updates and explanations!

Thanks! I hope to have a detailed article written on my QT setup and process soon and will provide a link when it is done.

Okay, so I didn't exactly get an update up for the weekend. Work, coaching activities, and other projects have all taken their toll on my spare time. Figured no one would want to really read up on all my mundane maintenance tasks like water changes and all that goodness.

Fish in QT are all doing well and have not had any visible spots for a while now. They are just biding their time until it is safe for them to go in the main tank. I'm thinking around Christmas. Things are going well and they are eating lots of Nori and are fat and happy. Maintaining water quality in the QT has been a breeze.

On the main tank, the wiring mess remains . . . and will be project for Thanksgiving weekend when I'll have time should I mess something up in the process. No new equipment purchases or anything like that as everything seems to be running pretty well. I just add top off water, do my water changes, testing, and check on my 2-part levels (which are about 50% depleted). I did order the Red Sea Coloration Program and will give that try just to do something different. I also do need to plan on and install some sort of deep cycle battery bank as back-up power for my system.

I had my AI Vega fixtures up to about 75% power a couple of weeks ago and started bleaching corals, mainly the ones from MACNA that were not acclimated to LED's yet so I backed everything down to 60% and am at 65% this week. I'll keep these levels for now and see if things recover before trying to increase the light intensity. Even though the Vega fixtures measured lower PAR levels than the Sols, they are still plenty bright and more than enough to bleach your corals if you are not careful.

Finally, I had a chance this weekend to try taking some pictures with a macro lens. My picture taking skills still suck compared to what I've seen on the forums and I need to learn how to do that white balance thing better and maybe how to use Photoshop or something for more advanced post production. But, here goes my first attempts at some decent photos . . .

First, the obligatory FTS:

Alien Eye Chalice that has to stay in the shade or it gets bleached:

Acro with some crazy PE:

Copps Tri-Color. All the parts sticking up from the encrusted base are new growth. Hard to get a good angle on this one that shows the top part that is exposed to the light:

Frogspawn. One of my first corals that I almost lost and has gone through a lot:

 

[MBSL55]

Green Acro of some sort. White sections are all new growth:

Green monitcap with blue polyps:

GSP. Yeah, one of the most common corals but also still one of my favorites:

Lime Green Acro:

ORA Acro of some sort that looks like a tri-color:

 

[MBSL55]

Side note, if you haven't figured it out yet, I'm not good with names for most of my corals. I just tend to pick-up things I like and sometimes I happen to remember the name

This was more of an orange digitada when I got it from someone else who had it under AI Sols and was dosing Zeovit for their tank. It morphed into a pink color for me which I really like:

Another SPS. I think this also came from ORA at MACNA:

One of the Ricordea from my little lagoonal area:

True Undata from Occulus:

Red ORA Acro of some sort. A friend of mine saw it at MACNA and said it was one they hadn't released yet. All those whiter parts are new growth and it is encrusting really well:

 

[MBSL55]

Finally, what reef would be complete without some zoas?

That's it for now! Taking pictures was harder than I thought. Well, not really, I just had to press a button . . . but taking pictures that came out looking halfway decent was. Maybe I'll get that whole white balance thing down at some point and get some pictures of other corals in the tank.

 

[reefin101]

Very nice! I too love me some GSP! On the sand bed only tho!!!
Keep us up to speed on the Red sea color regimin. I was curious to see if this stuff helped much. looks like a neat product.