Rayk's 180 upgrade Stupidity

[Kenn]

Spectacular !

[HUNGER]

great looken monti

[rayk]

After a long delay over the summer months, I am finally back to my indoor projects. I have the glass euro-bracing in place and the full length Caflo overflow in place.  I'll do a water test later this week and post pictures if it doesn't break...

- rayk

[HUNGER]

i have my fingers crossed for u

[rayk]

good so far....   loaded up with water and no breakage...  however my coast-to-coast isn't as water-tight as it needs to be.... so probably end up stripping of the silicon and redoing it.

- rayk

[HUNGER]

well thats good and that sucks but it could be worse

[rayk]

Okay, this is taking me forever....   but finally got some plumbing done and moved the rock and fish over to the new tank.  Still have issues:  micro-bubbles, loc-line on order, etc. etc.

So, here is the main tank.  Junk in the sitting room, but making progress:



And, the look from the main basement... again, junk everywhere at the moment:



And now for the Calfo tank-wide weir.... working pretty good, skimming the top right off!!:



And the last one, the overflow into the box on the back.  Going to have some salt creep issues here:



- Rayk

[HUNGER]

the tank looks great

[lazylivin]

This going to slow Ray. You need to get it wrapped up this weekend. Just kidding but good to see some updates. Hopefully we won't have to wait another 8 months for the next pictures. 

[rayk]

Yeah, still much to do Lazy, much to do.  More lighting, rock work cause I just threw them in there.  Couldn't really see from the cloudy water from newer sand.  At least if I get the rock work done, and get rid of the microbubbles which I found the source tonite, I can let the tank go a bit and work on cleaning up the old ones, and get my basement cleaned back up.  As soon as it settles in though, I'll need some more frags.  I lost a few of the last ones I got from ya. 

- rayk

[lazylivin]

If you want a nice size birdsnest and purple monti cap you are welcome to them. I have to many.

[AdenHoed]

where and how can I pick them up?

[rayk]

This is the build that I was going to tear down this Thanksgiving weekend.   The upgrade from the 120g to the 180g went great..... for a month...  then various problems that lost all the corals.  It has been in stand-by mode for 2 years now.  Fish are doing great, but water quality isn't even ready to try corals again.  I have many theories on the problems from the upgrade, but I also had alot of work and side-issues during this time, so I didn't get to post any of it.  OR get to 'fix' any of it.  After the corals died, I kinda gave up on it.   

The coast-to-coast overflow system is working great.  The BeanAnimal overflow syphon is working great, and silently.  The two big problems were #1 loss of heat - the temp dropped more than I wanted with all the extra water/air interaction, and I'm pretty sure my cheap digital therm was off.  The heaters blew a circuit and I have no idea how long they were off.   The 2nd problem appears to have been my older rock.   It was storing up some nutrients and when I switched tanks, I used ALL my 120 water, but needed like 100 gallons of new water.  This probably caused the nutrients to come out of my rocks, causing the hair algae outbreak also leading to the demise of the few corals I had.    The 3rd problem might have been the lower flow through my above-the-tank 30 gallon refugium.  It has tons of pods in it, providing a great food source.  But I had to lower the flow due to the new tank plumbing.  The 4th problem may be lack of wave action.  I have great flow in the tank, but my vortech died, and it was only source of variability...   My 5th problem... well, you get the idea... 

So I have 2 new projects.  First is a simple, unbelievably simple Up-Flow Algae Scrubber.  I set it up in 5 minutes.  I will take some pics, but it is easily running in my refugium, taking the place of my non-growing chaeto macro algae.    2nd project is going to be a regular waterfall Algae Scrubber in the main sump.   This is almost done, but had to clean up the basement work area for guests today.  The theory being that hair algae grown on a mat will absorb extra nutrients faster than anything else.  After seeing this first hand, with water that tested perfect, I can see how this may well help significantly. 

I will post picks tomorrow, time to make my family's sweet potatoes - basically caramel with some orange squash in it....

~rayk~