Teenyreef's IM40 Not-So-Teeny Tank - August FTS

[teenyreef]

10 hours ago, Weetabix7 said:

 

Oh my goodness, I LOVE these!!!!

Would love to get some of the blue Kenya from you sometime down the road....

Thanks! I'll be happy to share when it gets just a little bigger, I'm sure there will be plenty of frags once I have to trim it back. But check with Slowtwitch, he may have some frags already.

[teenyreef]

11 hours ago, sktr021 said:

Hi Teeny! 

I spent the last day browsing your build, and wanted to say you've got a killer tank going! It's something to strive for, for sure. I just set up an IM40 and am about to start transferring my IM20 over later this week. So, I wanted to ask you if you had to do it over, is there anything you would change? Anything you bought that you wouldn't again, or vice versa? Anything you'd advise a new IM40 owner to look out for or anything? 

 

 

 

 

Thank you! That's a great question...if I could change one thing, it would be to get a hybrid T5/LED light. The Nanobox wide quad is awesome, but adding T5's for broader and more even coverage would be even more awesome. I just cant do T5's very easily though because the tank's wedged into a corner under a shelf.

 

I had to replace the stock pump, but that's just because it started making a lot of noise. It had plenty of power already.

 

The Tunze Nano skimmer is less that ideal because without some filtration before the water hits it in the first chamber, it tends to clog up underneath. So every couple months I have to pull it out completely, take it apart, and clean it out. I may still investigate some other skimmer option that would fit into the second chamber instead.

 

You really need to clean out the dead chambers on either side of the pump chamber regularly, it tends to build up some nasty detritus.

 

Finally, as Kimberbee pointed out when she had one, it's a really tall tank, and reaching down into it gets a little old. The 25g lagoon has the same dimensions but isn't as tall. But you give up 15 gallons of capacity for fish and corals

[teenyreef]

My poor RBTA has been slowly shrinking, and I decided to try daily feedings starting last week to try and help him out. Of course I went ahead and fed everything else while I was at it, so nitrates went up from 3 or 4 to about 8 as a result.

 

Apparently the clowns never watched Finding Nemo, because not only do they not feed the anomone, they actively steal any food I give it. And they're not very gentle about it. I think that because it's not doing well and it's getting small, it's dead to them 

 

So for the last two days, I've target fed the anemone, and then covered it with a shot glass to protect it. So far it seems to be working pretty well. Now I just need to get the nitrates back down!

 

 

I've also tried feeding pellets every once in a while instead of frozen. As you can see in this detail, the RBTA isn't really doing very well at slurping up food. This picture was from last night, and only the food that was almost directly on the mouth got eaten. But tonight, it was able to close up enough to get some food into the mouth, so I think it is on the mend now.

 

 

[sktr021]

1 hour ago, teenyreef said:

Thank you! That's a great question...if I could change one thing, it would be to get a hybrid T5/LED light. The Nanobox wide quad is awesome, but adding T5's for broader and more even coverage would be even more awesome. I just cant do T5's very easily though because the tank's wedged into a corner under a shelf.

 

I had to replace the stock pump, but that's just because it started making a lot of noise. It had plenty of power already.

 

The Tunze Nano skimmer is less that ideal because without some filtration before the water hits it in the first chamber, it tends to clog up underneath. So every couple months I have to pull it out completely, take it apart, and clean it out. I may still investigate some other skimmer option that would fit into the second chamber instead.

 

You really need to clean out the dead chambers on either side of the pump chamber regularly, it tends to build up some nasty detritus.

 

Finally, as Kimberbee pointed out when she had one, it's a really tall tank, and reaching down into it gets a little old. The 25g lagoon has the same dimensions but isn't as tall. But you give up 15 gallons of capacity for fish and corals

Thanks for such a detailed response. Seems those bottom chambers are a bit of a wasted space. I may put a small pump down there to circulate.

 

I got an incredible deal on the 40 w/stand, so it wasn't my first choice but an impulse upgrade. Guess I can live with sticking my arms in there.

 

You and your build thread have a been a great help in my planning.

 

Thanks bud

 

 

 

 

 

[ninjamyst]

so sorry to read about the BTA =(.  mine likes high flow and and high light.  i try to feed it at least once a week.  hope it recovers soon!

[teenyreef]

1 hour ago, ninjamyst said:

so sorry to read about the BTA =(.  mine likes high flow and and high light.  i try to feed it at least once a week.  hope it recovers soon!

Thanks, Ninja! It seemed happy in the spot it settled in, even though it only bubbled on one fine, memorable day. But I think it may have been too small to host a clown yet.

 

I was feeding once or twice a week, but I think somewhere along the line the clowns started stealing the food, and I didn't realize how bad it was until now.

1 hour ago, sktr021 said:

Thanks for such a detailed response. Seems those bottom chambers are a bit of a wasted space. I may put a small pump down there to circulate.

 

I got an incredible deal on the 40 w/stand, so it wasn't my first choice but an impulse upgrade. Guess I can live with sticking my arms in there.

 

You and your build thread have a been a great help in my planning.

 

Thanks bud

 

 

 

 

 

Good luck! Have you started a build thread yet? Let me know and I'll follow along.

 

The dead spaces are just a consequence of having an AIO tank. Without them, the volume of water in the pump chamber is too small, and every time you stick your hand in the water it would make the pump chamber overflow.

[tinyforest]

The amount of color in this tank is simply amazing.

[thilankasp]

Sorry to hear about your BTA.. Hope it'll bounce back.. 

[sktr021]

12 hours ago, teenyreef said:

 

Good luck! Have you started a build thread yet? Let me know and I'll follow along.

 

The dead spaces are just a consequence of having an AIO tank. Without them, the volume of water in the pump chamber is too small, and every time you stick your hand in the water it would make the pump chamber overflow.

I'm a bit lost on how to scape this thing. It's taller than any other tank I've had, plus I have a couple of weird rocks. But, I've been looking at yours and others for inspiration and think I have few ideas. I'll start up a build thread this week!

 

Right now I have the tank just full of sand, water, and a few live rock pieces from my old tank. It's been up since Saturday and my parameters have stayed identical to the IM20. I wasn't sure if I would experience a cycle by just moving all the pieces over immediately, only replacing the sand. So for now I have both set up, and am slowly bringing the rest over.

 

 

[teenyreef]

On 3/1/2017 at 6:03 AM, tinyforest said:

The amount of color in this tank is simply amazing.

Thanks! I still have some brown ones but at least most of them are keeping their color. Nice name, btw

[teenyreef]

On 3/1/2017 at 7:00 AM, thilankasp said:

Sorry to hear about your BTA.. Hope it'll bounce back.. 

Thanks! Your tank is looking beautiful. Please post a new FTS 

On 3/1/2017 at 1:42 PM, sktr021 said:

I'm a bit lost on how to scape this thing. It's taller than any other tank I've had, plus I have a couple of weird rocks. But, I've been looking at yours and others for inspiration and think I have few ideas. I'll start up a build thread this week!

 

Right now I have the tank just full of sand, water, and a few live rock pieces from my old tank. It's been up since Saturday and my parameters have stayed identical to the IM20. I wasn't sure if I would experience a cycle by just moving all the pieces over immediately, only replacing the sand. So for now I have both set up, and am slowly bringing the rest over.

 

 

Honestly, in the long run, as long as you have plenty of unshaded spots at different heights to glue corals to, the scape isn't as important as it seems when it's nothing but rocks. Once the corals take over it looks pretty and you can't see the rocks anyway

 

I've been able to move rocks and sand and water over without the tank missing a beat. But if you replaced all your sand, it's good to go slow and make sure you don't a mini cycle.

[teenyreef]

I installed the Kamoer X4 doser today. It's pretty new on the market and doesn't have a lot of reviews, but the ones I saw were mostly positive. Kamoer is kind of like Jebao, made in China, some aspects are very technically sound, others are downright primitive. And don't expect much from the instructions  

 

The Kamoer X4 is typical of this uneven quality. The box is really nice, solidly built and with nice artwork:

 

Then you open it up and everything's just kind of thrown in there loose, without much wrapping or padding beyond the internal styrofoam.

 

However, it all went together fine and everything works.

 

There are no instructions, other than a single sheet of paper telling you to download the app on either iPhone or Android. Turns out when you install the app, it has instructions built in. So instead of reading a cheap sheet of paper instructions in poorly written english, you get to view the same thing on a five inch screen.

 

Hooking up to wifi was bad. Turns out the software mostly works fine, but the instructions are incorrect/missing stuff/just plain confusing. For example, to do a direct wifi connection, you have to exit to "wifi reset" menu on the front panel, otherwise it just times out. And the "automatic connection" never did work for me.

 

Fortunately, buried at the end of the "PC Instructions", they tell you how to access the doser's access point from a browser on a computer joined to the doser's wifi network. From there, it was easy to use the menus to join the doser to my home network, and it was clear sailing after that.

 

The actual doser software isn't bad at all, and it can be run on iPhone, Android, or Windows. You can pretty much do everything you'd expect to be able to do. It will figure out the dosing schedule for you based on how much you want per day, you can set start and stop times for the daily dosing window, you can set offsets between the channels to avoid dosing two different chemicals too closely to each other, or you can do it all completely manually. It only took me a few minutes to figure it out.

 

Caveat: I'm a computer/network engineer, so all this stuff was pretty easy for me. But if you've set up an Apex, you'll have no problem figuring it out. On the other hand, if setting up an Apex is not your cup of tea, I'd recommend against this doser, as it's kind of DIY flavored.

 

It has a few other cool features - there's a temperature probe included, and there are also plugs that can be used for float valves in each dosing reservoir so that it alerts you when it gets low. Or you can program the size of your dosing reservoirs, and it will calculate when it's getting low based on the consumption rate. Unfortunately, the kit doesn't include the float valves and wiring, which was disappointing because one of the reviewers posted a picture of his kit which included them. They don't show the float valves in the picture of the kit on the website, so my guess is they decided not to include them any more.

 

Everything is programmed and hooked up now, and I've verified that the pumps won't be spewing out ten times the programmed amount. However, I didn't bother to calibrate the pumps yet, as I didn't want to drain the existing tubes. I'll be adjusting the dosing amount based on my measurements, not some calculated amount, so it doesn't really matter as long as they aren't too different from channel to channel. I'll do it eventually but I'm just too lazy for now 

[J-Ranko]

Nice! The external packaging looks premium. Wouldn't have thought it was one of those Chinese imports with  "English" product manuals you can barely understand.  What are you dosing with it?   

[teenyreef]

41 minutes ago, J-Ranko said:

Nice! The external packaging looks premium. Wouldn't have thought it was one of those Chinese imports with  "English" product manuals you can barely understand.  What are you dosing with it?   

Yeah, it's funny, it's 90% everything it should be, and the other 10% would be so easy to fix. 

 

I'm dosing two part (Seachem Reef Fusion) and Acropower. And until tonight, I was dosing NoPox, but as an experiment I'm switching over to B-ionic Transition Elements+, which has both trace elements and carbon dosing.

[teenyreef]

The new doser is doing well, based on my alk measurements tonight, it's dosing exactly what I told it to. Which is a nice change from the Jebao doser

 

Some of my zoas are struggling a bit. There are a lot of hair worms that seem to be irritating them, so that may be my next project to see if I can figure out what's bothering them. The palys are fine, only the zoas are bothered. They seem to close up when I feed the tank the the hair worms come out, and I have read reports that hair worms can irritate zoas, so...

 

Most of the sps are doing well, although I think the reds seem to be turning into brown/purple, and the blues are not as vivid as they were. Nutrients were high last week but have been coming down this week, with Nitrates going from 8 to 4. I've also increased the lighting a bit. Hopefully colors will improve over the next week as a result.

 

In the meantime, I took a set of pictures of one frag rack - all the corals on this rack are doing well other than the coloration changes I mentioned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[markalot]

Loved all the pics!  So what is your daily feeding routine ... I know you've said this a million times ...

 

I had to start feeding coral food to my 40 every other day to get things back to healthy.  Without a way to surface skim this means I am manually skimming every few days as well since some of this food never ever sinks.  

[teenyreef]

On 3/6/2017 at 9:12 AM, markalot said:

Loved all the pics!  So what is your daily feeding routine ... I know you've said this a million times ...

 

I had to start feeding coral food to my 40 every other day to get things back to healthy.  Without a way to surface skim this means I am manually skimming every few days as well since some of this food never ever sinks.  

I have to confess I'm not very consistent in my daily routine. But I have good goals! Generally, I alternate between just pellets for a day or two, and then feed frozen for a couple days. About every third or fourth day, I mix up a cocktail of frozen PE Calanus shrimp with Reef Roids, Zoapower, Gonipower, and some liquid phyto. I broadcast some, then turn off the pumps and spritz it all over anything with small polyps. Then I target feed some frozen mysis, or spirulina brine shrimp.

 

I also dose a little bit of Acropower a couple times a day, and at night I alternate between Aquavitro Fuel and Red Sea Energy A/B, again trying to take a nigh or two off every week so that tank can catch up on itself.

 

With the RBTA struggling, though, I've been target feeding frozen almost every night, and I know I'm feeding too much frozen when I do. That's why the nitrates have gone up, and I think that's led to some loss of color. Generally, what I'm seeing is red colors going brown/purple, and blue colors going more green. 

 

I may also try dosing some potassium if things don't improve after the nitrates go back down.

[Weetabix7]

I haven't run across potassium dosing before. 

What does this accomplish?

[teenyreef]

17 hours ago, Weetabix7 said:

I haven't run across potassium dosing before. 

What does this accomplish?

It's supposed to help with red colors. Several successful reefers here on NR dose potassium. I have the Red Sea Colors kit, which includes potassium, but I rarely dose anything from the kit because the testing is a little inconvenient. 

[J-Ranko]

On 3/7/2017 at 11:41 PM, teenyreef said:

I have to confess I'm not very consistent in my daily routine. But I have good goals! Generally, I alternate between just pellets for a day or two, and then feed frozen for a couple days. About every third or fourth day, I mix up a cocktail of frozen PE Calanus shrimp with Reef Roids, Zoapower, Gonipower, and some liquid phyto. I broadcast some, then turn off the pumps and spritz it all over anything with small polyps. Then I target feed some frozen mysis, or spirulina brine shrimp.

 

I also dose a little bit of Acropower a couple times a day, and at night I alternate between Aquavitro Fuel and Red Sea Energy A/B, again trying to take a nigh or two off every week so that tank can catch up on itself.

 

With the RBTA struggling, though, I've been target feeding frozen almost every night, and I know I'm feeding too much frozen when I do. That's why the nitrates have gone up, and I think that's led to some loss of color. Generally, what I'm seeing is red colors going brown/purple, and blue colors going more green. 

 

I may also try dosing some potassium if things don't improve after the nitrates go back down.

 

That's quite a variety of food!  I thought my three different frozen stuff plus coral frenzy was a lot. 

[teenyreef]

17 hours ago, J-Ranko said:

 

That's quite a variety of food!  I thought my three different frozen stuff plus coral frenzy was a lot. 

Admittedly, it has more to do with using up various foods I've bought over the years than anything to do with a carefully planned diet 

[teenyreef]

BRS has had a couple of "what's the best..." videos that I really liked recently.

 

This one, on the merits of the Hanna checkers for phosphorus/phosphate, does a really nice job of explaining why the higher resolution of the phosphorus checker is important, and shows the checker is surprisingly accurate. I own the low range phosphorus checker, and everything they reported matches my own experience.

 

 

Today, they released this one on PAR meters. I have the Apogee SQ-420, which uses the same sensor as the SQ-210 that they tested. It was very interesting to hear about the inaccuracies they uncovered in the sensors that should have been the most accurate, and very interesting the the cheapest sensor, the Seneye, was the most accurate for the least cost, as long as you aren't measuring at a significant angle from the center of the light source.

 

I was also interested to find that you should not angle the Apogee senser towards the light when placing it in parts of the aquarium that aren't directly under the light.

 

 

[teenyreef]

I pulled the remnants of the rbta out tonight. It just kept getting smaller and smaller and finally melted down. I'm sad that I couldn't save it...but is it bad that I'm already eyeing the spot where it was and thinking about all the other corals that can go there? 

[Polarcollision]

On 1/1/2017 at 6:34 PM, teenyreef said:

 

Oregon Tort. This is a very small frag but looks healthy. PE is nice and full today.

 

Oregon Tort by TeenyReef, on Flickr

 

Oregon Tort by TeenyReef, on Flickr

 

Tyree Bali Tricolor, what a great freebie

OT... doh! Should have known. it's my favorite coral. Re: nub. Yours wants more intense light to stay royal blue and to grow. Mine is 6-8" from the Hydras, others place it directly under MH. The teal color shows on mine just before lights out when only royal blue leds are on, but you really have to look for it.

 

Edit: just found the par #s straight from one of the original 3 propogators' mouth: 700 umol/m2

[Weetabix7]

6 hours ago, teenyreef said:

I pulled the remnants of the rbta out tonight. It just kept getting smaller and smaller and finally melted down. I'm sad that I couldn't save it...but is it bad that I'm already eyeing the spot where it was and thinking about all the other corals that can go there? 

 

I think it's moving forward in a healthy way. 

Sorry you lost it, glad you will replace it with something cool for our vicarious viewing pleasure. 

 

Quick question tho, what do you attribute it's loss to?

I thought RBTA's were reasonably hardy.