The "Family 6", an adventure for all of us!

[Weetabix7]

It's like you said, nothing ventured, nothing gained. 

You obviously do your research and really stay on top of testing and maintenance. 

I looked at it, and it's a good price for what you'd be getting. 

The colors might not look quite as bright under the NC led lights, but you'll face that with any corals you buy, and they should still look good.

I think the lighting is likely strong enough for the Monti if you put it at the top of your rockwork and putting it in an area of higher flow would be good as well. 

Make sure with any new corals you get that you dip them in something like CoralRx before adding them to the tank. 

[CharlesFoxtrot]

When would you say I might be alright to start adding corals? I'm planning the fish for Wednesday, barring any unforeseen mayhem. DB has really been looking forward to that, and I'd hate to disappoint for the third time. My SG will be up to an acceptable level by then, with a few more small WC's.

 

I'm also wondering how everyone manages their dipping setup. Most of the articles I've read assume you have a few gallons of extra water in your tank to take out for mixing dips, rinsing corals off, and such. I don't, and I know a lot of you nano and pico reefers don't either. If I acclimate my corals to new SW, use that for dipping, then acclimate them again to the tank water, would that work? Also, what dips do you use? I know of Coral Rx, Lugol's, Bayer, FW, and I don't know what else. Is there a benefit to doing more than one kind? 

 

I know this is all on the Web, but it's hard to separate prudent from paranoid on a lot of these sites and threads. I want to avoid tank pests as much as the next guy, but I'm sure there's a happy medium between doing nothing and doing 4 dips and 12 weeks in the QT. Thanks! 

[Weetabix7]

For timing, maybe the week after you add the fish. 

That would give you time to make sure the biofilter in the rocks is able to keep up with the increased wasteload from the fish and also to adjust. 

That's not a hard & fast rule or anything, just what I'd be likely to do. 

 

On the dipping, you wanna talk about only having a little water work with in your tank??

Dude, I have less than 2g in mine and I have to use tongs to move things in and out of it cause there's no room for my hand!! 

If I can do it, anyone can!!

Anyway, it only took me about a quart of water for the dip I did with the frag I added today. 

I actually buy my water from my LFS and always have 2-4 gallons on hand, so for the quart I removed from the system I just poured in some fresh SW that I had on hand. 

For myself, I keep CoralRx on hand for regular dips & pest killing dips, lugol's iodine on hand for healing dips (including post-fragging), and 35% peroxide on hand for spot eradication of pest algae. 

[CharlesFoxtrot]

I think I can do a quart.  I also keep water mixed and on hand, so it should be no trouble to replace. 

 

More on the weird thing with the chambers and the DT. I think what's going on is that the tank expects me to use the same crappy filter media that it came with. Since I'm not using the giant sponge and bioballs and whatever, it's not drawing the right amount of water through. The fact that I have a new and stronger pump is just another reason why the rates aren't perfect. So when I was just changing the water, I thought, why not pull some filter floss out of the first chamber? Big difference, the return pump was suddenly unable to keep up, and the return chamber was now level with chamber 2! Put some but not all of the floss back, now there was space again! 

 

Does that make sense to anyone? It sort of made sense to me just a moment ago, but now I'm not so sure. 

 

I put the ATO back, adjusted the sensor to be just under the surface in the return chamber, and hopefully it'll behave better now that there's more flow through than before. Maybe. I'll check the SG in the morning and see if it's lowered from being over-topped. And the fun continues.  

[CharlesFoxtrot]

Well, whether that last bit about the ATO makes sense or not, it's still over-topping. Just checked it after letting it run overnight, and the DT is definitely higher than it was last night post water change. I'm going to dip out the extra water, and see if moving the sensor down further does anything positive. 

 

I've considered taking the ATO off completely, but I think the same problems might occur even if topping off manually. For whatever reason, the DT level is changing when it isn't supposed to be, which makes me think that there's a more fundamental problem. I'm going to try to calculate things out to see if it might be possible to top off based on SG rather than water level. If that works well, I might be able to put a brain on the tank to control the ATO pump based on input from a salinity probe. Because I'm planning on using an Apex Jr for going on summer vacations, it's not that far out as a possibility.

 

It all depends on how much of a swing salinity can have without negative effects on livestock. If I were to keep the tank at 1.025, and top off with a measured amount whenever the salinity reached 1.026, would that be a killer? I truly don't know what the tolerances are. I suppose I could divide that same measured amount out to get an amount per day, if I can expect to get the same rate of evap daily. Again, don't know, lack of experience. 

 

I persevere. 

[Weetabix7]

I've actually never dealt with this issue before and never had an AIO tank with the different compartments, which is why I'm not commenting. 

Wish I could help, but I know you'll get it figured out. 

[CharlesFoxtrot]

Thanks, Weetie. It's been kind of a frustrating time, and I really appreciate the vote of confidence. 

 

Further numbers: I think the minimum amount the pump on this ATO is capable of pumping at one time is right about 3 fluid ounces, just for a click-on-immediately-click-off.  This is based on the circumference of my reservoir and the little water marks left behind after each fill. First chemistry, now math class, who knew that this hobby was always the real answer to "when am I ever gonna need this" back in school?  I'm thinking that 3 oz at a time is maybe too much for the tank volume. Why it's raising the DT is still a mystery, though. 

 

A thought: if the ATO was plugged into a timed socket, maybe then it wouldn't overfill the DT, because it would have only certain hours in which it would work? Evap could then happen during the off hours, and the tank would be topped off 2 or 3 times a day.  Still it comes down to what's an acceptable swing in salinity. If everything dies, it won't really matter. 

[xAyanex]

Sorry I can't be of more help with the AIO chambers and such. I didn't really understand it either, I just knew I wanted my back chambers levels to be different from what they manufacturers expected because I didn't use their bioballs, etc. either.

 

I also replaced my stock pump with a stronger one. My DT remains constantly full. I have 3 chambers in the back. Chamber 1 is where the water goes first, and it is always full. Chamber 2 is where the water spills over into filter floss/media, and it is then sucked into chamber 3 by the return pump and pumped into the DT. My chambers 2 and 3 stay even with each other. They are the only thing that go down with water evaporation, and the only thing that raise when I manually top off.

 

Sometimes I'm lazy about topping off, and my specific gravity may vary between 1.025 and 1.026, but very rarely. When it does, it doesn't seem to affect anything in my tank, but I don't really have any difficult corals except 1 piece of SPS, which I just recently acquired.

[xAyanex]

Let me try to think hard and explain it better...So my tank is a BC29, but it really only has like 20-22 gallons in it. My pump is a Rio 6 HF that pumps 350 GPH. So it pumps plenty fast enough to keep the DT full. No matter how full the DT gets, it will reach a certain point and always flow into Chamber 1. Chamber 1 will always be full and overflowing into Chamber 2. and Chambers 2 and 3 volume are simply determined by how much water is left in the system after that. Does that make sense?

 

So like, if I did a water change and took out way too much water, my pump could pump all the water in into the DT/chamber 1 until it was dry and kill itself, at least I think, because after I do a w/c, I turn the pump on and the DT fills up, chamber 1 fills up, and chambers 2 and 3 go down until DT and chamber 1 are completely full.

 

So how are your back chambers set up? I will reread your thread.

[xAyanex]

So yours seems similar to mine but I'm not really sure. You have a 6g JBJ nano cube with a 185 GPH Sicce return pump, and 3 chambers kind of set up similarly? Through your thread it seems Salt Buddha explained the relationships between the chambers and DT nicely on p.4. And it seems you have been struggling with the relationship between the DT and chambers for a while now.

 

I would suggest not using an ATO until you get that squared away, because if your chambers end up lower than you want them and the ATO tops that off, your salinity is going to drop.

 

I feel more confused now after reading all that stuff, and I'm not sure I've been helpful at all. Sorry!

[CharlesFoxtrot]

Alex, thanks for the insight, and for taking the time to read over the thread again.  Here's the short version of what's going on back in there: My chamber 1 has filter media in it, and is always full. The water goes into chamber 2, which has my experimental mini fuge in it, and is also full to the top of the wall between chambers 2 and 3, which is a shorter wall than the one between chambers 1 and 2. Chamber 3 is the return pump, and its water level is lower than chamber 2. How much lower seems to depend on what sort of filter media are being used (more media, lower water level), and maybe on the output of the return pump (which can be adjusted, lower gph seems to correspond to higher water level).

 

The ATO is set up in the return chamber, both the sensor and the inlet tube. The return chamber stays at about the same level, even with the ATO in operation, but the DT gradually rises a little at a time whenever the ATO is topping off. I've done some measuring and experimentation, and the SG will drop by about .001 every 72 hours or so due to the overfill. I have to take a pint of water out of the DT every 72 or so hours, to prevent the DT from overflowing. But the return chamber stays the same amount of full, I can tell because of the placement of the ATO sensor. That's it in a nutshell. Whew.

 

I'd scrap the ATO, but I'm going to need it come summer, so it's going to have to be figured out sooner than that. After some thought and reading, I think my plan will be to put it on a timed outlet, probably through an Apex Jr, and set it to fill once a day only. That will simulate a manual top off, and should stop the DT level from creeping up on me, because the system will have a nice long chance to evap off. I might build in a redundancy where the timed outlet wouldn't come on at all if the salinity was measuring low. More money for more security, basically. I've been planning on the controller for a while anyway, so it's not going to break the bank, but the salinity module and probe will be an unplanned extra. Oh well. If it means I can go on vacation, it'll be worth it. 

 

TL;DR: Rear chamber levels seem stable, DT not so much. Dilution about .001 SG every three days, ish. Probably just going to use tech to eventually work around the problem. Not giving up yet, though, I'd really like to see this problem solved. My patience is holding for now. 

 

NB: This is a serious obstacle for the NC6. It's a nice tank and I like it fine, but this evap thing is a mess and a half. I have a workaround planned, so this is a mystery I may never need to truly solve. Bear in mind I've already had to implement a fix for overheating. Caveat emptor, my friends. 

 

[SaltyBuddha]

Honestly, this one has me stumped. I can't figure out why the ATO would have that effect on the DT. You could open the overflow from the DT to chamber 1 to see if that can help. It couldn't really hurt with the bigger pump. Besides that, the timer seems like a really good and functional idea. Easiest and seems like it would solve the issue. I was surprised at how much my IM10 evaporates. If I don't top it off, I think my back chamber would be dry in 3.5 days. Just installed the ATO and it's working well. Only issue I had was that I first put the ATO fill line under the water line. It would pump, turn off, then back siphon, then start to pump again and made a continuous cycle of siphoning and pumping. Once I moved the line above the water, worked out pretty well.  

 

My tank has been having heating issues. I live in SoCal so I was expecting I would need a chiller this summer, but my cycle has been fluctuating 4 to 5 degrees thru the day. Installing a CoolWorks HOB chiller and temperature controller that is supposed to work well. Adds some bulk on the back end that I didn't want, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

[CharlesFoxtrot]

Interesting development. I suddenly have what I would describe as "white specks with legs" all over my glass. I hope they're good or indifferent, because there are literally hundreds of them. Looked at some pics of pods and suchlike in the ID forum, nothing looked quite right, and I can't seem to get a good picture, they're too small. So I'm guessing pods, hoping pods, because I doubt I could do anything about them if they were bad. Their numbers are overwhelming. 

[SaltyBuddha]

Pods!! 

[Weetabix7]

46 minutes ago, SaltyBuddha said:

Pods!! 

 

Yup. 

 

[Clown79]

The chamber where your return pump is, is the chamber where the water level drops. This is where the ato needs to go to properly top up.

 

I top up manually every morning with no issue. I don't travel so its no biggy to drop a cup of water into the chamber.

 

The water level in the return chamber is usually 1 inch lower than the second chamber.

 

As for dipping.

You don't need huge amounts of water because most but frags which are small.

 

I have 2 new Tupper ware containers for dipping. Fill one each with tank water. 1 has the coral dip added, the other for rinsing.

[CharlesFoxtrot]

Hooray, pods! Such a relief. 

 

Continuing to gradually raise salinity using water changes, but it's getting to the point where the changes are becoming very large to have any effect. Can I mix up some SW at a higher SG (like above 1.026) for the purposes of raising the SG of the tank, just using a little? I don't want to shock the system, but getting SG up to 1.025 by putting in water at 1.025 will take either a 100% WC or a long time. Or both. 

 

I've noticed a different looking algae on one of my rocks, looks like GHA but the hairs look much thicker. Not sure if my ceriths are eating it. Also found what looks like a new hitch hiker, pic below. Looks tan or light yellow, with bumps on it, adhering to the rock surface. Sorry about the blurry pic, but right now my phone takes the best out of all my various cameras. Working on that. Thanks! 

[CharlesFoxtrot]

After due consideration, I think I'll hold off on the WWC pack I was considering. I think it's better suited to a larger tank, especially with that favites being a more aggressive coral. Add that to the doubtful monti and it's not as good an idea as it might have initially seemed. I'll almost certainly get some corals there, their stuff is beautiful and there's less expensive shipping to Florida, but probably not the 5-pack.  

 

Now that I have the prospect of adding some corals soon, I'm making up a list of things I'd like to have at some point, space permitting. Here goes:

 

Candy canes

Zoanthids (love the crazy names!)

Ricordias

Duncans (probably just one)

Blastomussa

Jedi Mind Trick monti (eventually maybe)

Clove polyps (maybe)

Yellow Fiji Leather

 

My general idea is to stay away from corals that require a lot of space, either because of aggression or because they will grow over other corals. I don't have a lot of space to make room for sweepers, and there aren't a lot of isolated rocks in my scape either. So keeping things friendly and somewhat cozy is a priority. I'm also trying to choose corals I like, and not just "beginner corals". 

 

Always looking for input! 

[Clown79]

You can top up every day with salt water instead of fresh water to raise salinity.

 

As for the corals

 

Yellow fiji leather are slow growing so its a good option but they don't like low light so ensure its placed in appropriately.

 

Candy canes/trumpets are nice but do have sweepers, not long but long enough to sting corals within 3".

 

Duncans are nice

Blastos are great

Zoanthids are great (the crazy names are made up and for marketing purposes)

 

Most corals have a down side to them. There isn't a perfect coral.

 

Even if they don't have long sweepers, they can still do damage.

 

[CharlesFoxtrot]

Thanks,  Clown! I'm not super worried about the candy cane sweepers, it's the really long ones that I find most concerning. After all, keeping a coral 6 inches away from others is tough in a tank that's 12 inches on a side. 

 

Zoanthid names are definitely good for marketing, also fun to tell people when you're showing off your reef.   I think it's all good as long as you're paying for the beauty of the coral and not the words in the name. Although I am guilty of wanting some corals because of the name as well as the look. 

 

I'll bear in mind that I can top off with SW. I think a couple more water changes will do it, though. I'm just about at 1.025, which should be fine. I'm finding some variance in opinion as to whether 1.025 or 1.026 is preferable. Mixing the SW to 1.026 would also give more calcium and such, but I understand it's also possible to dose for that. What are your preferences along those lines? 

 

I'm also excited because I have permission to put an Apex on the system! DB agrees that it would be nice to be able to keep an eye on things while we're away on vacations this summer, so I'm allowed to get whichever one I think is best. I'm leaning towards the next gen system for a couple of reasons. First, it comes with all of the probes and is ready to use them out of the box, no additional modules needed to buy and place, which makes it actually less expensive overall than the classic.  Second, it's very self contained, which I think would be nice because I don't have a cabinet or stand to hide it in. Initial reviews on it seemed good, although they apparently had some early troubles. It's been on the market for a while now, though, and my understanding is that the bugs have been worked out.

 

All automation comes with a risk, but if I can enjoy my vacations more I think it'll be worth it. We're also looking at fish tomorrow if nothing bad happens today. Exciting times! 

[SaltyBuddha]

Nice! Always good to get permission before making any purchases lol still haven't told my fiance how much I've spent on my tank so far....Lol

 

Did you get any fish today? 

[CharlesFoxtrot]

Hey, all. I did in fact get a little ocellaris on Wednesday! Pics will happen whenever I can get a good one. DB is already beginning to agitate for a second one. We'll see. 

 

Also new and good, my Apex came today and is mostly set up. I still need to install the probes, and I'm trying to DIY a solution to install them somewhere in the back. Maybe egg crate. Of course. And programming, which I'm going to have to learn. 

 

Also new and bad, I think I found an aiptasia. So I just pulled the whole rock out, because it was small and I didn't know what else to really do. Is there some way to clean that rock so I can put it safely back? 

 

Anyway, pretty exciting times! More info and pics to come, as well as my review and experiences with the new Apex. Stay tuned. 

[Weetabix7]

Burn it off with a lighter or hydrogen peroxide while rock is out of tank, rinse rock well, then return to tank. 

[CharlesFoxtrot]

Well, no posts for a while because everything was going well and nothing to report. Fishy thriving, algae okay, numbers coming up right. I'm holding off on corals until after summer vacations are over. 

 

But now, panic! I think my hermit (who I thought was long dead) is now apparently the proud owner of a cerith shell. Oh well, right? 

 

But, when looking for the hermit or snail or whatever, I noticed a boatload of little moving things in my substrate. They act like underwater ants, with a sort of clear body with a black center. Far too tiny and motile to photograph. Not sure what they are or what they're eating, but there are a blue million of them, so I hope they're good or indifferent.

 

Also suddenly seeing a new algae. This one looks like a long brown hair, and sort of feathery in places. I actually thought it was my hair, but the feathery bits put the lie to that. 

 

On the good side, the Apex is clicking along nicely, and my clown seems happy and eating well. My feather duster and spaghetti worms are also doing their thing as normal, and at least two snails are putting in regular appearances. Again, no corals yet until at least August, and as much longer as it takes to get things right again. 

 

If anyone can shed some light on the long hairs or my new maritime creepy crawly infestation, please do! I hope it's nothing unusual or exceptionally awful. And so it goes. 

[fishfreak0114]

Are the little crawling things copepods or amphipods?