JasonJones

Overall the controller experience has been excellent.

I cannot say enough good things about the customer service of the owner of the company as well as the great community that has been built on the controller forum. Several recommendations I have made regarding the IPhone ap have been incorporated quickly. The controller continues to get better with each update.

A couple of new things:

- The RA+ has been released, which raises the memory from 33k to 256k (or somewhere around there) which allows more than enough memory for every code or program you can come up with.

- I would like to add that the setup issues described in my original post have been ameliorated to a great degree by new programs they have created that install everything on the computer for you.

- I also added wireless capabilities so I could monitor everything from my phone when I was away. This was very easy to set up and worked extremely well. I could not only monitor everything, but I could also control everything from the ap, very convenient.

- The only real issue I have had with the controller (which was my own fault) was when water got into the controller. I do not like how the controller is set up because the temperature, ph and top off probes all connect in the top of the controller without waterproof seals. So any water that splashes on the controller will make its way onto the electronics. This is somewhat of a poor design, all plugs should be on the side or the bottom to avoid this. The best thing is clearly to mount it in a place where it cannot get wet, but still.

Congratulations. Both are awesome fish! That angel is beautiful.

What problems has your low pH been causing?

I think I checked my pH once, about 6 years ago.

I feed twice daily- a mix of spectrum pellets, Elos SV m2, formula one flakes and a little bit of reef roids mixed in. I use an ehiem auto feeder set for 3:00 and 8:00. It pours in very little food, but I think it is better to provide food in small quantities more often. I am a proponent of feeding the tank lots of nutrients and then removing them quickly with a large skimmer and chemical media. I find this to be the best method for keeping SPS, and other corals dont seem to mind much.

As far as changing media, I change my GFO when phosphates start creeping up and my carbon monthly. On a tank with a mechanical filter, like a filter sock, I would change it every couple or three days.

Excellent looking tank and great equipment list. I will be building a similar tank (though only 30 x 30 x 15) when I move back to Dallas this fall, so I look forward to watching this one.

If you are really committed to the wavebox, you could build it externally before you set the tank up. I would personally rather have the box external so I don't lose the space in the tank.

I like your SPS philosophy, skim hard and feed heavy. I think it is the best method for SPS tanks.

What are you planning on housing in the sump? Refugium, skimmer? Reactors? What size return?

All of those will factor into the best set up for the sump. Give us a little more info and we can help get you going in the right direction.

Stick the rock you suspect the crab is in into a bucket with water of a high salt content, around 1.040. Should get him out of the rock pretty quick. Best to elevate the rock a couple inches off the bottom

This video is made by BRS, the sellers of ROX, so keep that in mind, but a very interesting comparison nonetheless.

One of my favorite discussions on aquariums temperatures. By Mr. WIlson on RC.

Mr.Wilson Writes About Temperature & Climate Control

....

Credit where credit is due, for informative articles like this let's link back to the source site and thread. You can duplicate portions here for the sake of conversation but I want the original source to get the google and the credit for it.

You got it. Link added.

One of my favorite discussions on aquariums temperatures. By Mr. WIlson on RC. The original post is buried somewhere in a 300 page thread on RC, but this particular article is housed on the RC thread owners site: http://petersfishtank.com/best-practices/

Mr.Wilson Writes About Temperature & Climate Control

First of all the reports that reef tanks thrive at 82°F are absolutely true. Most SPS (small-polyped scleractinian corals) do best at 84-86°F. I aim for 80°F because it is the easiest value to maintain without using any additional resources/energy (heaters & chillers). Once you plug in all of your equipment, the tank will level off to about 79-80°F. It would require the use of one or likely more heaters to maintain 82°F, so I go with the flow and settle with an easily manageable 80°F. If you have a chiller, it should be set to come on at 84°F as basically a fail-safe. Heaters should bet set to come on at 79°F to maintain consistency. If you set your system operating level to 82°F, it leaves a little less room for temperature climbs. A target temp of 80°F leaves room in both directions for error.

A friend of mine was in Indonesia recently and he reports that the maricultured (ocean farmed) SPS are in 90°F water. Coral growth ceases at 76°F, so 77°F is at the bottom margin of their range. 93°F is the top of their range, so 84-86°F (low/high) is somewhere in the middle. 84°F is also the reported level for best growth/health.

I haven’t found “excessive coral spawning” to be a problem. If it was, it’s the kind of “problem” I want.

I believe the data Shimek uses in the article is from 1995. The seas have warmed in the past 15 years.

You need to establish where your temp will tend to drift. Most people have a temp that drifts up during the day while the lights are on. For this reason, it is safer to keep the temp below the optimum 84°F and keep it at 82°F. It’s easy to fix a temp that tends to drift down with a heater, so it’s not necessary to keep it higher than the optimal 84°F.

We aren’t keeping corals from the Atlantic Ocean or Caribbean Sea so the average temperatures from there aren’t accurate for our South Pacific, Australian and Indo-Pacific corals. I’ll look it up when I get the chance, but I doubt the temperatures where our corals come from go below 80°F. This article explains the difference between water and coral temperature.

There are a few things to keep in mind when deciding your optimum temperature. As I mentioned earlier, you don’t want to sit at the margin of the safety zone. Find a spot in the middle where you have room for error minor temperature swings. Temperature drops at the bottom of the safe margin are more dangerous than increases at the top of the margin.

The other issue to take into consideration is your corals need to have all of their needs fulfilled before you raise the temperature (or any parameter for that matter) to the natural optimum level. You can compare it to what a healthy diet for an athlete would be compared to an aquarium designer who chats on a forum all day I certainly have no business consuming the caloric intake of a marathon runner. Corals must have adequate light, carbon source, nutrient levels, major and minor salts and temperature. In the wild, corals will grow best at 84°F, but this isn’t necessarily the experience an aquarist will find in their tank, particularly if they cannot maintain dissolved oxygen rates near saturation levels. Warm water holds less oxygen, so good flow volume and dynamics are vital.

The Shimek article pretty much covers any questions. He claims keeping corals at the low end of tolerance is a common mistake. Calcification ceases at the low end so running chillers to maintain unsafe levels is a poor practice. If/when those chillers fail, you lose stability and increase stress as the water heats up. If your tank naturally runs at 81-82°F with no heater or chiller running, why expend unnecessary resources to lower it if growth and health is better at 84°F?

From Shimek’s article:

“in reality relatively few coral species persist at temperatures much below 24°C (75.2°F)”

“The most rapid growth of most corals is generally around 27°C to 29°C (80.6°F to 84.2°F) (Barnes et al., 1995; Clausen and Roth, 1975; Weber and White 1976; Coles and Jokiel, 1977, 1978; Highsmith, 1979a, b; Highsmith, et al., 1983).”

“the no growth lower limit of zero calcification occurred at 23.7°C (74.7°F) in corals from the Gulf of Mexico and at 25.5°C (77.9°F) in corals from the Caribbean Sea.”

“The most diverse coral reefs are found in a band running from New Guinea and Northern Australia in the west to Palau in the Western Caroline Islands up through the Philippines and Indonesia in the east (Veron, 1986). In this area, prior to the recent period of global warming, the atoll water temperature averaged around 84°F and probably never got as low as 80°F.”

“At 10°C below the optimal temperature, the metabolic rate would be reduced by about 96%, or put another way, it would only be 4% of normal. Under these sorts of conditions most animals die. In fact, most organisms will die if maintained for extended periods under conditions that constrain their metabolic rate to one half of normal. Even metabolic rate reductions to about 75% of optimal may cause significant problems or death (Withers, 1992). A reduction of this magnitude will be caused by keeping an animal with an optimum of about 82°F at a temperature of about 77°F.”

“Both the temperature and salinity of many reef aquaria are kept near or even somewhat below the lower normal survival limit of physiological tolerance for many of the common animals. This results in substantial and unnecessary mortality. In effect, these mini-reef systems keep the animals just healthy enough that they die slowly.” – Dr. Ronald Shimek

We’re talking about a variety of variables that all intertwine. If the question is “What temperature should I keep the coral at?”, then the answer is 84°F. If the question is, “What temperature should I keep my tank at?”, then the answer may differ.

It’s possible that more nuisance algae would grow at a higher temperature. It’s also possible that there is less dissolved oxygen, but I think the difference between 76°F and 84°F is negligible with regard to oxygen saturation. My point about flow rates earlier was simply a warning that if you have a problematic tank with inadequate flow then you don’t have room for higher temps.

Fish are more active at a higher temp. They eat more and grow faster. They would not have a problem at 84°F as this is what they experience in their natural habitat.

The point that Ronald Shimek is making is that it is foolish to keep the temperature at the absolute bottom of the safety zone.

For a large system like Peter’s, I would use an in-line titanium heater run on the main controller. Sump heaters tend to degrade due to salt exposure in the seals and wiring. They also take a bit of a beating during water changes and servicing as they are left on while exposed to air. I use a piece of styrofoam to make a float for the top of the heater so it can float in the sump, keeping the sensitive parts dry (suction cups don’t last long in salt water). The heater(s) should be located in a part of the sump where the water level is constant. The styrofoam floats will allow the heater to follow the water level, should it fluctuate. I would focus my attention on climate control of the ambient room temp with air conditioning or a furnace/boiler, and save aquarium devices in-line or in the sump for fine tuning.

While I would never talk anyone out of a fail-safe device, you have to remember that everything you plumb into your system could potentially leak, and everything you plug in could potentially cause stray current or shock/fire hazard. I don’t use chillers as a general rule. It’s part of the K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid) or “less is more” approach.

The factors that influence system temperature are as follows…

1) Ambient room temperature: North American homes are warm in the winter and cool in the summer, thanks to our desire for convenience and comfort and with a little help from huge utility bills As a matter of fact, many homes are warmer in the winter than they are in the summer, and cooler in the summer than in the winter. Typical ambient room temperature is somewhere around 72°F (for the record, we use metric in Canada).

Working with 72°F, we can assume that still water will reach equilibrium with that temperature. Once you start moving the water it has more contact with the surface where the temperature reaches equilibrium. A cooling effect starts when surface water evaporates and takes with it heat. Evaporative cooling is a very important process that we will discuss later.

2) Aquarium location: This factor is directly related to the ambient room temperature covered above. An aquarium located in a basement, or with a sump in the basement or garage will run cooler than an aquarium in an upper floor of a house. Even the position of the tank with relation to the floor makes a difference. While I operated a tropical fish wholesale warehouse, I found that the three levels of tanks showed different temperatures. The freshwater tanks where not on an open system, just air-driven sponge filters. I heated the warehouse to 80°F, but the bottom tanks 1′ off of the ground were 74°F, the middle row 3′ off of the ground were 76°F, and the top row 5′ off of the ground were 78°F. Peter’s radiant floor heating will eliminate this heat gradient issue. Placing the sump directly on a concrete floor will offer cooling.

3) System volume: Having a large sump is a cheap and easy way to improve thermal dynamics if you have the space. The extra system volume will also improve water quality, as the saying goes, “The only solution to pollution is dilution”. The best solution is actually filtration, rather than sweeping the problem under the rug, but it doesn’t rhyme so I doubt it will ever catch on.

Saltwater has greater density than freshwater, so it holds its temperature longer. Large tanks (over 200 gallons) are particularly stable with little or no fluctuation caused by day/night ambient room temperature shifts. In other words, the room may be cooler at night, but the tank will stabilize at a compromise temp somewhere between the day and night temp. The large thermal mass of a big tank makes quick temperature changes up or down more difficult, but nature doesn’t like change, so overall the thermal mass is a good thing for stability. Remember that bleaching incidents on natural coral reefs has been noted after only 2°F temperature increases. This doesn’t mean a 2°F increase in temperature will bleach (expelling symbiotic algae/zooxanthellae) or kill corals, but it does underscore the necessity for stability.

4) Heat transfer: Every electrical device, including chillers add heat to aquariums. Add a few degrees for pumps, a few more for UV sterilizers and a lot more for lighting and your cooler than room temp tank is suddenly 10°F hotter. Some of this heat is unavoidable, but most of it can be at least minimized. Directing a 12 inch circulation fan perpendicular toward the display or sump surface will drop the temp 5-9°F. The evaporative cooling effect will tax your top-off system a little more so make sure you can keep up with the demand. A second fan can be used to blow across the surface of the water, pushing radiant heat from the light away from the water. Raising or lowering the lights will also influence heat transfer.

Venting the cabinet or filter room is an often overlooked detail of climate control. Some pumps don’t employ cooling fans and subsequently run at very high temps (130-140°F). This is not a problem if the heat is allowed to vent away from the system, rather than trapping it and raising the ambient temp and surface water temp. Chillers are an important device to vent as the heat exchanger will dump that heat right back into your system so it works against itself.

5) Water movement: As mentioned in the previous points, good water movement will increase the amount of water exposed to the surface for thermal and gas exchange. A good system of flow dynamics assures that water is moved from the bottom where it is cooler and lower in dissolved oxygen to the surface where it can be oxygenated and heat can vent. Using a glass top will raise the temperature about 5°F. While this is rarely desirable, it’s a good practice if there is an extended power outage and your back-up power is limited. I assume Peter has a natural gas generator and UPS/deep charge marine battery backup. Certain filtration devices (gas reactor, wet/dry filter, shallow ATS etc.) work as evaporative coolers or cooling towers. In general, these evaporative efforts are directly connected to improved gas exchange as well.

6) Air quality: Fresh, dry air will be cooler than stale humid air and gas exchange is more efficient. Peter’s HRV unit is more than enough to handle this issue. It also vents equipment to deal with heat transfer.

You should have a bypass line on all of the equipment such as the chiller so it can be taken offline for service without affecting the operation of the aquarium. There should also be a true union shut off valve on each bulkhead of the display tank. This way you can fill and run the tank independent of the plumbing and filtration devices and if your plumbing springs a leak it can be repaired without draining the tank or capping the internal plumbing.

There’s a handy chart on this site that illustrates the relation of salinity and temperature to dissolved oxygen potential.

For Peter’s tank I recommend he pick up two 1000 watt titanium probe heaters and plug them into a controller. Make sure the module/power bar can handle the 20 amps that it will draw. Having each heater run on a separate controller will resolve this issue and act as a failsafe. If the controller jams in the on position the tank will only go up 5°F instead of 10. If the controller jams in the off position, the other heater is still on the job.

We discussed heaters earlier in the thread. The experts agree that the ideal temperature is 86°F. The room temp may drop at night even with your climate control system. The most important issue is stability. In my experience the tank will run about 5°F warmer than the room. Evaporative cooling will drive the temp below room temp and LED or well vented MHL lighting has little affect on water temp. Your pumps are all external so they won’t transfer as much heat as submersibles. Your UV unit will add a bit. The trickle/wet dry filter will cool the water through evaporation and contact with air.

Where you see a lot of overheating issues is with a tank under 200 gallons with MHL lighting crammed into a tight canopy, poor cabinet venting, inefficient pumps, powerheads, and high ambient room temp.

Cold air drops so your basement will have a cool ambient room temp year round. Your remote sump and equipment will keep the tank cool. I think you said your live rock vats were about 78°F.

The problem with magic numbers is they aren’t magic for everyone. Peter has a high tech climate control system and a budget to keep it where he wants it. There are numerous fail safes and the high water volume and acrylic tank tank construction offers yet more stability. Fear of a temperature drop during a power outage or a high temp spike during a heat wave are not factored in when establishing target temp. If you have all of your ducks in a row, then a magic number of 82-84°F fits the bill (no pun intended).

If you feel you are at risk of power outage, extreme weather (hot or cold), or equipment malfunction, then you should aim lower, closer to the middle of the temperature range (79-80°F).

In most homes, it gets cooler at night. This can drop the system water a few degrees, especially since lighting and in some cases pumps are off at night and cooling fans are often left on. Most fish and corals are from areas with stable temperatures. The temperature swing is more injurious than the temperature value itself. For this reason, it makes more sense to keep the heater at 80°F rather than 79°F or lower so nightly drops are compensated for.

You can use a chiller to keep the temperature from rising over 80°F, but that represents a $1000 – $1500 equipment cost and elevated operational costs. It also increase the possibility of leaks and equipment failure.

I don’t know the actual numbers, but the amount of dissolved oxygen in 79°F water versus 82°F water isn’t a huge difference. Keeping the resting temperature lower will add extra minutes of air, rather than hours.

I posted an article by Dana Riddle earlier where he compares water temperatures to actual coral temps in aquaria. He uses a directional infrared thermometer to test the temperature of the coral. Some lighting systems emit radiant heat that reaches the corals, making them warmer than the surrounding water. The sun also generates radiant heat, obviously, so this heat transfer is not unique to our aquariums.

If we were in Dallas I would plasma cut it for you, but I have nothing here. You may call around to a couple of fabrications shops, I bet they would cut it for very cheap.

Is the wavebox pointing to the front? If so, any particular reason you decided to orient it this way versus down the length of the tank?

do you mind my asking how far apart the leds are from each other? I've noticed when you start getting near 2 inches of separation the effect becomes more pronounced.

in your light it seems to have helped a good deal

The LEDs are in four clusters. The LEDs in each cluster are right next to each other and each cluster is about 2 inches apart, similar to an AI SOL fixture on a smaller scale.

The light on this tank is only 2" from the surface, so as we discussed earlier, that makes the shimmer much more pronounced than if the light source was higher up.

but you really don't need a diffuser unless your really close to the waters surface and at that point it won't do much to help. really though unless your running deeper than 20 inches you don't even need optics to aim the light down. they come stock with a 110-120° optic from the factory.

I would have to disagree with you here. Not only does the diffuser material help remove color banding, but it also significantly reduces the disco ball effect that LEDs create, especially multi-color builds. It makes the shimmer look like a halide, versus the intense shimmer of LEDs. You are right that this effect is more pronounced when the LEDs are closer to the water, but I have found it makes LEDs look much more natural regardless of the LED height.

For those that have not seen these, here are a couple of videos of my wife's tank before and after diffusion material. This build only uses three LED colors, so you will not notice the color banding as much as you would in other builds, but the shimmer difference is unmistakable.

Before:

After:

Gabe makes some really good points. It all depends on what you are going for. A mixture of just whites and royal blues will not look bad. However, it will miss parts of the spectrum and therefore some coral colors will be washed out. By adding other colors, you are able to plug the wholes in the spectrum and bring out some of those washed out colors.

Frankly, if I were in your shoes I would order 3up clusters from ledgroupbuy.com (they also make a very nice heatsink/housing combo). They have three ups with 2RB and 1 NW. This is a great base. They make an "ocean coral white" 3up, which is just a RB, Red, Cyan. I would order one of those for every 2 or 3 of the RB/NW 3ups. Send them an email and they can help you with how many ocean coral whites to add. I would then add some violets (can we all agree to stop calling them UVs and call them violets??? UV is below 400nm, the leds everyone is calling UV is 420nm). I also like Gabe's recommendation of .5 violets for every RB. Finally, you can add one or two normal blue leds in there for another element, but dont add more than 1 per 7 or 8 RBs.

Last, but most important IMHO, if you are going to do multicolors, I would add a diffusion material. It really cleans up the color mixing. You can purchase a cheap one here that I have used on multiple builds that works excellent and tests have shown only drops light output by about 5%: http://www.berlinwal...Transparent.htm -get the "sand" color.

It all depends on the intensity of your lighting. The higher the intensity, generally the shorter the photoperiod. Most people run between 8-12 hours.

My lights are on for a total of 10 hours, however, I only have all the bulbs on for 5 hours during the middle of the day.

With your lights, I would run closer to the 12 hour point because the CFs are not overly bright.

Mu guess on the sump. Small enclosed section is where the drain comes in. That then drains into the skimmer compartment where the skimmer shelf is. This section could also house a small refugium, which may be why the skimmer is elevated--or just to ensure constant water height for it. The skimmer section overflows into the return section, although I am not certain why the separator is bi-level, unless you want to direct the way the water flows in the return section--or to ensure the water passes by the skimmer and not around it.

Really nice ones. I particularly like the blue one.

The KZ Fiji purple is equivalent to the ATI Purple Plus. You do not want two of those with only four bulbs. You can look somewhere else for the New Gen or go with another blue+ or an aquablue special. I would personally order from somewhere else for the new gen, I have wanted one for a while and wish I would have done that.

I think it is certainly possible, but the risk to reward ratio cautions against it. I would buy a purpose built HOB overflow.

Great looking set up with an excellent equipment list.

Nice aquascape too. Did you build the rocks yourself?

Shallow Tank-

- Easier to light (better par with less electricity used)

- More surface area per volume = better gas exchange

- Easier to work in because of less depth

- Easier to aquascape well

Deep Tank:

- More aquascaping possibilities, but harder to aquascape well

- People tend to create vertical walls trying to utilize the entire height in the aquascape

- Waveboxes tend to work better

- Harder to light well

I am very biased to the shallower tanks. 90% of the tanks I have seen that I really loved have been shallower. However, my favorite tank of all time is 48" deep with an incredible aquascape--Chingchai's tank.

There is a difference between carbon dosing and using carbon. Using carbon in a reactor or passively will not cause a bacterial bloom. Overdosing a carbon source (vodka, vinegar, etc...) can cause a bacterial bloom that turns the water a milky white.

I would have to agree with the others that the lights are probably not the cause, but they may make the problem look worse.

Here is a post you might find interesting. This is from Blasterman on nano-reef.com. He is incredibly knowledgable on LEDs and one of the pioneers of multicolor fixtures.

"Just a note that I ordered a bunch of Aquastyle LEDs because I wanted to try out the different colors and now having a spectrometer I wanted to give them a good testing. The spectrometer tests are going to be trickier than I thought, so I'm working on a test rig for that, but I did have a chance to test out their 10k, 6500k, and 4500k LEDs along with royals.

Their Royals aren't too bad. Brighter than Satistronics and only a couple nanometers warmer than XT-Es. I'd still stick with XT-Es, but their Royals are workable and cheap.

In terms of color, different story. While plenty bright enough I had no use for the 10Ks. Just an extreme cool-white by my eyeballs with the typical pinkish / purplish cast. They aren't actinic enough to be used by themselves, and combined with royals they are just dull in terms of coral color.

6500k seemed similiar to older XP-Es.

I was hoping for more from their 4500k, and while visually they looked like Bridgelux and Cree neutrals the response over my tank was totally different. Color was anemic at 2:1, and even at 1:1 it still wasn't that good, but just OK. I'm currently running Bridgelux 402s and Cree XT-E's, and the Aquastyle 4500ks really weren't in the same class in terms of color. For instance, orange monti caps in my tank have a deep, orange 'velvet' like color under the 402's, but lose most of their color under the Aquastyle 4500ks. In fact, everything just looked dull regardless of color ratio with the Aquastyle whites.

It's possible that Aquastyle's 2700ks would fix the issue, and when I have time I'll test it out, but for now I can say with 150% affirmity that the white 80 CRI and higher Cree, Bridgelux *brand*, and Rebels (avoid the ANSI versions) deliver a rather significant improvement in color over the Aquastyles. Again, a lot of this is subjective and it's possible the 2700Ks might fix the problem, but that's my opinion."

Here are some thoughts on the mix, I wish I knew a bit more about color mixing with bridgelux LEDs

You seem to be overpowered on whites and underpowered on blues. Between the 6500 and the 10,000k, you have 45 whites. Between the Cyan, RB and V, you have 21 Blues. I would keep the cyans and violets the same and at least double the RB. I would also consider running a couple of Osram Reds that are around 660nm, versus the pinks that peak around 600nm. LED fixtures generally lack in the red department and I am not sure the pinks would help that much.

In addition to the high number of whites, keep in mind that RB, C and Red mix together to form a white light. This will effectively make your fixture even more white. The fixture I just built had only 6 white leds out of 25. I considered the RB, C, and R together as white as well, moving it up to 12 white leds. With the blue channel and white channel on equally, the fixture is between 14 and 15k.

The led layout looks good and nicely mixed.