Day 17, The arrival of summer

It's March in Arizona, which means, it's basically about to be summer.  This brings with it all the fun concerns of heat and the tank.  But first, FTS!

On March 1st, at pretty much 1am, the Apex woke me up to tell me that the tank was too hot.  77 degrees.  This confused me a bit, because on Feb 28th, it was happy at 76.7.  I run a slightly modified version of the Apex temperature table (the one that varies month to month).  But why is it suddenly a problem, when all winter the tank has been struggling to keep up to 76.5?

Well it turns out, on that table, the coldest month is March.  Jan, Feb, all warmer than March.  This is no good, and also explains some of my pain the last 2 months with the heaters.  So the first thing I did was shift the entire table up by one month, so now the coldest month would be Feb, which is more in line with reality in Arizona.  This should also shut the heaters up a little bit next year.  I have other plans for the heaters, but not today, today is about cooling...

So, knowing that summer was here, it was time to test out the big wall mount fan that is mounted in the room, as it would soon be needed.  Turns out, it was dead.  No point in trying to repair it, I just got a new one.  The old one had a plastic blade, and years ago, I was awoken to a horrific rattle in the middle of the night.  The fan had built up some salt crud on the blade, which increased the weight, and it literally ripped the blades off the fan, which were smacking around inside the cage.  I did replace that blade, but it was a pain.   So goals for the new fan:

1. Metal blade!
2. Closer to the wall so I have more room to move around.

Found one on Amazon, swapped it out, all is happy!

A big tank needs a big fan.  This should do the job.  On a setting of 1, it moves a decent quantity of air.

Next step, the humidity.  This fan is going to evaporate some water.  That water will build up in that sealed room, and then pain and sorrow.  On the wall above all the equipment, I have a register in the wall.  It ducts through to a register in the hallway, so air can move out of the room.  At the bottom of that wall, there is an in-wall fan, that blows cold air from the floor level of the hallway into the room.  Problem is, the air just doesn't move around enough.  I used to have 2 120mm computer fans bolted to the register to blow air out, but as with all computer fans, they die in salt, so they were rusted shut.

So I went on Amazon, and found a basement crawlspace fan.  This is a fan specifically designed to reduce humidity in a crawlspace.  I got the AC Infinity AIRTITAN T8.  It has a little digital display, where you can set the temp and humidity level where it turns on and off, and a little remote probe so it senses the room, not the fan itself.

A quick hackjob with the saw, and I expanded the opening to fit, and now we have a fan!

You might notice the fan in that picture says the temp in the room is 84.  84!  It was a bit warm in there.  It's not that hot in the house, maybe 76 degrees, but that room was warm, and the heat rises, plus humidity.  I think the humidity in the room was around 55%.  No good.

Fan immediately spun up to full power, and within an hour, it was telling me the ceiling temperature was 79, so it quickly did it's job!  It also dropped the humidity to about 40%, but it's struggling to keep it there.  My goal is 45, so it runs pretty often.  Once the house AC is on, I think it will be easier, without the AC running, it's just kind of dealing with stagnant airflow.  Overall, for $90, a good buy!  For the curious, the fan in that configuration blows air OUT of the room, not in.  Also, the width of the fan is pretty much the width between 2 studs, so the screw holes line up perfectly to the studs.  Easy as pie to install.

Now those of you who are more observant, might notice that something is different in the FTS shot.  If you said fish, you sir, would be correct.  I kind of did a thing.

Normally I am super conservative when it comes to stocking.  I also have a QT setup all setup and ready to go.  My plan was, go to the LFS, and find a foxface, put it in QT, and in a few weeks, deal with the algae that was starting to grow a little.  Ok, easy plan.

So I get to the LFS, and of course, they have a tank with anthias.  I love anthias.  Why did I want a 800 gallon tank in the first place?  So I could have a giant school of anthias around a big acro head.

Again, normally, a few anthias wouldn't faze me.  But they had all juveniles, so super likely to be female, all same species (I think!) all arrived at once, and there were 26 of them.  Yeah.  26.  In 20 years, I've never seen more than 10 at a store at once.  I couldn't pass it up.  But of course, there is an issue here.  My 40g breeder QT is not equipped to handle 26 anthias at once...

So bad decision dinosaur won the argument, and 26 Dispar anthias went straight into the big tank.  There are no other fish in there, so worse comes to worse, nobody else gets sick.   I could not pass up the opportunity to have the school size that I really wanted, all at once (which IMHO is the best way to stock anthias), and.. well... I had to take the risk.

The foxface however, is currently in the QT tank.  Seems to be doing well.

Interesting thing about the anthias though..  I'm 99% certain they are Dispar..  but when they were bagging them up, I swore for just a second I saw vertical bars on one.  Then later, when the lights went out in the tank, I saw, just for a second, vertical bars on two of them.

I'm not aware of any juvenile mimicry in anthias, but it's possible I have 1-2 individuals of a different species in there, that are mixing together.  They are all acting as a single school right now, but I wonder if there is something else in there.  The only thing that matches the vertical bar pattern I saw was a Sunset Anthias.  It only shows up in the fright or night coloration, and only sometimes, but I suppose it's possible.

Excited about all the new life in the tank, I am barely able to go to sleep...

Day 16, Let there be life?

So lots of little things left to do on the tank at this point, as I slowly ramp it up into full operation.  Lights are currently on at 16% (of a max around 65).  So now I want to get a few things running on there, and try to button it all up.

So let's start with the easy stuff.  Since my calcium was low, but my dKH was correct, I decided to just mix up a gallon of CaCl and dose that into the tank over the next few weeks.  Rigged up a simple bottle for that to pump out of, and hooked it into the doser.  That should fix the base calcium levels.

Second, I hooked the Kalk stirrer up.  Went with an Avast K2. I really like Reef Octopus stuff, but I've heard lots of bad things about the motor units on those.  The Avast one, they advertise that you can run that stir motor 24/7, as opposed to periodically, so, ehh..  Went with that one.  Hopefully it was the right choice.

Normally on a big tank like this, the thing to do would be to hook it to the ATO.  As a plan, this is super problematic for me.  First off, the ATO is a Neptune ATK.  This device has an RO feed that goes to a safety float switch.  This way if your ATO turns on, but your water level is high, it does nothing, because the float keeps the water off, despite the PMUP running.   You simply cannot connect a kalk device to this.  If ever the pump turned on, and the float was closed, it would overflow the stirrer.

Second issue is, my tank doesn't have the calcium demand just yet for an ATO dose.  There are two ways to run a kalk reactor when you don't need it's full power:

1) Mix the reactor to full strength, and then attach a dosing pump to the inlet, and dose it as needed.
2) Hook it to an ATO, and adjust the kalk concentration as needed.

The second one there, sounds like a complete nightmare.  Until the coralline kicks off on the new rockwork, I have roughly zero calcium needs right now, and the dKH is rock stable, so, I kind of don't need any kalk dosing yet.  So currently, it's just filled with RO/DI water and nothing else.  But I hooked up the dosing system.

As you might recall, I built a simple doser out of a Kamoer 24v pump connected directly to an Apex 24v outlet.  I connected this doser to the RO/DI reservoir, and then into the Kalk stirrer.  The output of the stirrer goes to one of the sumps.  The doser puts out a known quantity of 83ml/min.  So I have a simple OSC statement in the Apex that runs it once a day right now.  As my needs change, I will up it to a few times per day with math.  This will slowly cause the Neptune ATK to run less often, and at a certain point, I'll have to stop, because I'll hit the evap point.  But during the early stages of the tank, this makes things easier.

However, placing the kalk output into the left sump, raises another problem that has been driving me insane anyhow.  Currently the vinegar doses into that sump, and a few inches away is the pH, ORP, and Salinity probes.  4 times a day, the vinegar dumps in, and the probes all freak out for a few seconds, alarms fire off, and it makes me crazy.  Know what will make that even better?  Dumping 12.0 pH water in there a few times a day.

So the probes all have to move.  3d printer to the rescue.

This little bracket didn't come out perfectly, but it did come out.  Printed from eSun PETG.  It will hold the 4 main neptune probes, and the little clip on the bottom will hold a temp probe from one of those little suction cup thermometers, (I keep on as an emergency sanity check).  Now I can relocate the probes to one of the drain towers on the tank.

And instantly, all my weird accuracy problems have disappeared! No more sump bubbles screwing up the Salinity probe.  No more vinegar screwing up the pH probe.  The only strange effect was, when I moved it up there, the salinity moved down like 5 points, and has remained there.  No idea why.  It's super stable now, just, reading 27.  Oh Neptune.. your silly conductivity probe..

So in the realm of calcium, I returned to an older project.  I have a Reef Octopus CR140D calcium reactor.  I mentioned this awhile back, and that I had lost the O-rings for it, and the pump was dead, so I ordered one from CoralVue.  That showed up.  Time to get the body assembled.

So this is what the pump swap kit looks like.  I have to say, CoralVue hit this one out of the park.  Amazing.  Makes me want to buy more stuff from them.

It comes with the new pump, which basically is the totally wrong physical shape from the one this reactor shipped with.  But they give you this pile of pipe fittings, and detailed instructions.  The fittings kit, has a bit of extra space on the fittings, so you put the new pump into place, and then carefully measure and cut down the supplied tubes, and everything then fits this new pump.  You toss the old input setup entirely.  It came with every imaginable part I would need to do the swap.  All I had to do was carefully cut and measure the bits, and it went together like a dream.

Before:

After:

You would seriously never know this wasn't stock!

I also had the O-ring problem to deal with, and as I mentioned, I purchased a bunch off the O-Ring store (amazing..) and had them sitting around.  Turns out, this one fit perfectly:

3.5 x 103mm.  Dead on, super happy.  They even put some saltwater taffy in with the shipping bag.  For what was basically a $10 order.  Amazing service.

Now a quick caveat and warning.  As I plumbed this up, I was trying to make sure that everything lined up perfectly.  This involved gluing the tubes together while the whole assembly was on the reactor.  My mistake, was leaving it to dry like this.  It turns out that PVC cement causes acrylic to craze.  So there is a little bit of ugly now at the bottom of my reactor.  Reader beware.  Luckily, I pressure tested the whole assembly overnight, and there were no issues, it's only minor surface ick.  Oh well.  We learn things.

But all of this brings me to the actual title of my post.  I wanted to add life to the tank.  This was, well...

So I ordered 5 peppermint shrimp, 5 trochus, and 5 ceriths from the Algae Barn.  Went with 3-day because they have the arrive alive guarantee.   The Phoenix post office however, was bound and determined to screw that up.  The box floated around in Phoenix for 3 days before getting to my door.

The trochus were all super sad.  One was unresponsive, the other 4 would barely move.  One shrimp was in 2 pieces, and 2 were dead.  The ceriths were all happy.  Oh well, nothing to be done, it all goes in.

Shrimp went in, immediately disappeared into the rocks never to be seen again.  The trochus were all placed on a rock.  Overnight, 2 of them moved away, and the other three didn't.  Checked in the morning, shells were empty.  My clean up crew found the dead ones, and literally stripped the shells empty overnight.  Effective!

So long story short.  In theory I have 2 tiny peppermint shrimp, somewhere, and 2 trochus, and then 5 ceriths.  My wife of course, said "what were you thinking, you should have bought like 25 of each, do you know the size of this tank?"  The problem is, no. I really don't.  I cannot wrap my brain around the size of this tank still.

Normally, one would buy just a few of these things, and slowly scale up.  You don't want a ton of snails that wipe the algae out and then starve back.  But I was totally off scale here.  1 trochus has managed to barely handle 1 rock in 1 week.  That means I need like..  25 just to pass go.  I probably need more like 50 at this point.  That's an insane number to me.  I would never put 25-50 snails in a tank where I just turned the lights on.

I'm way off here.  I need to hit the store and buy real quantities of life.  The numbers just boggle me, and I can't keep up with it mentally.

If we look at that picture..  there are 30+ rocks there.  There was probably 1.5 - 2 times that much rock already in the tank.  So lets say, 75 rocks, on the low side.

My 120 has, 6 rocks.  My brain says, 800/120 == 6.  So that means I take the numbers from the 120, and scale up by 6.  Right? No.  Scaled up, the rocks would be like 36, not 75.  I need to be operating in the range of 12-15 TIMES what I do/did to the 120.

I am way off.  The 120 would start with like, 2-3 trochus and ramp up.  I should have gotten 25-40.  I should have gotten like 15 peppermint shrimp, maybe 25.  It's insanity to me.

Utterly boggled by numbers, I slip off to bed...