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The Maroon Lagoon V2.0


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A small update:

Nutrient levels continue to come down. I figured out that my automatic feeder had been completely missing the floating feeding ring, so a lot of food had been floating into the overflow and settling in the corners of the tank. The house smells pretty funky from all the excess nutrients in the tank, but oddly no algae growth, just some diatoms here and there. I adjusted the position of the floating feeding ring and nutrient levels in the tank have been coming down ever since.

I did increase the feeding of the tank to 3 times a day with smaller amounts. The anthias look like they're losing weight after being released into the display tank. I imagine they are burning more calories in a larger tank and now have to compete for food with the other fish. I'm hoping the 3 small meals a day plus prepared foods whenever I'm home will be enough for them.

Yesterday PO4 was at 0.03 ppm and NO3 was around 1.5 ppm. Alkalinity has been stable (praise Jesus) and Mg has started to slowly rise since I added Neomag to my calcium reactor. Overall things have been looking great and I plan on taking a day off work this week as my Spring Break opportunity to get back to working on the stand and hood.

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Outside of hilarious South Park gifs, progress has been made on the tank build. The weather was nice yesterday and I've been working a lot of OT so I decided to take the day off and build the hood of the tank. Nearly took me all day since I had to tear all the cherry trim manually and take dozens of measurements and cuts, but it came out very well. I will be sanding, staining, and sealing it soon so hopefully I can get the hood on by the time I get back from my next field assignment. Here are a couple pictures I took during the build.

The front of the hood that will be connected to stainless steel piano hinges for access to the tank.

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The "completed" hood before adding the hinges and sanding/staining

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I plan on drilling holes in the top later and installing vent fans that will turn on whenever the aquarium gets too warm, or maybe whenever the lights are on just to vent the extra heat and moisture out daily. I also need to attach a piece that my Apex automatic feeder can securely attach to since sitting on the edge of the tank will no longer be an option. Lights will be suspended on cables, with the exception of the T5's, which will be connected to the sides of the hood. I bought the Apex lunar module, so I'll also have to figure out where to fit them in the hood where they aren't being blocked by light fixtures, or blocking light fixtures.

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I got bored last night and while reading a thread on R2R about microbubbles at night I decided to give it a try. I placed an air stone underneath the intake of my return pump and let it run all night. I haven't tested for anything yet, but my temp and pH probe documented it at least.

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I'm a little surprised at how much the pH came up. I expected an increase in pH from the injection of O2, but I didn't expect it to raise the pH above day time levels when the tank is photosynthesizing. I also assumed the skimmer and overflow would offset this affect as it normally oxygenates the water at night, perhaps not as much as I had originally assumed.

I was hoping the flood of micorbubbles in the tank would grab onto and lift out the current diatom bloom I'm experiencing, but most of the junk on the sand seems to have been left in place. The rocks look slightly cleaner, but nothing earth shattering.

I am curious what this did to my alkalinity levels though. While the increase in oxygen in the water over night probably would not have a significant impact on alk and Ca levels, the increase in O2 and pH of the water as a whole would probably impact the CaRX and its pH levels. I would think that when the pH of the tank water increases, that would cause the CO2 solenoid on the CaRX to open more to decrease the pH back down to my set point, effectively increasing the alkalinity, Ca, and Mg.

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The largest downfall of this experiment was that the house got really cold last night (about 62, hooooray old houses with thin materials!) and the injection of cool room air drastically decreased the temperature of the tank below 78. Both heaters came on, but they are slowly bringing the temperature back up. The nice thing about this is it offers an alternative cooling method for the summer months once the hood is placed over the tank and the sump is fully enclosed. Assuming the temperature of my house is less than 79 (oh Lord, please don't let me house get that warm this summer), then injecting the tank with microbubbles is an effective way to lower the temperature of the tank without running fans over the surface of the water.

I am not sure if this method is all it's made out to be, but it certainly offers options in controlling the temperature and pH of the tank when large adjustments need to be made. I don't believe I will run this routinely in the future because eventually I want to get clams in the tank and I feel bubble inside and underneath clams are detrimental to them. But for now I think I will keep running microbbubles at night just to document their effect.

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haha good one Ty.

Yeah, I'm not at all convinced that this method is anything more than a current fad to meet peoples wishes of a magical strategy to make everything wonderful. As I've already stated, the increased pH and lowering of the tank temp without running a chiller were the largest benefits. The tips of my corals looked bleached today, but all my parameters are still stable. I can't be positive if this correlates to the microbubbles or not, but it's the most obvious possibility right now.

I wish it had lifted all the junk and dinos and other junk that is currently blooming in my new tank up into the overflows to be skimmed out, but that didn't happen. I can say though that the protein skimmer cup was quite full this morning and was pretty funky smelling. Not a measurable scientific observation, but an observation none-the-less.

I will be going to the midwest for the week for work, so I'll probably put the microbubble experiment on hold until I get back. The wife is pretty clueless when it comes to the health of the corals so I'd rather not risk it.

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Random observation just now, but I've been dealing with a dino bloom lately and I attributed it to a new tank, dumping all my fish and their bioload into it, and the three feedings a day to accomodate the metabolisms of the anthias. Well I'm sitting here in front of the tank at 9:20 pm when the automatic feeder goes off. I currently have the following program set for the automatic feeder in Fusion:

OSC 000:00/000:30/000:30 Then ON
If Time 00:00 to 10:00 Then OFF
If Time 10:02 to 14:00 Then OFF
If Time 14:02 to 18:00 Then OFF
If Time 18:02 to 00:00 Then OFF
If FeedA 000 Then ON

For whatever reason I guess it's just been feeding the tank non stop every 4 hours. The entire drum was almost completely empty when I just checked it, which means over the last week or two it has emptied a fairly substantial amount of food into the tank, a lot of which has not been consumed. Hopefully this is why the dinos are so prevalent right now. doh.gif

If anyone sees a hole in the programming let me know. Perhaps it has something to do with the FeedA schedule, but I'm too tired to look into it right now.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Still haven't figured out what was going on with the automatic feeder. I changed it to FeedB hoping that some other command was causing FeedA to turn on at times I didn't request. Seems to have worked since I haven't seen it feed at random times of the day.

In other news: while we were hanging out at the North beer meet up this week, Ty convinced me to abandon my plans to hang my lights via zip ties and copious amounts of duct tape and adopt a style that would better match my "sharp tank build". I have decided to order some black anodized aluminum extrusion bars that I will hang in the hood. I would really like to find some top-mounted heavy duty drawer slides to mount under the top of the hood so I can slide the lights out enough to change out the T5 bulbs whenever needed and also adjust the position of the lights if so desired. Currently searching the internets for a suitable drawer slides that will mount upside down, won't rust, robust enough to hold the weight of the lights, and has holes suitable to properly secure the aluminum extrusion bars to.

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I went to RCA yesterday and picked up a wooden air stone and placed it near the return pump, but not underneath it. I set it to run for two hours early this morning, but surprisingly the tank wasn't visibly full of bubbles like it was with the traditional air stone. I'm not sure if this is because more of the bubbles are being dissolved due to the small pores of the wooden air stone or if the return pump just not capturing as many bubbles.

I would really prefer to run the air stone with outside air because I've noticed that when it's a nice night and the windows are open, the pH comes up when injecting air. However, if it's been warm and the house has been closed all day the pH actually comes down when the air stone turns on, probably due to pumping more CO2 in from a house with an atmosphere of elevated CO2. I would love to experiment with having an O2 cylinder in the sump with a regulator and solenoid valve and try injecting straight O2 into the tank in small doses. I'm not sure if this would be more detrimental to the livestock, but I would really like to see what would happen.

The reason I would prefer a cylinder of O2 (or even compressed air with less CO2 in it) is because a) I would rather not drill holes in my walls to run power cords and air lines outside b) the seasonal temperatures worry me with outside air. If it's 98 degrees in the summer and I'm injecting warm air, that is going to bring the temperature of my tank up in the summer unnecessarily and if it's freezing outside in the winter, that will really bring the temperature down.

As far as the claims of microbubbles "scrubbing" the water columns and lifting all the detritus out of the tank and into the sump, I can't say that has much validity at this point as I still see tons of organic matter on the rocks and sand bed. It could be accomplishing this in small amounts that aren't noticeable, but I can't really observe or confirm this theory so I won't argue for it.

I will likely continue to run the air bubbles for the next few weeks and document the pH and temperature swings at night. I wish I had a control tank and Apex to compare this too, but unfortunately I don't so my observations can only be taken at what it is.

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Oh and by the way, I still can't figure out what the heck was going on with my pH yesterday. It continuously jumped around all day, and both my CaRX and sump probes were unsteady for the same time frames. It corresponded with feeding prepared foods soaked in Selcon on Wednesday afternoon and ended Thursday afternoon when I fed prepared food not soaked in Selcon.
[emoji848]

I can't be certain that was the cause of the erratic pH, but it's the only variable that really corresponded with it. Perhaps some compound in the Selcon caused the probes to whack out? Maybe some kind of electric noise in the Apex? I'm left scratching my head...

All that to say, I don't have a real good pH graph and baseline for this microbubble observation at this time [emoji849]

33eb268737c3aa3a2327d7474f1e7836.jpg

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Oh and by the way, I still can't figure out what the heck was going on with my pH yesterday. It continuously jumped around all day, and both my CaRX and sump probes were unsteady for the same time frames. It corresponded with feeding prepared foods soaked in Selcon on Wednesday afternoon and ended Thursday afternoon when I fed prepared food not soaked in Selcon.

[emoji848]

I can't be certain that was the cause of the erratic pH, but it's the only variable that really corresponded with it. Perhaps some compound in the Selcon caused the probes to whack out? Maybe some kind of electric noise in the Apex? I'm left scratching my head...

All that to say, I don't have a real good pH graph and baseline for this microbubble observation at this time [emoji849]

33eb268737c3aa3a2327d7474f1e7836.jpg

Mark Callahan had documented something similar with ph in his house, I believe he had a full thread and even a video about it. He got to where he was leaving a window open each night. I seem to remember he even ran a pipe or something to bring in outside air...

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