First, I finally got ahold of some small RJ11 female-female couplers, and was able to extend the cables on my Neptune leak detectors. I have 4 of the solid floor style, and placed one in each section under the stand, and one over near the R/O system (the one that flooded my house, yes, that one)
I finally got my shipping notification on the massive passive heatsinks for the LED's. They will ship on the 12th, so, when I will actually get them is probably debatable, but hopefully in the next few weeks. Because this is suddenly impending, I needed to get to work on the lights, so when the sinks arrive, I can just bolt them up and make with the glowy.
First step is I need a way to hang them. Now the old lights were little CPU heat sinks that weighed maybe a pound each. A simple screw-in hook was more than enough for those. These heat sinks though, they are 4.5kg each. And I need to hang 4 from the ceiling. That is going to require a bit more beef than a 1/8" steel hook.
So first things first, I got some nice 1 3/4" square board, and bolted it to the ceiling with 4.5" lag bolts into the rafters. These will give me a solid base to mount my lights to, and are strong enough to hold me on the ceiling, in case I ever go insane.
Next, I pre-drilled a bunch of different holes in some 2x4's, and screwed them into the square board. This will give me a variety of mounting locations for each light. The idea is to mount a 5/16" eye bolt into the holes, and then hang the monster from that. They can easily hold me up off the ground, so I'm confident they can hold 25 lbs of light forever.
The square board gives me a bit of room so I can get in there with a wrench and put the nut and washer on the other side, and be able to move them to different holes at will. I also went ahead and purchased some 50lb rope hangers, with adjustments, so I can easily raise and lower the lights to dial them into that perfect spot. So excited to get them going again.
I also recently got my Mighty Magnet in the mail. Previously I had an FF4 from them, and loved it. Over the years it kinda lost it's strength however, and was always a little weak for the 7/8" acrylic. So I got myself an F5. I've been slowly scraping away at the coraline on the front of the tank the last few weeks, but this thing is so great. The F5 holds much better, and I was able to make some real progress on the front glass.
One problem with an in-wall like this, is you cannot see the glass at all, so you are kind of scraping blind from the inside of the tank. I figured out a little trick to this the other day. What I did was get a big LED shop light, and place it in the front room, aimed right at the front of the tank. Then I went into the fish room, and turned all the lights off. Now with the light shining into the dark tank, I could see the algae on the front of the tank! Eureka! I could finally scrape the right part of the tank. I've made some major progress here now on this, but there is alot of work left to do there. A little bit every day after work helps.
Next on the checklist, is a Carlson surge bucket. The original build had a Borneman surge, and I absolutely loved it, but it had some serious issues. The Borneman devices are loud. Stupid loud, and they sound like a toilet. A toilet that flushes in your foyer every 10 minutes for the rest of your life. And they splash. Oh lord do they splash. Ruined the drywall in the corner where it was mounted. But that isn't the worst part, no, the worst part is the toilet flapper. The rubber used in these things probably isn't designed for saltwater, because very slowly over the course of 6 months, it dissolves. And when it finally breaks down, your surge stops working, and you have to get a new flapper. The new flapper never works the way the old one did, so you spend a week re-tuning the chain and float to get the stupid thing to work again. Every week or two the chain gets stuck or something and the thing sticks open. It's a mess. (And I ran one for 5 years, so this is not based on a brief encounter)
So I built a big Carlson surge in a bucket. The main benefit of this is that it gives me an amazing way to feed my fish. Food goes in the bucket, surge goes off, fish dance happily in the tank, guests are wowed, and none of the food goes into the overflow. Win all around. So after the requisite forever to tune the bucket, up it went!
You see, right as I was about to get into my car and drive to work, I get a text from the Apex. LEAKDETECTED = ON. Oh, that's no good. I was just in the fishroom like 30 seconds ago and didn't see anything. It must be broke. Maybe I spilled something.
Go back into the room to check, look all around, and wouldn't you know it, there is some water over by the R/O system. A quick look around, and it's coming from the very manifold I plumbed in last week for the carbon filters. I fiddled around for a few minutes, and couldn't find anything obviously loose, just saw water dripping out of the manifold. Luckily it wasn't much. Well, that's on the new COR15, so I held the button down for 3 seconds, water shut off, the reactors and the bucket both emptied out through the COR15 into the sump, and the leak stopped. Definitely the right choice not to put a check valve on that feed pump. Threw a towel on the floor, sopped up some stupid, and off to work.
When I got home, I investigated the manifold. I figured maybe I did a bad job putting in one of the little adapters. Nope. One of the little adapters split right in half. Boom. Fail. Argh. So now I'm waiting for a new manifold and little bits to fix this from FlexPVC. Hopefully next week I can get the carbon running again.
Overall though, I'm happy with the result. I know the Apex did the right thing, it told me there was a problem, and stopped a major disaster. I went ahead and added some code to the COR15 so if that leak probe ever goes off, it shuts down. Now the problem will be self healing in the future. That, right there, is worth the price of entry into the Apex. It just saved me probably $1000 in repairs if that pipe had kept leaking all day.
Day 9 over, damp, I go to bed.
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