Trouble keeping water clear

[MONTANTK]

After a few bumps in the beginning of the build, my 7.4g reef is finally starting to thrive. The only issue is my water is kind of cloudy and there is a noticeable amount of debris floating around.

I know this is due to the lack of mechanical sponges and filter socks in the back but it’s only because I literally have no room for them. I thought about lowering the water level a little so debris would would get caught in the overflow but there’s also a bottom intake that I can’t plug. First chamber has a small polypad and my Eheim heater, 2nd chamber has my chemi pure bag and the 3rd is obviously the pump.

The water level of the 2nd chamber is way too low for the heater. The only other option I see is packing the 1st chamber with floss around my heater. Does anyone have any other suggestions? Never ran into this problem with an AIO tank because normally the second chamber is tall enough for the heater but I guess this is a design flaw by lifegard.

 

[GoVols]

Bump!!

 

[Snoopy 67]

Even if you filter 1 section it's better than none.
I can only do 1 overflow on mine but it traps a heck of a lot.

 

[Montiman]

If you know the problem is the lack of mechanical filtration then the only solution is finding a way to add it. I like using the Sera Crystal Clear media. I put this in the back of my Lifegard AIOs and it works well. Forms around equipment better than pads.

 

[MONTANTK]

Update: changed my heater to a aqueon model that was much shorter. Moved it to the second chamber and modified an IM filter sock so it would fit in the first chamber. Worked wonders

 

[GoVols]

Have no clue if the below quote helps, but posting it.

Ok ok, I'm way overdue on an update here. Sorry everyone!

The tank is still alive. It's doing fairly well. I've learned a bunch of things along the way. The first two pictures below were taken about 1.5 months before the second one, you can see the growth on the cyphastrea and psammacora on the bottom glass. The tank is not perfect, and not everyone is totally happy, but we're headed in the right direction...

1.5 months later ...

The hair algae problems have mostly cleared up. Now I'm getting bubble algae and some other sort of macro popping up here and there. I do some manual removal with water changes.

Great growth from some corals, medium from others, and none (and in some cases even a little bleaching) in a couple. I've found a few things that could be contributing to that, more on those below.

Water and Water Changes
The water change regimen is going well so far. Roughly two gallons a week. I've found that this tank is actually closer to 5 gallons when accounting for the LR etc... I even wondered if the 7.4G measurement was taken when the display and back chambers are filled to the brim! Anyways, what it means is that we're doing nearly 40% WC a week.

I haven't started using the spring water yet, and continue to mix Tropic Marin Pro with Kroger brand distilled water. I managed to get ICP results on both the spring water and the tap water. The summary there is that the spring water is pretty clean, with the exception of elevated silicates, which make it unsuitable for use as top-off water. It's probably OK for use in WCs though. The water from the tap had very high copper content, along with silver and tin, which is probably from the copper piping and soldering in this old house. Check out this thread if you wanna read more about that: https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/s...s-what-is-acceptable-for-source-water.737822/

The volume of water needed per week so far has been low enough that buying distilled water is manageable. Once things are more stable, maybe I'll give the spring water a shot.

I noticed pretty early on that the Kroger water reads ~1-2ppm on a TDS meter. One thing I worried about was the potential for copper (from the use of copper equipment in the manufacturing process). I thought about sending it for ICP, but that doesn't help a ton if you don't know what the variance is. I reached out to Kroger customer service and requested the latest quality control results as well as the tolerances allowed. (Literally) Months later, I've got the results: no copper detected, but the allowed tolerance simply cites the US FDA tolerances which are very high. Still, reassuring. I've attached the report.

The Inverts
When the algae outbreak got really bad (following my last post), I decided it was time for a CuC. I ordered a handful of dwarf ceriths from reef cleaners, as well as two limpets and two hermit crabs. I was worried about the hermit crabs not being able to get up on to the rock structure (since it's elevated on acrylic pylons), but that turned out to be a non-issue. I was also worried about the mass of these creatures - for instance, if a regular-sized trochus snail were to die in a tank this size, it would probably wreak havok on the water chemistry if not discovered quickly. Luckily, these dwarf ceriths are very small.

Neither of the limpets survived, I'm not totally sure why. It's possible I screwed up their acclimation. The hermit crabs seem to be pretty happy, and have already switched shells once or twice. The dwarf ceriths are everywhere. There are also a lot of empty shells... It's hard for me to tell if they were empty when I got them, or if they died in the tank. At any rate, the algae situation is much much better now, no doubt in part due to the CuC.

I also got five sexy shrimp. One died the day after I received it. The other four survived and seem to be happy. There are conflicting opinions on the internet about the care of sexy shrimp. Some people say they need to be fed, some say they don't. Some say they can feed on coral slime. Having to feed them is far from ideal... especially if it requires frozen food - that's a big burden to leave behind on my family, especially for some tiny shrimp . I have small pellet food for them, but that's not good for water quality either.

I decided to see if I could get away without feeding them. A month later, I can say that the (likely) answer is "no" after I concluding an investigation into why some of my zoas weren't doing too well... that's right, I'm fairly certain they've been munching on my zoas. As of today, I've begun to sparingly feed some pellets... so we'll see how that goes for a while. It's really hard to tell if they're eating the pellets or not...

The Bottom Drain Problem
The drain at the bottom of the tank seems like a nice feature at first, but it has turned out to be really problematic. I'm now of the opinion that there's a design flaw in the overflow, which caused the manufacturer to make a quick fix by drilling a bottom drain.

The bottom drain hole sends water into the mechanical filter chamber, where I currently have the sponge that came with the tank. It enters the same chamber as the overflow, just at the bottom instead of the top. As time goes by though, the water level in the display slowly rises, and the level in the back chamber slowly falls. This causes the ATO to kick in as it has a sensor in the back chamber. More water is pushed into the chamber, and more is pumped into the back, and this cycle goes on until the water level in the display is quite high.

When I perform a WC and clean the sponge, the display water level drops back to "normal". In some cases, it drops even lower, below the overflow. I realized that by having the bottom drain, we no longer have a clean separation between display water level and pressure, and back chamber water level and pressure. The worst part of this cycle is that it caused my salinity to crash - it wasn't until I happened to take a salinity measurement during a WC and noticed that the tank was at 1.022 specific gravity!

So, I plugged up the bottom drain... not so fast though! Simply plugging the drain causes the display to nearly overflow! It turns out that my return was pumping water out of the back chamber faster than the overflow could allow for. I did have an upgraded return... I started to turn the flow down, and found that even the lowest possible flow setting was too high. So, I got the stock pump and installed it, and even it was too strong... and much louder.

The stock pump came with a flow restrictor, so I started dialing it back and eventually got to a spot that worked with ~85% restriction :-|. I've been running it in this configuration for a few days now, and so far so good. The fact that I have to restrict the flow so greatly with the stock pump is what leads me to believe that the overflow suffers from a design flaw that limits its throughput, and the bottom drain was the quick fix.

I had to add another powerhead to account for the reduced flow from the return. Luckily, the powerhead system I bought allowed me to easily add on another one and control it with the same equipment. Hooray!

A Media Basket
The mechanical filter that the tank came with - a reusable sponge - is decidedly less than ideal. It's hard to clean well and hard to pull out of the tank. There is another lifegard build thread in which I got the idea to 3d print a media basket. He didn't share the model though, so I had to design a new one.

It is designed to drop into the left-most chamber seen behind it. The bottom platform is angled because the water exits the left-most chamber through a triangular shaped hole, which the bottom platform aligns with. Once I see that the water levels are stable while the bottom drain is plugged, I will start using this basket... I guess I also need to order some filter pads.

I've attached the STL file for the media basket. The one pictured is scaled to 97% and it fits perfectly. I zipped it because for some reason r2r only wants zipped files.

Concluding Thoughts
I feel things are going fairly well given the circumstances, and considering the age of the tank. I have an acropora that looks like it's growing and shows some OK polyp extension. I have some corals that have grown very nicely... all of this is a surprise after having learned about the salinity issues. With that being addressed (as well as the sexy shrimp issue), I'm hoping that some of the other corals will start growing better too.