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...