Doc's Reef

[drdude05]

I'm going to bump my own thread ... anyone out there with any thoughts or ideas????

[aquawolf]

Are you thinking of just hard plumbing one drain into a pump, and then having that pump return the water through several nozzles at the top of the tank? Without drilling the tank, that is really the only thing I can think of as well. Would there be any problem trying to match the flow rate of the pump with the rate of water draining from the tank?

[Jadinop]

You can't use an overflow to feed a closed loop. The air bubbles will be drive you crazy. A closed loop has to be fed from and return to the same tank with the inlets and outlets submerged.

[drdude05]

I was afraid this might be my answer. The kind of flow I want to add probably won't be adequately supplied from an overflow and thus ... yes there will be air bubbles indroduced into the system. Not to mention that the pump I was thinking of using will probaly suck the overflow dry.

What about plumbing a pickup tube through the overflow? The only way I can feed a closed loop is by either drilling the tank to supply an inlet or by plumbing up and over the back of my tank wall. Instead of plumbing up and over the back of my tank ... why couldn't I plumb a pick up ... up and over the side of my overflow?

[Jadinop]

Coming up and over the side of the overflow will work but you will be limited to the current bulkhead size. Most closed loops use larger intakes to feed the pump. The general rule is to plumb it 1.5 times the size of the pump inlet.

You could use the second hole as an overflow drain instead of the return. The water inside the overflow will go stagnant if you don't keep it flowing.

My first thought would be, why a closed loop? There are so many other lower wattage/higher flow options currently available. With all of the plumbing, valves, and unions, properly installed closed loop can really take up much of available space behind and under the tank.

[drdude05]

I was looking at a closed loop in order to get some, if not all the powerheads out of the tank so it wouldn't look as cluttered. Right now I use two Tunze Turbelle stream 6100 controlled with the multicontroller and one Korella number 2 or number 3 pump, which ever is the one that pushes 800gph.

[drdude05]

Well, I'm back with an update on the progress of my T5 lighting project.

On my last update I had just finished painting the newly modded and widened canopy. I needed to widen the space between the center front and back supports to allow enough room to install the 8 T5 lamps and reflectors. While modding the back support I noticed that it had become loose and I was concerned that it might not hold the back of the canopy very well .... so .... I had to build some bracing to fix this.

Here are some shots of the newly supported back brace.




The back support is a steady as a rock now!!!

[drdude05]

Next I started laying out the reflectors to make sure that eight would fit inside the canopy. After I verified this, I set to work planning the bulb layout. The longest T5's I could find were 60" and these were still not long enough to span the whole tank. This ment that I had to stagger the bulbs. I ended up with four bulbs on one end of the tank and four bulbs on the other end of the tank with them overlapping in the middle.

Here are some pics of the reflector measuring and layout planning.


In this pic you can where I was setting the spacing for the standoffs.

[drdude05]

These next pictures were taken during the standoff mounting phase. You can see how I am measuring then using a right angle to make sure that the standoffs are mounted square with the canopy. I wanted to make sure that they were not running cockeyed and thus end up crowded on one end.



I also assembled a bulb in the endcaps and used it for spacing to make sure that the standoffs weren't mounted too far apart.




An issue I had was that even though I found 60" bulbs, IceCap does not make 60" SLR reflectors. Because of this, I had to order two 36" reflectors and drill them accordingly to that I could bolt them together with stainless steel nuts and bolts. You can see the reflectors overlapping in the picture above.

[drdude05]

The next step was the wiring ... which wasn't technically difficult other than it was a pain trying to keep everything neat so that it would clean up nice and tidy when I bundled the wiring together and used brackets to secure it to the inside top of the canopy. To keep the wiring straight ... I marked the brackets that I was working on with electrical tape so that I knew were I was relative to the wiring diagram. I am using IceCap 660 ballasts in this setup and they will only run three of these 60" lamps per ballast. I therefore decided to stagger the lights in the canopy so that every other light was powerd by a different ballast. That way ... when I plugged in my lights and then set my Aquacontroller Jr timers, I can stagger not only every other bulb as far as when it turns on, but can control the mixture of lighting that turns on at any one time.

Here are some wiring pictures.

[drdude05]

An issue that I had with my last lighting setup was corrosion of the wiring. I'm pretty sure that is what was causing the GFCI tripping issues that I was having, but I could never find the faulty connections. One thing that I wanted to make sure I did with this install was make it as sealed against moisture as I could. This is partly solved by using IceCaps moisture proof endcaps for the T5 bulbs. It has a rubber washer inside the cap that is seated against the bulb and contacts when the cap is screwed together. A problem though is that the wiring of the endcaps enters under the standoffs and then up into the endcap. This part is not sealed and could pose an entry way for moisture and corrosion over time. I wanted to find a way to seal the bottoms of the caps but was having a difficult time figuring out how to do this. Then ... it hit me ... the perfect solution ... and it was a material that I used regularly in one of my other hobbies but had never thought of using in my aquarium hobby. Something called Coax Seal. This stuff is awesome. It is a cross between electrcial tape and moldable plastic ... it comes in rolls and you tear off the amount you need then wrap it around whatever you need to moisture proof. After that you knead it together into a solid mass of plastic and voila ... instand moldable moisture proofing that you can cram into any nook and cranny. I use this stuff all the time to moisture proof antenna feedlines and wiring in my amateur radio hobby.

Here's what it looks like:


And here's what it looks like applied to the endcaps. As you can see ... it seals them up nicely ... no exposed bare wires or terminals.





I love this stuff!!

[drdude05]

More to come!!!

[quader94]

hoods coming together nicely

[aquawolf]

Very nice work! Great job making sense of the spaghetti wiring as well.

[Jadinop]

Very nice job on the wiring but I have to question having the lights mounted to the top of the canopy like that. How high off the water are those bulbs going to end up once the canopy is on the tank? You may want to incorporate some standoffs and bring those bulbs down a few inches.