My custom 180

timkenagy · Feb 7, 2016

Jimbo662 said:
I upgraded my gyre blades about two weeks ago. I was amazed at the difference. I initially had it running at 58%. After the upgrade I had to turn it down to 30%. I have two trachs on the sand below the gyre and it was sucking up so much water it was moving them around.

Yeah I'm wondering if I have mine cranking too much flow. (If there's such a thing?) I'm at full power but have it on pulse so it's not constant.. I'm debating changing the blade combination and run it sideways. But I finally have it running good I don't really want to mess with it too much. I run bare bottom so I don't have the issues like that anymore..

Jimbo662 · Feb 7, 2016

I ran mine on pulse for a while but discovered an issue. 2 or 3 times over a period of about 3 months it just stopped. You could see it attempt to run, the blade would jump a little so I set it back to normal. Have you seen anything like that? I discovered if I run it too high I end up with bare bottom at the far end!

timkenagy · Feb 7, 2016

I don't know really.. I got it used about 4 months ago and just figured out the bushings were all stripped out when I got it. So this is literally the first time I've seen it running correctly. I'm wondering if it was the shaft spinning in that bushing? If so I think the new one will fix that (the clear bushing) because it seems more like a hard plastic vs. the old that was a softer plastic.

timkenagy · Feb 8, 2016

Friend brought me a pulsating Xenia frag today. It made me smile. It reminds me of the simpler times in the hobby. And it's a fun coral to watch. Unfortunately I haven't been able to grow much softies lately because I have the nutrients so low in this system. We'll see how this goes .. I wouldn't mind a large chunk of it in my tank

timkenagy · Feb 9, 2016

Got the first new piece of coral that I've gotten in a long while. (Aside from the Xenia) A local reefer brought these by because he wanted a piece of my hammer.

timkenagy · Feb 10, 2016

My oversized fuge.. I have one resident, a black and yellow chromis. I'm debating moving him to the frag tank.. (Although I don't want him at all, but I promised him) I'm debating pulling the trigger on an Achilles tang. If I do then he'll be living alone in here until he's fat and healthy..

timkenagy · Feb 11, 2016

Had a friend come over to have me look at his sump to see if I can fix a broken piece. I was talking about my reef and was telling how difficult it was to take pictures because my rabbit is a photo hog and if I put the camera by the glass he photobombs it every time.. Then said watch ;

timkenagy · Feb 12, 2016

Some more new pieces in qt!

timkenagy · Feb 13, 2016

Looking through my pictures and I found this one of my montipora right before I took it out and passed it on to a bigger tank. It came in as a quarter size frag.

timkenagy · Feb 22, 2016

So in the past 3 years I had been fortunate enough to have only lost 1 fish. It was a clown that didn't make it during the swap from acrylic to glass. Well at least I thought. I was doing some maintenance on my tank last night and looked in my overflows. I see an orange speck. So I grabbed a flashlight to get a better look. A clown comes swimming up and looks at me.. Gives me this HELP! look.. So now there's once again 6. Problem is he's now really big which leads me to believe that he may not be a he anymore and might have a problem. (amazing how a thin piece of plastic can determine the sex of an animal) but all she wants after 4-5 months of life in an overflow is to hang out in the nem. But the others ain't havin it.. So I need another nem for her now. But poppa snowflake (whose been spawning with the female snowflake) keeps sneaking over there like he's some sort of player

timkenagy · Apr 2, 2016

Tore apart the reef because those pink and gold palys were taking over and choking everything out.. Hopefully scrubbed every last one of them off and I'll never see them again. But now the tank is back together and this time I spent a good week scaping it. It was nice having the 180 fuge to hold the rock and the frag system to hold the corals so I could take my time without worrying about loss. I'll get some updated pictures or a video soon. I also ordered a bunch of new fish from Live Aquaria and some corals from Battlecorals.. Which was fun because I hadn't really added anything in 3 years.

Also after giving the new ATS a few months to break in. I was playing around with different bulbs on the 2 screen. As stated in a previous post I had a pair of Cree LED bubs (5000k) on one and a pair of melevs fuge bulbs on the other. The cree LEDs were giving me about twice the growth although both were doing pretty well. I've also stepped up the feeding quite a bit because I've added 3 new tangs and a few other fish and want to make sure they have plenty to eat after the big pigs in the tank eat... So since I'm out to find the best/cheapest bulb the testing never stops really.. So the Cree's are running on the one side and I picked up a pair of Bridgelux red grow bulbs. I ordered them from Geek (wish.com) and they were only $4/bulb so I'll let you know in a couple months how well they do.

timkenagy · Dec 3, 2017

I quit...............…......…

timkenagy · Dec 3, 2017

Ok but seriously. I messed my back up really bad. 3 surgeries later I get the pleasure of being a chronic pain patient for the rest of my life..

So the decision was made to liquidate all my equipment. Just going up and down the stairs was hard enough, 40 gallon weekly water changes became to much really quickly. The plan is to eventually get something small, but a break is in order.