75 Gal Rebuild Thread

[schneijt]

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Originally Posted by Afish4u

I have too been toying with the idea with the ac jr... well since TCMAS did that group buy back when.... what else do you use your controller for? Temp, lights, heater, fan,.... I've got just about everyting else on seperate timers so I'm trying to figure out if its still worth it or not. Does yours also have the serial port for the pc?


And Matt Congrats on 1,000+ posts

Mine doesn't have the serial port. I don't need anything too fancy. :-) I'm going to be using the AC Jr. to control temperature, lighting, and possibly a fan in the summer if necessary. If you add a pH probe, you could use it to turn on a kalk reactor pump or such. It's quite versatile. You could also use it as a timer to turn pumps on/off for wave motion or such. Like I said, I just use mine for temp and lighting right now, but it'd easily be expandable for pH and other things in the future if I want to control things or use an outlet like a timer in the future.

-Joe

[schneijt]

Ok, here's an update as of realllllllly early on March 2nd (Monday). Came home from a couple days in the Twin Cities to find that the skimmer had developed a bit of a foam head. That's surprising, since there's hardly anything as far as organics in the tank. Cool! I pulled out my refractometer and found that the salinity was only around 1.020 or something like that. So I added a few cups of salt in front of my K4 and I'll check it again in the morning and slowly get it up to 1.025. I'll also calibrate my refractometer with the small bottle of solution that I have, just to make sure nothing changed with it in the last year.

I stopped in Stillwater today to get a cup of sand from one of Peggy's tanks at All-Reef. She's got her new rimless (120 gal?? I think...) frag tank set up and has a few corals in it. It's made of Starphire glass and it's amazing. It will be super nice when it's fully running and chock full of goodies. Last I heard, it'll be chock full of sweet sps frags and clams. I'm excited!

Finally, I must let you all know that I now have THREE heaters on my @$#% tank downstairs. lol I have a total of 750 watts in the sump and it STILL won't get up to 81 degrees... :-( But it's holding at 77.9 degrees right now, so that's good enough for me. It's evaporating 2.5 to 3 gal of water each day, as well. Gotta love a cold, extremely dry basement in the winter... NOT!

Anyway, I'm hoping that the Reef Geek order of bulbs and my acrylic shield for the TEK light gets here soon. I'm itching to see the tank lit up now. Also, I'm starting to wonder if it'll be ready to get its first livestock this coming weekend in Rhinelander. That would be really cool. :-) But I'm not going to rush anything, and if it's not ready, it's not ready.

If you're wondering how I can be cooking rock and questioning if the tank will be ready by next weekend for an easy-to-care-for fish... The bottom of the rock tubs doesn't seem to show any "crud" on it from the rock. I'm going to fill some pails with SW tomorrow and give the rocks a good swishing in them to see if it knocks anything out. If I don't see any built-up organics "shedding" from the rock by this weekend, the rock is going into the tank and I'm adding a fish or something. Hopefully I start to see the cooking take hold and remove organics from the rock, but if it doesn't start happening soon, I'm going to just abandon it for now and maybe do it in small batches later on or something.

Do you guys/gals want any pictures? Nothing new has really happened, but I can snap some if any of you are wanting to see pictures of anything particular or such.

Oh, a word of advice about the AC Jr.--CALIBRATE YOUR TEMP PROBE. The old one was off by a couple degrees, and the new "improved" version that I got in the mail the other day was also off by about a degree. So let it (the probe) measure the tank's temperature for at least a few hours to stabilize, and then use a trusted thermometer to take a reading and adjust your temperature calibration up or down until the AC Jr. reads the same as your reference temperature. Not a big deal, but just realize that their factory calibration isn't very accurate, in my opinion (IMO).

-Joe

[Sndwave80]

nice light!

[Kyuss]

Joe, you are right about the temp calibration, the first probe I received for my AC III was 3 degrees off. I was very disappointed with the Neptune support as they were not friendly what so ever and tried to blame the issue on me..... However, they did send me a replacement once I was able to prove that it was defective.

I use mine to monitor all my pumps, heaters, lights, skimmer, phosphate reactor, and PH from my desk at work. kenargo from Reefcentral made an app that plugs into Vista and polls the controller every 30 seconds. It works great. I like having the status emailed to my phone also as it gives me piece of mind when I am on the road or on vacation. I am looking for a Kalc reactor now so I will be using it for that.

It is also handy in the summer since I have it programmed to turn off my main halide lights if it gets to hot.

I think their support is lacking but thankfully there is a good community behind the product. Kenargo is an awesome resource!

[schneijt]

I think I also heard that someone over at Reef Central made an iPhone/iPod Touch app to monitor controllers. I think it was for Neptune controllers that are capable of transmitting data like yours is. Alas mine is not, or I'd have it on my phone... Time to upgrade to a new controller??? lol

-Joe

[Kyuss]

Originally Posted by schneijt

I think I also heard that someone over at Reef Central made an iPhone/iPod Touch app to monitor controllers. I think it was for Neptune controllers that are capable of transmitting data like yours is. Alas mine is not, or I'd have it on my phone... Time to upgrade to a new controller??? lol

-Joe

Heheh you sound like me **** I wish Alltell had the Iphones, my company uses Alltell, I would love an Iphone!

[schneijt]

I'm such an Apple fanboy and an overall technology geek... lol :-) I'm lucky that I wasn't bound by a cell phone contract or had to go with a specific carrier. I used to have Alltel before I moved to TN, and I liked it, except for the fact that our house here in EC doesn't have the greatest coverage indoors unlike other places in EC. AT&T, though, gives me awesome coverage inside the whole house, even sometimes in the basement. That has me pretty pumped. The only thing I don't like is that EC is on the slower EDGE data network and not 3G because 3G is expensive and only larger cities have it right now. Oh, life is rough. lol

Did your ACIII have trouble keeping time accurately? I'm still tinkering with my "Leap Seconds" feature on the Jr. to make it keep time exactly with my watch. Right now it's only off by a few seconds each day, which is close enough for me. But I'm adjusting fractions of a second now so that eventually it'll be dead-on every day.

-Joe

[Kyuss]

Heheh I figured you were another tech geek, if I remember correctly you used to have an Apple as your avatar

I have not noticed the time sync issues but I have not watched it that closely I would not be surprised if it was off.

[schneijt]

I got my Reef Geek order today, so I was able to install the reflectors along with the new bulbs and the acrylic shield. My order is as follows:

*Front*
Blue Plus
75/25
GE6500K
Blue Plus
Pro Color
Blue Plus
*Back*

With it fired up on the tank, the look is around 12K or so. I'd prefer a bit more blue, but I'm satisfied for now and may just move another Blue Plus up toward the front later on to try and make it look more like 15-20K from the front. I decided to keep the Pro Color since it'll help bring out the colors of future corals, along with the 75/25. The 6500K is mostly just for growth, plus it might help out the colors of corals a little bit with its heightened lower end of the spectrum.

I discovered a pretty bad micro bubble issue when I turned the lights on. I knew right away that it was from the refugium returning water down to the sump. The water makes a pretty big drop down to the sump, and my return pump is on the side of the sump closest to the waterfall from the fuge, so I knew that too much flow would cause this problem. So I closed the gate valve some to reduce the flow of water into the fuge, and within a minute or two it really made the problem disappear. I may slowly open up the gate valve a bit at a time to find my "tipping point" between good flow to the refugium and minimal micro bubbles in the tank. If worse comes to worse, I can always add a small pump to circulate water in the fuge later on if there isn't enough flow diverted from the drain line to keep water moving nicely in there without causing micro bubble madness.

I also got my two little Coralife PC fixtures for the refugium from the UPS man today, courtesy of Marine Depot. I haven't installed those yet because I'm sick of being in the basement working on the tank for now. Time to go grab lunch. Yeah, I'm having lunch at 5pm because I've been working on the tank all afternoon. Oh the fun!

-Joe

[schneijt]

Got the rocks into the tank and kinda aquascaped. I swished them in buckets of saltwater, and lots of detritus and other crap came out of them. Still, I ended up with some stuff floating around in the water. I'll change the filter sock daily for a few days to make sure I trap as much gunk as possible and get it out before it breaks down or anything.

I don't love my aquascaping yet, but it's going to have to do for now. I like the left side a lot, but the right side I sort of ran out of "good" pieces of rock to use, so I had to cobble things together with smaller rocks. I think I need another 30lbs or so of rock to really get it the way I want, but oh well. I have lots of room to mount corals, but there is also a lot of room for fish to swim around and there are plenty of caves and holes in the rockwork to make things interesting and let the fish swim "though" everything.

My new K4 got here today, so I installed that. Oh, and now that the rock is in there, the skimmer has a little something to skim out for once. Here are some pictures:





Enjoy, and hopefully after Saturday there might be something swimming around in the tank!

-Joe

[ReefLuvR]

Lookin' good Joe! If you decide to do some drilling for your aquascaping, I'd be glad to come over and help. I really had fun doing mine, it's so easy and it gives you so many options. And that extra set of eyes makes a huge difference. I got sick of looking at mine, trying to figure it out until Brenda came over and said "that one should go there, and that shouldn't be like that, etc...". All of a sudden it was fun again.

[schneijt]

Thanks for the compliment, Jen! I've heard a lot of people talking about drilling rocks and putting rods in them and such. I haven't tried it, but I've always been a fan of stacking rocks in a million different ways until something finally looks "correct." For now I'm going to leave everything the way it us, I think. I might add a little more rock down the road, but I want to leave LOTS of swimming room for fish, since I want to keep a tang and some Anthias in the tank, and they both need a lot of room to swim.

Anyway, I need to go downstairs and make some RO water to fill my top-off section of the sump...

-Joe

[Jrmass]

Looking like it's a pretty good start Joe. Hope it doesn't take long for the tank to fully cycle so that you don't have to stare at the box of wet rocks too terribly long.

Jason

[schneijt]

Thanks, Jason. I think the tank is decently cycled already, though obviously not ready for a full load of fish or anything. I'm going to be adding the first fish or two within the next few days. The skimmer is fully broken in, which is nice; it pulled out a little gunk from the rocks when I put them in there, and now it's not doing anything since it has nothing to skim out again.

After running my lighting the last couple days, I can safely say that the fan mod on the TEK light is amazing. The fixture is cool (not even warm) to the touch even after eight hours of being on. I was worried that all four fans blowing in would cause trouble with venting air out of the fixture, but the vent holes on top have lots of air coming out of them, so I know that there's plenty of air moving through the fixture to keep it cool. The best part is that the fans are only at about 75%, so I don't even have to run them at full speed to keep the fixture cooled down with the acrylic shield on.

-Joe

[Jrmass]

Interesting... where did you get the fans from btw?