Soulpatch's 150 SC build

[soulpatch]

Originally Posted by ReefWreak

Soulpatch, you have an online storefront yet?



I'm feeling the need to add a few more colorful acros so I'm putting out feelers to different reefing friends.

No not yet. Not ready to do so as I stabilize my stuff and setup.

That said let's talk before reefapalooza and I'll bring you and homer a few things.

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[homer1475]

I'm still here.



Just bought my tickets for both days! So excited to go, and to finally meet reefwreak!

[soulpatch]

So as is the case with my tank it seems I am swapping some equipment.

Sold the GHL doser and KH director. I liked it and found it reliable BUT it did not give me trend lines since I did not have the Profilux. Seems trivial I am sure but for me it was critical to see trends over time as I adjusted various items. Looking now to upgrade my Apex headunit and likely delve into the Trident.

My new fish have come along great but run into a slight issue with the grow out tank. My copperband is amazing in the display with the aiptasia I have to the point I don't see them. They were in my sump and overflow which the copperband cannot get to and as such now in my grow out tank to a degree. Thinking of trying the berghia route again in the growout tank and see how they can do to keep that area under control. Added benefit is that there are no predators for them in that tank with the melanus and such in the display.

I missed the last frag swap as I was in Europe for business so as such have a large batch to be going to my LFS shortly for resale. A lot of decent looking cuts that have healed and allowed me to dial in my radion and get corals to not only heal but color up as my cuts are normally the outer bottom edges and as such dull to a degree.

I need to figure out my ATO for my upcoming vacation though. With the grow out tank being open top I am exhausting my ATO in a manner of a few days. I churn through a good 2+ gallons a day at this point. I am thinking a large 30 gallon tote but worry slightly about siphon and flooding the tank. I do however have the spectrapure ATO unit I was using for my calrx feed I can utilize which should mitigate that risk but still something I need to test. Else I will utilize my tried and true pump from tote into omy ATO res so as worst I only overfill that one and don't drift my salinity.

[soulpatch]

Milli game is on point

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[ReefWreak]

That does look pretty spectacular!

I always wonder how people handle having pests in their system, not just display, longer term, when they take care of it with a local solution. I guess you'll just have to keep them at bay in both tanks. It would be neat to see if you can get berghia to survive, and maybe even spawn/thrive in the frag tank without predators.

For an ATO, I went with a 15g acrylic container from online, and I've been extremely happy. My troubles are more from user error while messing with the pump and programming, than with the container or even the stock ATO setup. I'm using the neptune ATK/pmup/FMM. So far so good, knock on wood.

[soulpatch]

Reef. When do you wanna hit up reefapalooza? I'm thinking maybe Sunday to try for deals but game for sat as well. Homer will be there both days

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[ReefWreak]

See everyone there on SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY

[Njdevils1220]

I have the SC 120 and wish I did the 150.

[soulpatch]

Originally Posted by Njdevils1220

I have the SC 120 and wish I did the 150.

Wishing I did a 300+ some days. Others however I wish I never set up. Haha. Story of our lives in this hobby.


So after RAP I discovered my t5 rails were rusting and leaching into my water when splashed. I think this caused some issues in my tank and was coupled with a CO2 tank that ran out for my calrx.

So needless to say I've been dealing with some water quality issues and as such lost some coral. I need to do a Triton test soon to ensure indent have something else I'm not seeing going on.



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[Njdevils1220]

I had a similar issue from a frag rack magnet. Do a ICP test, pending your results will tell you how to fix it. The hardest part is the wait time to get the results. You can use GFO to remove certain things if you want to try and save some stuff in the mean time.

[soulpatch]

Running cuprisorb now as a precaution.

Just got back from week in turks and caicos and things are mainly still alive so all good there. I've lost a few things before leaving so hopefully issues are being handled to a degree

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[mav3rick478]

That's sucks, hope everything stabilizes and returns to normal. How heavy is the fixture, I wonder if you could have some rails 3d printed to not have any issues in the future?

You could try spray coating another set of rails but eventually the same thing would happen because as you pull them out the coating gets rubbed away from the friction.

You could try ceramic coating, like what they use for cars but I don't know if it's marine safe.

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[soulpatch]

I sprayed this set of rails to last longer. Needed immediate fix.

Next will be aluminum 80/20 rails

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[soulpatch]

So another thing happened right before I went away on vacation. I was woken at 1 am to a fire alarm.

I had water splash onto my gyre controller I had knocked free from the velcro while cleaning. I had cleaned the water lines and tank as well as the pump BUT failed to ensure drain line was not getting clogged from extra debris I stirred up in frag tank. To be short water level rose to my emergency drains and the gyre pushed water out front of tank dripping onto controller.

Thankfully it was caught early and controller still works. I assume there is internal safety to a degree and the short likely happened where the plug connects causing brief puff of smoke that my overly sensitive detector picked up.

Backup jabeo was used for vacation and now that I am home and gyre fully dried it is up and running again.

Always something though

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[soulpatch]

so been away for a while but it was an eventful last few months. In Mid August I had a tank crash. My tank was already a bit on the rails with some of the other mishaps. I was in summer mode and as such was a bit lazy in countering items which I shouldn't have been after spending a few grand in coral over the summer.

I had my calrx CO2 go out on me and I did not notice so my PH and Alk levels had swung in a bad direction almost over the course of a few days. I noticed a bit of bleaching and tested to see my alk wasnt too bad and added some kalk to my ATO to stabilize till I had more time to mess with the calrx. I did not know, however, that the calrx was not running.

This caused a massive PH swing and alk increase as I evap quite a bit of water and honestly put too much kalk in for what was needed. I had gone to an amusement park for the day after dosing and came back roughly 6 hours later. I opened the door and could smell the tank so knew I was walking into serious issues.

My bluethroat trigger was dead and my other fish were struggling. My corals were all sliming like crazy and everything was closed up. I did a massive water change but with fresh IO the alk is 10 and I did not have buffer so while this saved my fish and some LPS this nuked some of my sensitive SPS.

In the end I lost roughly 90% of my SPS coral. For LPS I lost some acans and my one aussie torch which was a solid 25 heads is now down to 5. All fish save for my trigger survived.

In the months since I have been working to get stable and am now so. My phosphates are still super high as old coral skeletons and such I cannot get to decay a bit. I am running phosgard and such intermittently to drop it some but not to shock the tank. I have about another 1-2K in coral purchases I have slowly added again to the tank for growout with some local guys giving me deals and such as well.

All in all this has been a VERY expensive past few months. In a way kicking myself for not snagging a mindstream when I could have so as to have testing ongoing. I will certainly be looking to purchase one when available again as I cant bring myself to trust the trident with all the issues I read about with the regents and calibration.

[cincyjim]

Hey Soulpatch! I'm so very sorry to hear about your tank and animals. I know you must have been devastated. Sounds like things are getting back in order for you and heading in the right direction. Glad to see you not toss in the towel! Jim

[soulpatch]

Originally Posted by cincyjim

Hey Soulpatch! I'm so very sorry to hear about your tank and animals. I know you must have been devastated. Sounds like things are getting back in order for you and heading in the right direction. Glad to see you not toss in the towel! Jim

The thought did cross my mind of selling off. The thousands I had just spent and the colonies I had to throw out was devastating. If it wasnt for some of the surging corals and fish that I liked I might have gone that route. I also know this happens to most which made it easier and unlike many I knew what happened that crashed things and it was my fault.

Now if only I could get automatic testing again I'd be in a better position

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[cincyjim]

So true that you get to a point of should I or shouldn't I. For me, it's the challenge of it all and watching the corals grow. I'm glad to see you sticking around as I've always enjoyed your posts and feedback!

[mav3rick478]

Damn, that sucks. Glad you're toughing it out and bringing it back up. You made me look at the Mindstream and it's interesting and a serious consideration if I can ever get my 75 started. Which I really need to before the end of the year. I'm guessing in the long run its cheaper than testing yourself because you also have to consider your time.

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[soulpatch]

I'm lazy when it comes to testing and know I'm bad at it. If I can buy something to do it for me then I am all about it. I wanted the trident but so many issues and cant find the darn thing. Plus I'd need to upgrade my apex to run it and I do NOT plan to dose based on values so connection to my controller doesnt matter to me.

Mindstream has the worry that they are slow to meet demand and stopped taking orders while they catch up. That said they seem to be most complete and 30 a month for calibrated disks that I just swap in and out seems worth it to me. No calibration solutions or drifting PH probes...

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[mav3rick478]

Did you get an email from Mindstream this morning, they just closed their doors because of lack of funding. It's a shame, I was looking forward to possibly getting one. It says they will try to find buyers for products or parents but we'll have to wait and see, bummer.

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[cklayko]

Yeah and stole everyone's money that pre-ordered....

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[mav3rick478]

Originally Posted by cklayko

Yeah and stole everyone's money that pre-ordered....

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I thought people who were waiting for products were able to get refunds? Yes sucks for the people who got products and now don't have a supplier for replacement disks but there is hope if another company buying everything and hopefully reissuing the product without overpricing it.

Growing pains are hard for start ups, you always hope for the best but usually end up with the worst scenarios. Let's hope this product can get resurrected with major backing.

BTW, Merry Christmas to everyone if this thread goes silent next week for obvious reasons.

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[mav3rick478]

Hey fellas, how are things? How's the tank doing Soul?

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[strat1960s]

Last summer I went through a situation where I wasn't sure if I'd stay in the hobby or not. We moved from San Antonio to a small town a couple hours south of Dallas. The 50g SCA, 210g Aqueon, and all my gear survived the do it ourselves move. But it took me almost two months to get water in the 50g. My plan was/is to use the 50g as my quarantine tank for fish and corals. In San Antonio, the 210g was set up as a peninsula. The stand was built specifically for this. At the new house, there wasn't anywhere to set it up that way that my wife and I could agree to. I knew what I wanted to do, but it took a couple of weeks to plan it all out. I sold the 72x24x29 210g and all the gear for it in January. I placed an order with Planet Aquariums for a 48x48x24 (240g) tank. I really like to 24x24x24 SCA cube and that is what motivated me to go this route. I brought the tank home in late January and got busy setting it up.
I was considering stepping away from the hobby, but once I got to thinking about it, well I think I'll keep these tanks until I am not longer able to keep them.