Day 8, Of manifolds and refugiums.

One of the things I purchased, and now regret, is this little 9w refugium LED.  It looked like a decent little light.  An Aquagadget ChaetoMAX.  When it arrived I was rather surprised at just how tiny it really was.  Just to play around, I hooked it up to an EB832, and turned it on.  It's not bad, it does provide light.  But hey, the EB832 says it's only drawing 6 watts.  Hmm.  Not very impressive.

So I needed to actually do something to light the Ruby Elite.  In retrospect, the Elite, despite having a larger-by-volume refugium, is not really well suited for growing Chaeto.  The problem lies in the fact that it's a long narrow section, which makes it hard to actually light.  I can't just throw a giant nuke lamp on it, because that will light up the whole sump, not just the refugium area.  No good.  Instead, I found 3 little 15w LED grow lamps, and a nice little 3-bulb hanging light kit.  Funny thing about these,  1/8th the price, and they actually draw 15 watts each off the EB832.

That's just one of them lighting up the night.  A few notes about this photo.  First, originally, I wondered, would the drain have enough oopmh to push water down that side pipe into the refugium area.  Answer:  No. The COR-20's are a bit too anemic to keep those drains at siphon, so they don't actually blast water down like they used to.  So that's basically a dry pipe.  I might try raising it a bit out of the water to see if relieving the static pressure helps though.  So to tide things over, I installed a PMUP in there, and have it pushing water into the refugium.

Then I was a bit worried about sending light over into the pump zone, and growing tons of algae in there.  So to solve that, I purchased a big sheet of white plastic off Amazon, and some small epoxy coated magnets.  Attached it to the inside of the refugium, and now there is a bit of a reflector in there and the pump area stays nice and dark.  Oh, and that little 9w disappointment?  Well, it actually runs pretty cool, so I stuck it on the side near the bottom, and it side-lights the area.  I think this will actually help just a bit.

A small bit of Chaeto arrived from Algae Barn, and in it went.  Lets hope it likes it's new home.

Now on the other side, we have a bit more room.  So off to ebay I went, in search of the smallest high-power grow LED I could find.  Yeah, I said the smallest, because when you start looking for grow LED's on ebay, you find all of these 1200w monstrosities that could melt your tank down.   Finally, I found a little 150w (the ratings on these are pure nonsense, I think it actually pulls like 130w) light, and today it arrived.  Into the sump it went!  I wanted one with a dimmer,  because I was a bit afraid it would be too powerful right off the bat.

I don't know why one would want to farm spiders.  That seems awful.


Here it is at lowest power.  Pretty bright actually.  A little more blue than I expected, but I think it won't be an issue.

And at full power.  That is bright.  This thing is a beast.  I have it suspended off some of the cross braces of the stand.  I'm pretty happy with it, but time will tell if it really works.  I need some chaeto to feed into this, hopefully I'll get my hands on some soon.

One might also notice the Neptune ATK in there, all plumbed up and ready to go.  No, not really.  The cords on the PMUP's are super short.  I need another 6-8 feet at least just to get it to the plug.  So I ordered a 1Link extension cable for it.  Yes, you read that right.  I ordered the wrong cable for it.  So now I'm waiting for the right cable, and just doing topoff by hand until then.

However, this gave me time to work on a different problem.  My Neptune salinity probe has been driving me nuts.  Keeps saying the salinity is 24, when the refractometer says 39.  Neither is a good number, so I've got to fix that mess.  Recalibrate the probe.  24.  Do it again. 24.  Argh.  Get the refractometer out, check that, 39.  Argh, recalibrate the refractometer, no, it's right, add the special fluid to it, read 1.035.... wait.. I'm supposed to read 35, not 1.035.  Oops.  Grumble, fix that.  Oh.  yeah.  So my water is actually 24.  How about that?

So while I patiently wait for the right cable to arrive, I'm doing topoff with saltwater to fix the salinity.  Good thing the only things in the tank are some worms, pods, and one amazing Nassarius snail that seems to have survived the entire ordeal.  Wow.  (I mean the entire, 3 year shutdown ordeal, not just the past few weeks of me fiddling around)

So now I'm off to fix another mistake.  Previously, I plumbed the side output off the right sump, in that special way that invalidates the check valve, and makes it siphon the tank down through the reactors during a power loss to the pump.  Rather than try to fix this, I decided I would redo the entire idea.

The COR-20 just isn't powerful enough to be a return, and run those reactors.  But they make this nice little COR-15, that is enough to run the reactors, and a few other ideas I have.  So I get one of those.  Bonus, it doesn't need a plug, it hooks right into the EB832 with a 1link cable.  So I disconnect the side output, screw a plug into it, and now my anti-drainback works just fine.  Also, bonus, I got to test out my fixes for having one pump "die".  I unplugged the COR-20, and just like I planned the sumps balanced via the pipe connecting them in the back.  Everything worked perfectly.

So first I make the world's most complex drain system.  This manifold will let me connect a variety of drains from reactors, and god knows what else, and feed them all back into the sump.  The COR-15 is plumbed into the other manifold, that has a bunch of outputs that feed reactors, and other mysterious ideas I might have floating around for future enhancements.

Now I fire it up, and boom, I have reactors.  Fill them up with carbon, and everything works like a charm, with the COR-15 at only 50%, I'm super happy.

Now all the basic support equipment is wired in, things are running, tank is stabilizing.  It's finally getting there.  I have a few weeks until the lights show up for the top, and a few other side projects to work on.  But other than the lack of chaeto for the right sump, things are mostly working, and it just needs to run for awhile.  That's fine, I have lots of little ideas for tweaks to make while it's stabilizing.

Day 8 comes to an end, and I head to bed, completely... drained...