Mike M.

Long made it over and picked this up. It's gone fellas! THanks for looking.

Mike

You are welcome. I enjoy having you out.

Mike

Pham,

Your inbox is full or cannot receive messages. PM so I can bounce you a message back.

Mike

For any of you getting a SPS tank going or that have a place midway or high up in a mixed tank, take a look at these frags. The A. Horrida is a fine branching green polyp with purple body coral. It likes moderate light. I have it at the top of the lower half of my tank. It has grown very quickly over the last nine months and I love its thin, dense, branches. I have one of these available. Here it is:

A. Horrida

Super Hairy Green Milliepora-SOLD OUT

This is another fast growing SPS. I have found it to be easy to keep and can also recommend it to those that have done okay with montis and are wanting to add new acro species to their tank. THese have been mounted for over a month now. $15 each. 4 available.

JG Yellow

Fast growing millie, likes moderate to high light in moderate to high flow. ANother easy middle of the road SPS. 2 available. Both mounted over a month.

I reworked some of my rock this morning and realized that it was time for this colony to move on its way. For anyone wanting an easy SPS, this is it. I had it in the bottom of my 120 so it is not a high light demanding coral. $30 takes the colony. Bring a bucket or container with you. It will break in a bag. This is a nice piece, and will take off in your tank.

Here are photos:

I made it through about ten pages of the ebay bulb thread. Interesting. I think I'm sticking with the spectral and output data available on the web to support my choice in lamp. I don't mean in any way that you couldn't keep a tank under those lamps and I think it would be cool to see a six to twelve month journal of a tank lit by a set of these Plusrite bubls. It might shed some light on low cost ways to operate within this hobby.

Do it! Take a before photo. Install the $10 lamps. Run the tank 6 months taking a photo every 4-6 weeks. Let us see and maybe we can all throw away our $65-135 lamps. I'd love to see a demonstration of a healthy tank under less expensive lamps. Do it!

Yes, they are bluer than the Reeflux stil and I have both lamps over the tank now. Go for it. They are a cool lamp and that's a great deal.

Mike

Your head loss calculations look good. SOunds like you are set with a T4.

With that long a run, you will need to carefully calculate head loss and may need to consider 1 1/4" lines. There is a head loss cacluator at Reef Central. These Poseidon pumps are good to I think something like 15' head loss. This is not an impossible deal for you, but you need to put pen to paper on this one if it is that far to your chiller location. I hate this aspect of fitting a reef tank into a home. Should we all not build our homes around our reef tanks? (Credit Mark M. for that line)

I run 1" pvc hard and spaflex and it is a 20 foot round trip out to the chiller and back to the display. It calculates out to about 13' of head pressure.

Nope. no splitting. When it does come on, I want all flow to the tank enjoying the cool coils of the JBJ.

Any coating is gonna fail in the salt environment. You might extend the life of a European hinge by urethane coating it.

Here is a source of Stainless Steel European hinges though...this would fix you right up:

Stainless Hinges

correct. The chiller is inline and has a controller inline that monitors temp. Gets a little warm, chiller comes on. Cools off. CHiller off. Flow to display all goes through the chiller. With on 6 feet of head pressure, you could easily run the tank with 1 Poseidon T3. I am no longer a fan of mulitple return pumps. That'll stir everybody up, but I just don't like maintaining multiple pumps. The T3 I'm using is dependable enough that the worst thing that could happen is that is siezes up and I come home to a full sump. No big deal. Tunze's in the disply will keep the circulation going. Temp monitor will shut the whole thing down if the temp rises to 82. No worries!

Added temp...yes. It's a yes but...All internal pumps add heat. The big Mag pumps you'd need for a 180 will add a ton of heat. THey are water cooled just like a Poseidon. The only way around adding heat with the pump is through an air cooled external pump and then...Whammo...LOUD PUMP!

You had mentioned that you are going to have a chiller. If so, then the heat issue is a nonissue. Maybe your chiller would cycle one more time per day than it would with air cooled pumps. Pick your poison. Noise or quiet with some heat that MIGHT make for one more chiller cycle.

My current setup with the Posiedon pump cycles the chiller 2 x per day all months but August where we have been at 100 degrees. I have had a third, 30 minute, chiller cycle during this month that relates only to outside temp and the fact that some of my plumbing is outside the condo. The normal two cycles relate to when the MH lights are on. Chiller does not come on otherwise which leads me to believe that there is enough cooling even though the pump adds heat.

So really, the HOT factor of the Poseidons is not a factor. Search it on Reef Central though, and that is all the users say about it...quiet, but adds a ton of heat. Based on my experience, I don't believe it to be a deal. No additional electricity consumption by the chiller directly attributable to using the water cooled external pump. Make sense? It is whisper quiet though. ALmost can't tell its on.

There is no right answer on this one. I used to used internal pumps for my 120, but I grew tired of the noise those very dependable and easily serviced Mag Pumps (Mag 18) delivered. Can't say enough good things about Mag pumps. The eHeims may not be enough flow for a 180 gallon rig, that's why I mentioned the mag.

Currently, I am plumbed with an external Poseidon pump. Yes, they add heat to the water, but so do internal pumps. It is a SUPER QUIET pump and has run without a hiccup since January. I like it and it generates pretty good head pressure for running to my remote chiller location outside my condo. If your pumps are going to be in a place where noise isn't an issue, the Reeflo's will be a great choice. That being said, either route will work well.

So this would be your alk setpoint. Your goal should be to hold 8.5 going forward. Maybe smaller amounts of buffer solution more often would help smooth things out. Also, Mark's suggestion of using a Kalk topoff would help stabilize.

Good luck with this.

Your dosing schema is the source of the instability. Try to move your husbandry to limit this swing to <1 kH across the week. Your tank is rocking and rolling over time and SPS do not like this at all. I think we have this thing licked.

Meek out!

Hey Mark,

Thanks for posting your observations on Alk swing. Due to the relative lack of accuracy on the test kits, I was reticent to say .5 kH, but that would be my best guess on what is actually going on in my system versus a whole point. Matt will clarify if he actually has a 2pt swing or if he is saying that is the range he tries to maintain. I am having trouble understanding how you get a 2 pt. swing in a day and that would certainly explain why he may be having necrosis issues.

Are you saying that you have a 2 pt. kH float across the day? If so, how are you maintaining alkalinity? You might need to consider some adjustments to your dosing schedule to smooth out the float. I never see more that .5-1 Kh float through a day. kH seems a little lower in the morning than afternoon in my system.

I have foundLug ol's solution, a drop or two every now and again, causes purples to intensify in my SPS. Careful with it though, as has been stated, it can be overdone with dire consequence.

The Aquaconnects are definitely not cheaper. Nice lamp though. Makes me want a PFO HQI ballast!

You aren't crazy. That's why I didn't make any big statement with the opener. Now, the Aquaconnect is not burnt in yet. It has four hours of burn on it so it may not be up to full output. That being said, that Reelux 20K sure looks yellow. It has about four months burn time. The Reeflux 20K may provide good growth despite its 20K designation.

The 14K Aquaconnect is certainly a "whiter" light compared to the Reeflux 20K on the left. Probably just matter of taste since you are not thinking of getting SPS fever. I am not a softie expert by any stretch of the imagination so I would have to defer to anyone else's opinion what would be best for your tank.

Below is a full tank shot I took with a Reeflux 20K(left half) and Aquaconnect 14K(right half) 400W lamps. Both lamps driven by a Coralvue eballast. No opinion here, I just look for comparison photos from time to time and they are hard to come by.

Mike