jcolletteiii's 'Hanging' 16g Biocube Journal: New frags on the way!

[jcolletteiii]

1-16-17: Nanobox Large Retrofit Installation in a Coralife 16 gallon Biocube (PT 2) - Installing new mounting points in the stock Biocube hood

 

I've been wanting to finish this up, but haven't had time with the semester and classes starting up again. The work that remains is just: 1) tidying up the wiring, and 2) installing new mounting points for the main controller board and Bluefish Mini.

 

As noted in part 1 of the installation (above), the lack of mounting points meant that the controller card and the Bluefish Mini were both just sitting on the top of the splash guard - not an ideal situation. I did not want to have any additional screw holes coming through the top of the canopy, so I ordered some round 5/8" ABS black rod stock from Amazon last week. I would have preferred something a bit thinner, like 3/8", but they didn't have any for cheap (found some, but it was more - quite a bit more in fact). So I ended up going with the 5/8". To make your own mounting points in any Biocube, Nanocube, or any other AIO with a black ABS hood, all you need is some ABS stock, some ABS cement, and a drill.

 

 

It's quite tight in there, and you really have to retain the stock board if you don't wand a big square hole in the top of the hood. So the stock board becomes a clock and a power supply for the stock fan, which I will be running to supply extra cooling to the new light. Here is the space available.

 

 

I decided to install new mounting points under only two of the diagonal corners of the main controller card, and just one for the Bluefish Mini. The hood has a slant to it over on the sides, so I measured the approximate length I needed and cut the ABS stock at an angle - so that when it was dry fit, I would have an approximately flat mounting point. I sanded the ABS smooth on both sides with 100 grit sand paper, applied a small blob of ABS cement, pressed it into place, gave it a quarter twist, and let it set up. I did not use ABS cement on both surfaces, and I used only enough to have a thin coating on the mounting piece as the stock hood is quite thin and I didn't want to worry about deforming the outer surface of the hood. Here are the new mounting points installed.

 

 

And here is the finished installation with all of the standoffs installed, and the wiring tidied up just before putting the splash guard back in place. I would have preferred to put in new mounting points for the heat sink instead of drilling through the canopy for a more stock look, but with the black plastic screw head covers on there, you wouldn't know it wasn't stock if you had never seen a Biocube before.

 

[jcolletteiii]

I so love your rockscape

 

 

Thanks! Now I just can't wait to see it covered in corals!

[jcolletteiii]

The Elos phosphate test kit arrived this afternoon. The kit comes with a flat-bottomed glass test tube, a 5ml syringe, a rather loose fitting plastic stopper for the tube, two reactants, a color-printed color comparison chart, and printed direction sheet. The results I got (3x - I'm CDO as my wife says - have to arrange the letters in alphabetic order) indicate somewhere between 0.0-0.05 ppm.

 

 

In any case, phosphate looks pretty good. Noticed that in some places, the cyano strands appear to be turning white. Looks like the Phosban is doing its thing!

[jcolletteiii]

Been glued to fleaPay for World Wide Corals' auctions this week - there were a couple of pieces that I saw last week that I have really been looking at more and more, so I thought I'd pick a few of these up while I was able - and not at bad prices too - their corals auctions usually end up going for considerably less than their website prices.

 

I scored this birdsnest -

 

...this favites...

 

... and two really cool cyphastreas... Goldmember (I'm excited about that one - big Austin powers fan!)

 

and this one...

 

I'm keeping my eyes out for a few other things as well - cherry corals has a favia they call 'laser lime' - it's astounding. And that 'Bizarro' Cyphastrea. And of course - a pectinia. But, I think I'm mostly done with this haul.

 

The tank is improving a lot. Replaced the phosban on Sunday, and the cyano is in rapid decline. It's interesting how it is declining though - I've never noticed this before. There are round, perfectly white patches that grow slightly each day. They cyano has faded and is either turning back to clean white rock, or where it was thicker - to brown. Water continues to test at 0-0.05 for phosphates, but it has to be slowly leaching out of the rock, so I'll be running a little phosban in my center chamber for a while. Had a bit of bryopsis that came in on the frags that I'm picking out as I find it. The sunny D's have already sprouted a baby, and the digitata has started to color back up - it looked like an orange digitata when i got it. The skin is starting to blue up, and I'm starting to see a bit of green fluorescence. The darn mushroom still is not firmly adhered to its rock - still sitting on a piece of rock in a small cup out of the flow. Take it out of the container and it flaps in the current like a black lab's lips when it sticks its head out the car window. No bueno!

 

I'm gradually siphoning out the sand - it's just a bit too fine. Going to order something a bit larger this week - 1-2mm in diameter maybe.

 

Will post some new pics soon - I promise. The lights are usually out when I finally sit down for the day. Can't wait for the new frags to come - hoping I can get them this Thursday!

[Volnation]

Did you put the plastic cover on or are you running it open?

[jcolletteiii]

Did you put the plastic cover on or are you running it open?

 

The splash guard is back on. Saltwater, aluminum, copper and lead probably isn't a great combo! I also run the stock controller, which becomes a clock - but it also runs the stock fan to help keep the heat sink nice and cool.

[jcolletteiii]

New sand went in today! I went with something I could find locally - found a 15lb bag of dry Caribsea reef grade aragonite. Good looking stuff, but had a few larger chunkies that I didn't like. So I went to in to the lab and ran it through a #12 sediment processing sieve - the grid is 1.7mm - that resulted in loss of about 1lb of larger grains and organics. The rest of the sand is a bit more uniform in terms of grain size. I washed it repeatedly to get the dust out as much as I could - took about 10 rinse cycles in the sink until the water was mostly clear. Then I sucked out the old sand with a siphon and added some of the grungy water to the new sand to help seed it with bacteria and let it sit for about an hour in a warm area. I took all of the corals out, put them in a bucket, then added in the new sand. It's still a bit foggy - too foggy to take a photo of yet - but I have floss in the back to help take out the cloudiness. This is what the sand looked like in comparison - small tub is the old stuff.

 

 

I'll post some photos of the new frags and a new fts when it clears later tonight or tomorrow. I am super happy with how it looks!

[jcolletteiii]

A couple of quickie shots - trying to get used to Adobe Camera Raw for the aquarium lighting with LED is not easy, but these look pretty reasonable in terms of color rendition.

 

The digitata is continuing to grow and to color up - the green is just visible a bit on the two tips in this picture (it's much more visible in-person).

 

And the Sunny D's have sprouted a new polyp. It hasn't opened yet, but it's really close!

 

And a FTS as of 1-29-17. You can see I had an accident with the birdsnest... When I snipped it off it's plug, I dropped it . I had forgotten how fragile birdsnests are. It's all superglued back together, has great polyp extension and will get its first target feeding tonight. Hopefully it'll grow over those spots quickly! If I recall correctly (the last time I kept birdsnest was in '09 or 10), they grow fairly fast when they're happy - now I just have to stop breaking the damn thing.

 

As you can see, the cyanobacteria has really declined - it's more or less given up. In it's place, I have a bit of Bryopsis in a few places. I need to find a couple of syringes so I can go after it. I also think the new sand looks particularly good!