Swedish fish - behind the scenes rebuilding a public aquarium

Sallstrom · Mar 26, 2019

d.fast said:
Bad heaters!

How are you doing with the native fish? No nice deluxe treatment of those? Or have you rehoused them during the rebuild? I can imagine that they would be harder to house temporarily because of the cooling needs(though the chillers would heat the room a bit preventing the need for evil heaters) and many of the specimens are a bit larger and more predatory than your tropical fish. Though it seems your budget for the tropical tanks exceed the cold-water during the last years... ;-) You need to tell mister Jens that he needs to step up his game aswell!

We will have at least 4 small tanks up soon for cold water species in the temporary Aquarium. It'll be mostly invertebrates and maybe some pipefishes I think. Cods and most other Swedish fish gets too big

So when we start up the chillers, I'm sure we won't have a problem heating the tropical tanks no more

We are more worried about the temperature in the room during the summers. We got one AC now, we might need more.

The reason the tropical part of our collection has grown more than the cold water is the cooling capacity. Our old large cooler broke down and we didn't want to replace it a year before the rebuilding. So some cold water tanks became tropical. It's much easier to keep water at 25 degrees than 12!

In the new Aquarium it'll be a lot of cold water tanks. Both cold as in Swedish waters, but also a system for Atlantic/Mediterranean animals with a temperature around 18 degrees. And a kelp system with temperature following seasons.
And some plans for a 4-6 degrees tank, for deepwater corals like Lophelia pertusa.
So Jens is will have plenty of cold water tanks in two years! (He's responsible for our cold water systems)

d.fast · Mar 26, 2019

Sounds great! Looking forward to seeing your challenges and solutions to housing the cooler animals. Really missing visiting you, going to be two long and hard years! At least Havets Hus seems to be done soon, will have to be content with that. Maybe Universeum as well, they do have some pretty good tanks too, but it's quite crowded there many times. You guys have a closer connection to us hobbyists

Sallstrom · Mar 26, 2019

d.fast said:
Sounds great! Looking forward to seeing your challenges and solutions to housing the cooler animals. Really missing visiting you, going to be two long and hard years! At least Havets Hus seems to be done soon, will have to be content with that. Maybe Universeum as well, they do have some pretty good tanks too, but it's quite crowded there many times. You guys have a closer connection to us hobbyists

Thanks for the kind words! I really miss the reef meets and all the aquarists too! Hope we can do something during the rebuild, but I can't promise anything yet.

Yes, both Havets Hus and The Baltic centre(at Skansen) will reopen/open this year. It'll be interesting to visit! (Other Swedish public aquariums for those of you who's not familiar)

Sallstrom · Mar 26, 2019

We had a productive day today! Jens cleaned the two large propagation tanks(the ones we renovated and painted) and I did the pipes. So tomorrow when the glue is dry, the tanks are ready for water! (We only got 1000L ready, so we can only fill 1/4)

And now we are at a point where we need to reuse equipment from our old tanks instead of buying new. So at the moment this system has no skimmer and no lights. Just a return pump. I have an idea of disassemble our 2500L mix softies/LPS tank and move everything into this system, and do it on one work day. Because we need to move the lights and stuff too. Plus the water. That might be a long day

Since I really like to find easier ways of doing things, the new sump is already connected to the other system(the six acrylic tanks). Just need to remove two pipes and the two systems become one. So if everything works out well we can have one large coral system. But we start them up separate(which was a good idea considering I've poisoned the first one by melting plastic heaters in that water..

).

Here are some pictures

And the sumps!

Silver Dollar · Mar 26, 2019

Why don't you want to have two separate systems for redundancy?
If something bad happens in one of the systems, you have the other system left. It can be techincal malfunction or unhealthy corals.

Sallstrom · Mar 26, 2019

Silver Dollar said:
Why don't you want to have two separate systems for redundancy?
If something bad happens in one of the systems, you have the other system left. It can be techincal malfunction or unhealthy corals.

That's very true. And we might go that way. I get a bit lazy sometimes and want one system to manage instead of two. But two systems would be more safe in case something happens. Thanks for the reminder!

JacquieBeginnerReef · Mar 26, 2019

Inspiring!

Sallstrom · Mar 27, 2019

JacquieBeginnerReef said:
Inspiring!

Thanks!

Today we started filling up the second system in the temporary Aquarium!

And here's a picture from one of our cold water tanks that still up and running.

And some Detox skimmate from the first new system(the one with the heater accident). Today we started a filter with activated carbon. There's growing some algae in the tanks and the Caulastrea coral look happy, so I don't think it's a lot of nasty stuff in the water.

crusso1993 · Mar 27, 2019

Sallstrom said:
Thanks!

Today we started filling up the second system in the temporary Aquarium!

And here's a picture from one of our cold water tanks that still up and running.

And some Detox skimmate from the first new system(the one with the heater accident). Today we started a filter with activated carbon. There's growing some algae in the tanks and the Caulastrea coral look happy, so I don't think it's a lot of nasty stuff in the water.

Not sure why but I like looking at those long tubs. Strange.

Happy to hear that it appears not much damage made by the Great Heater Debacle of '19!

Brew12 · Mar 27, 2019

Are you going to top off the temporary systems manually? I'd imagine you are going to have a lot of evaporation once they are up to temp and flowing.

Sallstrom · Mar 27, 2019

Brew12 said:
Are you going to top off the temporary systems manually? I'd imagine you are going to have a lot of evaporation once they are up to temp and flowing.

We have a 200L rain water barrel as a temporary RO tank at the moment, and auto top off via GHL profilux. I hope we can fit our current RO tank into this room further on. It's 1000L.

Brew12 · Mar 27, 2019

Sallstrom said:
We have a 200L rain water barrel as a temporary RO tank at the moment, and auto top off via GHL profilux. I hope we can fit our current RO tank into this room further on. It's 1000L.

One of these days I need to switch my ATO over to my Profilux. If I go that route, I may hit you guys up for how you have it programmed for reliability.

Sallstrom · Mar 27, 2019

Brew12 said:
One of these days I need to switch my ATO over to my Profilux. If I go that route, I may hit you guys up for how you have it programmed for reliability.

I'm pretty used to the simple ones, just a float switch and a on/off socket. But @Lasse loves to connect all kinds of functions to the level control, so he's the right guy to ask. I'm just trying to keep up with him

Sallstrom · Mar 28, 2019

The bamboo shark tank is looking pretty mature now! For size comparison, there's a medium sized clown fish down to the right in the anemone. So some of these colonies are quite large now

LED only in this tank.