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The Montipora Cap didn’t make it. It slowly died off until I finally removed it from the tank.

The Blastimosa doesn’t seem to be fully extending out during the day either. I’m wondering if my lower salinity is causing it. I’ll work on getting that slowly raised back up.

All the other fish/inverts are doing well. Having the pH probe in the top-off tank with the Kalk has helped me to keep saturation high. I think this is also helping me keep the Ca/Alk higher in the main tank as well.

Over the weekend I took the time to finally get the chiller installed. The tank has gotten quite high a few times now. It hasn’t gone over the 82 degree set point where the chiller would have turned on, but it’s gotten close.

I’m not actually sure if the chiller will ever run. We don’t let the house get above 82 even when we’re not home. The tank is next to a window, so maybe the heat from that might cause the tank to run hotter.

I haven’t noticed that the lights and pumps are adding much heat to the tank at all, which is nice.

The macro algae is growing quite nicely in the sump. There’s also some red algae showing up in the sump due to the excess light, but I’d rather have it there than in the main tank. I never thought sumps should be that clean anyways 🙂

I’m hopefully going to get some more fish this weekend. I’d like to get a few Pajama Cardinals. I also want some more corals, but man those things are expensive. I keep watching for frags to show up on Facebook or Craigslist.

No pictures this time… Sorry.

It’s been a month or so since I have added the corals to the tank. The Montipora Cap isn’t looking too good, but the Bird’s Nest is showing pretty good growth. Here’s a picture from the last month to compare.

I bought a blue night-light for the aquarium. It’s a little 8″ LED light designed for smaller tanks. It’s just about perfect as a night-light on my larger tank. I think it might be a bit bright, so I’ll print some clips to cover part of the tube and limit the number of bulbs.

Right now I have the light placed on the ledge of the aquarium pointing up at the reflector on the light.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00X84LRCU/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

For only $10 it’s working really well. I’m pretty much leaving it on 24-7 as the main T5’s easily overpower it during the day. It keeps me from having to write any type of program for turning it on/off. It has a manual switch that I can reach up and turn it off if I need to.

There are some other lights on in the room when I took this picture. It was hard to get the camera to focus with just the blue light on.

Well. Besides the green star polyps that came in on the rock.

I went to a guy’s house that posted on FaceBook that he had corals for sale. His pricing was very reasonable and I just got a paycheck…

I bought one of each of the following:

• Neon Green Birdsnest
• Red Montipora Capricornis
• White Favia
• Blastomusa

I walked out only spending $60, which you really can’t beat seeing that the corals were all almost 2″ in size. He said he wasn’t even planning on fragging the montipora, but one of his tangs got caught up in it and snapped some of the branches off. I think this is a pretty good start.

I also worked on trying to get the wavemaker working. That thing is a pain in the arse to work on. It was really a bad design on my part. It’s still not working, but at least I have water flow out of all 4 pipes now to help move things around.

 

Finally got around to doing my second water change. The process is super simple and only takes me about 10 minutes start to finish now. I lay out my water hose and extension cable, hook up the pump to the top-off valve, and then I open up the drain on the return pump. As the water goes down in the sump, it trips the top-off which sends fresh salt-water from the tank outside. The temperature drops about 1 degree with the temperature of the water from the outside storage.

I also finally got the power supply controller printed. It took a couple of re-designs to make everything print. I think part of my problem is that ABS shrinks and also that my printer prints a little on the small side (about .5 mm per side on a 20mm print). I still need to calibrate my printer’s axis.

I received my 3D printer a little over a week ago. It took me about 6 hours to build it and another 4 to realize that the rods that came with it were bent too much to be useable. I replaced the cheap steel rods with some hardened rolled steel ones.

It still took me a week of fiddling with it, but I finally have it printing reliably. The first thing I did was to print new versions of the DC-9000 pump mounts. I only have the power supply housing printed right now, but will print the controller housing tonight.

I’m not quite ready to start leaving the printer running through the day while I’m at work. The plan is to get a Raspberry Pi running Octoprint with a camera working. Then I’ll be willing to leave the print going. I’m going to install a relay so that I can shut off the printer when the print is done.

I also plan on mounting the whole thing in a box to help keep the air temperature stable. The programming I’ve done on the aquarium controller should make a simple fan controller pretty simple to do. I might try to write a plugin to Octoprint to tell an arduino what temp to maintain, since PLA and ABS both have their own settings.

Here’s some pics of the printer I built and the new power supply mount.

I added some more livestock to the tank over the weekend.

I added 1 of each of the following:

* Bi-color Blennie
* Golden Headed Sleeper Goby
* Engineering Goby
* Skunk Cleaner shrimp

The Citrinis Clown Goby has been much more active since adding the other fish. He’s been following the engineering goby around the tank. I don’t know if he’s being territorial or just curious. He came close to the other fish a couple of times, but I haven’t seen him nip or anything.

The Bi-Color blennie does what they always do… he’s camped out on various perches watching the other inhabitants in the tank.

The Sleeper goby immediately swam into the rockwork. He’s since been busy building a tunnel from the front to the back of the largest rock. He was out sifting sand shortly after making his new home.

The skunk shrimp went into the rock work as well. I’ve seen him out a few times, but he’s mostly staying out of view.

I’ve been able to find my peppermint shrimp using a flashlight during the day to peek under some of the rocks. I don’t know how many are still under there from the original 3… mostly because I don’t know if I keep seeing the same one, or different ones.

On a side note… Freezes are REALLY bad to water setups outside. I need to rig up some type of pump to circulate water in the storage containers when it drops to freezing. Right now I have the salt-water mixing pump running, but I don’t have anything in the fresh water. It got above freezing just long enough yesterday for me to get 10 gallons of water out of it for the top-off tank.

When I opened the doors to my outside storage, I saw that the freeze caused two of the canisters on the RODI to freeze and break. I’ll have to order new ones. I’ll just take the new canisters off and bring them inside when it looks like it’s going to freeze.

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve last updated. In that time, we’ve added our first fish and had our first casualty.

On December 28th we added a hermit crab, a matted filefish and a citrinus clown goby.

On January 1st, we lost the matted filefish. I never really saw him eat anything and he barely picked at any of the aptasia in the tank.

I also had a big problem with the Citrinus goby taking plumbing rides to the sump. He did it three times in 2 days. Once was even after I tried putting filter floss in the overflow to block it.

Finally I ended up getting some light diffuser material from Lowe’s and wrapping that in the filter floss. He hasn’t gone for a pipe ride since.

The plan is to add a fish or two each month until the tank is stocked. Corals will be added here and there as well.

Here’s the obligatory pictures:

Done. Done. Done.

The last coat of paint on the stand has dried and the tank build is finally done. I have nothing else to say.

And it was all my fault.

I woke up Saturday morning to the sound of the recirculation pump squealing. I have a spare bearing set for it, so I figured I’d just pull the pump and replace the bearings. I get the pump out just fine with only spilling a bit of water only to find that once off the tank, the pump was no longer making noise.

I grabbed the two ends of the pump and found that if I flexed it just a little, the squealing came back. That’s easy enough to fix, I just need to put something solid under the back of the pump to keep it from flexing.

I put the pump back on the tank and decide I wanted to fix one of the wave maker returns that was being stressed. I gather all my PVC materials and reach up and cut the pipe… which happened to be below the hight of the water in the tank. Water starts pouring out of the top of the pipe. Some quick thinking on my part and I grab the coupler and extension I was going to put on it and shove it on the end of the pipe, stopping the water flow.

I then spent the next 30 minutes with towels and the shop vac cleaning up the water from all over the floor.

So, here I sit… the floor is dry, but I have the PVC pipe dry fitted onto the end of a pipe that as soon as I remove it, water starts pouring out.

I turn off the main pump and let the tank water drop down a few inches. I check, but the PVC is still a bit lower than water height.

I finally decide to just go for it. I take my pipe glue and put it within arms reach. I wrap a large towel around the pipe. I grab the extension, I pull it off, stick it on my thumb, grab the glue, put it on the pipe, and then I shove the extension back onto the end of the pipe. Only about half the towel got soaked in those few seconds… not bad.

I finish my repair work, and pick up all the tools making sure nothing is leaking. Then I grab the son and we head to Hooters for lunch.

What I thought was going to be a quick 1 hour task ended up taking 2.

On a side note, I did end up swinging by the aquarium store and picking up 10 snails for the tank. They seem happy, or at least the ones I can find.

Also, after moving a bunch of rock around last week, the wave maker is clogged again. I’m hoping clean water flowing through it will clear it out, but I’m betting I’ll have to pull it off again and disassemble it and clean it. That was such a pain in the butt. I really need to redesign how it’s mounted on the tank.