Mhucasey's SPS obsession

[Pife]

Great tank and colors. Those dang green acros are everywhere.

[sahin]

Love the tidiness of the electrics!

[mhucasey]

Originally Posted by Pife

Great tank and colors. Those dang green acros are everywhere.

Friends don't let friends buy green acros. There should be a PSA for that

[david76]

Great tank, great corals and colors, great set up, great post...great everything. Subscribed!

Congratulations and many thanks for sharing!

[biggles]

I can't say i've ever seen a real yellow acro mate, everything i've seen is really a very 'yellow' shade of fluoro lime pigmentation. I love using small stylo frags as buffers between acros to slow down their encrusting. They have to go up and over the sacrificial stylo to keep moving forward.
Your wiring is nowhere near as much fun as my dining chair wiring setup. I bet anyone could work out how to turn off the return pump within a minute, it would take you a good ten minutes to solve my reef wiring puzzle....

Do you have any pink milli - if not i think you should make that a priority acro to add to your yummy collection - i have your back on the greeners

[Electrobes]

Originally Posted by mhucasey

Friends don't let friends buy green acros. There should be a PSA for that

[mhucasey]

Originally Posted by biggles

I can't say i've ever seen a real yellow acro mate, everything i've seen is really a very 'yellow' shade of fluoro lime pigmentation. I love using small stylo frags as buffers between acros to slow down their encrusting. They have to go up and over the sacrificial stylo to keep moving forward.
Your wiring is nowhere near as much fun as my dining chair wiring setup. I bet anyone could work out how to turn off the return pump within a minute, it would take you a good ten minutes to solve my reef wiring puzzle....

Do you have any pink milli - if not i think you should make that a priority acro to add to your yummy collection - i have your back on the greeners

I know there are some that are pretty close, but they are rare. Krzysztof(lunar) has one that is just ridiculous, and there is one in this video at 3:46:
http://youtu.be/CKyGKVuO97s

I've been training encrusting montipora onto the rocks between frags for the same reason, plus it looks better than rock. Once I figured out Acro beats monti I planted it all over. If the monti gets too close, the acro gets a snack and trims it back

I have a red milli, but I think its going to be more of a dark red rather than pink. There was a piece that came in to my local store a while back that was off the charts pink...for 500 bucks...it was so intense I actually considered it A pink coral is on my short list, just waiting for the right one

[mhucasey]

Originally Posted by david76

Great tank, great corals and colors, great set up, great post...great everything. Subscribed!

Congratulations and many thanks for sharing!

Thanks David!

[ridetheducati]

I recently rebooted my system because of M. Confusa over taking my acros. It only took two years to get out of control. Tried to keep it at bay with epoxy but it grows extremely fast, you can almost see it growing daily. Going forward, I will never add encrusting monti, unless it is well isolated. I made the mistake of letting it bridge the gap. When I say reboot, I mean total tear down and acid bath 100% of the rock. I could not take it anymore. Roughly 50% of my rocks were covered with it.

I am currently cooking my rocks. Beware of the run-away corals.

[mhucasey]

Interesting. I have a Confusa as well as purple haze, Bloody Mary, and rainbow montis growing right up to acros and they get beaten back pretty well by the acros. Sometimes I give them a trim with the agave vac mower to give them some extra room. I'll keep an eye on them with your advice in mind.

[viktor72]

This is amazing system that you built and the corals are even more,thank you for sharing.
Once you said that you add iodine using Fauna Marin colors additives for Blue and Red,are you adding iodine inside the FM solutions,and what iodine solution do you use and how much?Do you test for iodine?
It would be also interesting to read about your feeding regime for corals and fish.
Keep up the good work,you are an inspiration.

[mhucasey]

This is amazing system that you built and the corals are even more,thank you for sharing.
Once you said that you add iodine using Fauna Marin colors additives for Blue and Red,are you adding iodine inside the FM solutions,and what iodine solution do you use and how much?Do you test for iodine?
It would be also interesting to read about your feeding regime for corals and fish.
Keep up the good work,you are an inspiration.

Thanks for the kind words!
I was dosing about 3 drops of lugols/day, but i don't dose it right now because of using the FM colors, which have iodine. I dose about 10-15ml per week of the Blue/purple and red/purple solutions. I have never tested for iodine, but I was able to see definite increases in polyp extension and skimmate production when dosing lugols after breaks in dosing. My research into this led me to conclude that the iodine is skimmed out especially in my heavily skimmed system, and that it is needed for both the corals and bacterial populations. Some people can meet this need with foods, especially if feeding nori.

I feed the fish at least twice a day, and pick two items from the following list, rotating them for variety:
Frozen mysis
Spectrum Thera-A pellets
Live California Blackworms(not bloodworms!)
Reef Caviar

I feed with all the flow on - the fish like to chase the food and it gets eaten very fast.

[mhucasey]

Well the new bulb layout is a hit, the only bulb I have been playing around with is the bulb in the 8th position. This Aquablue Azure bulb from Giesemann might be my new favorite white bulb, it is a beautiful whitish blue and the corals fluoresce a lot under it without blues.

I found an interesting effect with using the Actinic Bulbs - the bulbs punch up the fluorescent colors nicely without shifting the overall color to heavily toward blue. The balancing act I end up playing is wanting the tank bright, with all colors represented, no yellowish or pinkish overtone, and with flourescence maintained. Too many blue bulbs, the tank got dimmer and reds started looking brown, yellows looked green, etc.

A while back I found that the KZ New Gen could be swapped in for a blue bulb and the overall color balance didn't change, it was just like the brightness had been increased some. The problem was that once I hit a certain number of white bulbs, the flourecsence would drop off and the corals would look pretty dull. After adding Two Giesemann Super Actinics, I was able to keep the fluorescing no matter what. A large part of what we see as the corals color is due to fluorescent pigments, so I'm not just talking about the neon green here. If you take a brightly colored frag outside and look at in the sun, it looks nothing like it does under the lights from the tank.

I started with the fiji purple, two actinics, The Aquablue Azure, A new New Gen and the new actinic blue from Gman. I had blue bulbs in the remaining positions like so:
Blue-Aquablue Azure-Actinic-FP-Actinic-Actinic Blue-New Gen-Blue. Almost right away I felt that the tank looked dim in the front with the first bulb being a blue one. I switched that out for a New Gen and that was my initial lineup. I've played around with the final bulb a bit, starting out as a blue Plus, which looked good, nice and bright. I tried a Superblue in that position and because the superblue has a bit less green, it looked dimmer and the red from the fiji purple became a bit more pronounced, I didn't like it as much.

Last night I alternated a New Gen and a Aquablue Special there and while they were both very close, the Aquablue special won out as my favorite(for now). The tank is bright, the colors all are very vibrant in a way that I used to only get with a lot more blue bulbs, fluorescence is there nice and strong, and I know that with this combo the PAR is crazy high.

[mhucasey]

For something different...Our pair of stubby snowflake clowns in their gigantic Purple long tentacle anemone, buried deep in the back of the reef:

[biggles]

I love seeing clowns in anemones, never had that in any tank but i've always wanted to. Your clowns are little stunners

[mhucasey]

Originally Posted by biggles

I love seeing clowns in anemones, never had that in any tank but i've always wanted to. Your clowns are little stunners

Thanks,
On day one of the tank we of course had to get a percula clown, though his name is "Carl" not Nemo:angry fire:
Then I came across these beauties, Ive never seen any like them since, "Stubby Snowflake" clowns. They are very cool and I'm glad we have them but getting clown was another part of the "its so exciting to have a tank and lets get everything stage. Luckily their anemone found a great spot in the back of the reef under a lot of other stuff, because it is about a foot across or more and if it wasn't there It would tank up a huge chunk of real estate. When I upgrade the tank the Nem might get its own island

[mhucasey]

So withe the change in seasons the challenge is once again keeping the temperature up, and when its cold I have close to 1000 watts of heaters working quite a bit. Considering that our local electric company(SDGE) is one of the most expensive in the country our electric bill has taken it in the shorts(They also significantly raised rates recently too). We have had our bills jump from 200-300 bucks to 300-450 bucks a month. We are going to install solar in the spring to get this down, but in the meantime I'm contemplating changes to keep the heat in the system.

There is a big open space on the other side of the room from where the tank is now, I was thinking that I may build or buy a cabinet large enough to house the equipment and re-route the plumbing to keep all the water inside the house. If I do it right this "Filtration Pod" can also be used for a larger tank when we upgrade. I will lose the settling tank and some of the sump volume but I need to do something about the electrical use!

[Electrobes]

Maybe insulate piping?

[mhucasey]

Everything is insulated already, including the sump and skimmer, unfortunately

[reefmutt]

+1 add a ton of insulation on that pipe..
But instead of moving the system, might it be easier to build an enclosure around your system in the garage? Not sure if this is feasible..

[reefmutt]

Maybe line all of the sumps in some insulation?

[reefmutt]

Oops.. Missed that last post. Didn't refresh..
Enclosure?

[mhucasey]

The insulated pipes outside still lose a lot of heat, in the summer they hear up the water too. Plus, with the mega long run of piping the return pump has to work hard to get water back to the tank, I calculated a head of 12 feet. Locating the sump in the same room would allow me to use a smaller return pump with less wattage too.

One other option was building a diy natural gas powered heater...the folks who have done that are able to heat similar tanks for next to nothing.

[markalot]

I would box the pipes in rather than solely rely on insulation wrapping the pipes. Air is a great insulator. Easier said than done, of course.

[mhucasey]

I think its a lesson for anyone trying to route pipes through cold or hot spaces like outside the house, underground, or to the basement - you can't have too much insulation.

I think the idea of a "filter pod" has some merit though if done right. The idea would be that the cabinet contains the electrical, pumps, sump, reactor, and skimmer, and is built with sliders on it so it could be moved in the future. Out the side and back will be two pipe stubs with union, one for the return pump supply and the other one for the overflow from the tank. Maybe one more pipe outlet that would be a low point drain.

With that the whole pod could be drained once or twice a year, disconnected, and a jumper could be attached to link the two pipe stubs. The sump could be filled with water, add citric acid or vinegar, and turn on the return to flush the solution through the sump and clean it all out. Rinse the acid after recirculating, connect it back up to the tank, add some fresh salt water and start it back up. Ideally the pod would only have those pipes and one or two power cords. Any ideas on ways to improve it further?