malawian Posted December 5, 2013 Author Share Posted December 5, 2013 REINFORCEMENTS FROM BRS COMMAND SIR! (world's biggest bottle of Aiptasia X. I think its hilarious, i had no idea it would be that big. But thats ok, ill never need to buy more!) (also, my RO/DI water is still at 0 PPM TDS after not replacing a single filter on it for nearly 3 years!) Link to comment
malawian Posted December 6, 2013 Author Share Posted December 6, 2013 (NEW FIRST POST!) A little note to anyone who is still looking at this project... TL;DR: Thanks if you are still following along on this project! I hope you like it when its done! I know this started a loooong time ago (like a year and a half) and progress is minimal (and stopped completely for nearly a year) but I am spending most of what little time I have available on this build and it is really getting close to coming together. I'll keep posting updates for anyone who is following along so you can see any progress I AM making and I hope you like the end result and thanks for sticking around for the long haul! I would love to hear some feedback on the build too! and now, a picture because no build thread post should be without a picture! These guys will be going inside the light fixture to control everything! No automation for RGB channels, only for primary white and blue but one day Ill add two more ALCs so I can automate the RGB and UV channels too! 6 lunar pods are going in for pretty night timiness (only up to 5 right now, 6 is coming soon when more money is available...) Link to comment
malawian Posted December 9, 2013 Author Share Posted December 9, 2013 NEW FTS! Re-arranged the rockwork to calm any aggression from my total B**** of a clownfish. I didnt like it at first but its growing on me. It will change again with the addition of LR from the 29g. fair warning, i still cant find my charger for my DSLR so Im stuck with iphone pics And a new addition to the tank! The first one thats been added to the 75 that was JUST for the 75! Very pretty Bi-color Angel! Link to comment
Reef Starter Posted December 10, 2013 Share Posted December 10, 2013 The keyboard in the top photo looks like a black widow ultimate, also nice working on the fish tank. How big is your Ro / Di unit that you are using btw. Link to comment
malawian Posted December 10, 2013 Author Share Posted December 10, 2013 The keyboard in the top photo looks like a black widow ultimate, also nice working on the fish tank. How big is your Ro / Di unit that you are using btw. That IS a black widow ultimate lol. LOVE this keyboard. I think my neighbors can hear me type and my wife closes the door when I play COD because she can hear me hitting the keys in the next room. I'm using the BRS chloramines plus 5 stage kit which is 75 gpd. I highly recommend it although I cant say most people will get the life I have out of my filters, I am lucky to get VERY clean tap water from the city. oh and welcome to NR, i see this is only post #2 Link to comment
Reef Starter Posted December 11, 2013 Share Posted December 11, 2013 That IS a black widow ultimate lol. LOVE this keyboard. I think my neighbors can hear me type and my wife closes the door when I play COD because she can hear me hitting the keys in the next room. I'm using the BRS chloramines plus 5 stage kit which is 75 gpd. I highly recommend it although I cant say most people will get the life I have out of my filters, I am lucky to get VERY clean tap water from the city. oh and welcome to NR, i see this is only post #2 Haha yea I've read the forums for a while, and decided to make an account and post my 40g breeder, when I start getting some work in on it Hopefully soon. And I have experience with it playing some dota2 time to time and other time sucking games by blizzard and such. Also thank you for the welcome Link to comment
malawian Posted January 4, 2014 Author Share Posted January 4, 2014 BIG UPDATE! ok...are you sitting down? ok probably. Ready? Wait for it... THE LIGHT IS DONE! Still no DSLR pics. I ordered a new charger for my camera's battery because I have searched high and low for mine and cannot find it. Starting Tuesday I can take DSLR pics again. First some more boring stuff. The refugium is pretty much ready to go in. I needed to remove a baffle first...and I got impatient... So this is the finished product, its been tapped at the bottom for the return to the main sump, Im just going to add a standpipe to the drain to control the water level in the sump. Ok, now the fun part. Here is the last part of the build process for the light. First, fun facts: 84 LEDs 216 watts 6 moon lights 6 colors 6 LED chains 2 high voltage LED drivers 4 Low power LED drivers 1 25v power supply 4 pots 2 10v controls 288 solder points ~150 feet of wire For those of you who havent been following along the light functions on 6 identical LED clusters. Each cluster has 3 NW, 5 RB, 1 RGB 3-up star (all 3 watt), one true violet and one moonlight pod (with 2 low power blue LEDs). The RB and NW channels are dimmed off of a reefkeeper elite controller and the other channels are all dimmed manually from pots. The moonlights are controlled with a moonlight controller on the RKE simulating a lunar cycle. We got the cabinet finished up, it came out perfectly. We then covered it in some polyurethane just to make sure its waterproof. Then I had to finish buttoning up the LEDs, adding the moonlights and labeling the 3 million wires to be wired up. Then it was time to wire...wiring this thing alone took about 10 hours. I had to do a good job because a tall person can see into the open top of the fixture so I wanted it to look nice. I especially liked my little acrylic plate I made to hold the pots for the RGB dimming. the dimmer for the violet went next to it mounted to the board...because I forgot about it when I made the neat little acrylic plate... When It was all said and done there were easily a hundred feet of wire and it looked like this The result was staggering...the colors are amazing. My crappy iphone pics cant begin to do it justice at all. The fixture looks great IMO and I couldnt be happier with the finished product. I'm replicating a full 12 hour light cycle, still dialing the exact numbers. I'm trying to replicate what the sun actually does over the course of a day. This is some data from an empirical study: This is the cycle Im going with for the moment: Dawn/Dusk (this makes an iphone camera very unhappy) a little further into the cycle Daylight At the end of the day I couldnt be happier with what I have. I do plan on adding two more ALC controllers eventually so that I can do dawn/dusk with every color of the rainbow! Let me know what you guys think! its been 622 days since this project began...but its finally, miraculously, done! Link to comment
JLynn Posted January 4, 2014 Share Posted January 4, 2014 Just wondering, how much money did the lighting cost you, total? I am thinking of doing a similar setup on my 40B. Link to comment
malawian Posted January 4, 2014 Author Share Posted January 4, 2014 im not positive...but it was quite a bit at the end of the day. Big costs were LEDs and drivers which were about $350 and $150 respectively. Add another 50 for power supply and cooling fan on the little drivers. So thats $550. Another $100 for heat sinks so thats $650. So thats the core cost and you can be pretty cheap with the rest of things but I really wanted everything on this build to look polished and the end result was a lot more money. The wood for the cabinet was more than $100, the ALC and MLC are another $180 with $60 worth of moonlights, hell each nice power cable was like $15 so thats another 45 in power cable. I must have gone well over 1k. It can certainly be done for less (and I made a lot of mistakes along the way that made things more expensive) but I tell you all of this so that you dont think, like I did, that once you buy LEDs and drivers youre basically home free. Link to comment
malawian Posted January 31, 2014 Author Share Posted January 31, 2014 So it finally happened! New pictures! And they dont even suck (much)! A note about photography: (Skip down if you couldn't possibly care less about the process) I got my new battery charger for my DSLR. My good old Nikon D70 is showing its age, it doesnt handle LEDs too well but I can compensate a lot by using RAWs. Its also pretty grainy at 1600 ISO (which is its highest) which I need for a lot of shots on the tank. And some shots are a hair out of focus, I have bad eyesight so autofocus is my friend but sometimes the AF doesnt work right and I dont notice or its a shot where I need to use manual focusing. Still have some good ones though! A note about the progress on the tank: (Skip down if you dont care about the guts) So here is a funny story about a sump. I had beautiful plans for mating my current sump to another sump, which would serve as a refugium. I cut gorgeous baffles out of black acrylic and cemented pieces together for sock holders etc. It seriously looked professional. But measuring widths down to a tiny fraction of an inch isnt so easy. So my baffles were .038" too wide, or about a tenth of a millimeter. Well that apparently was too much so I ground one down to try and get it in. Well it was still tight but I thought it would go. I was trying to get rid of a gap under the baffle (with apparently too much force) and then *POP* the seams on the sump on either side of the baffle cracked. Oh did I mention I spent 8 hours redoing the entire drain on my tank because it started leaking like a sieve during the overhaul? So incredibly discouraged and concerned my tank was not doing well without the sump I broke down, went to my LFS (which was thankfully open on MLK Jr. Day) and bought a sump (an Eshopps RS-200). With that sump I have ample room for skimmer and anything else I need and even have room under the stand for a 5g container of RODI for the ATO as well as my carbon/GFO reactor. Both of these probably would not have fit (certainly the water can wouldnt) with my old plan. To make up for the filtration I would have had with the refugium I will be running a reactor with biopellets and a reactor with Seachem Matrix as a biomedia (which would be here if not for the latest snow-pocalypse). Ill use the other two tanks some other way, one probably as a quarantine tank and the other...idk ill find a use. All in all it turned out well even though I am still dissapointed that months of work and preparation didnt pay off. It still COULD have worked but I was on a timer. Such is life at times. So now Pictures! FTS again! cuz its awesome! (with correct colors and everything!) A new SPS, Ive forgotten now what it is...i hate it when I do that. Maybe you know? A new LPS, a really pretty frogspawn they had at the LFS. On sale and I really like it. The Bicolor Angel. A pair of corals in the BC29, some Green Star Polyps (that refuses to grow on anything white apparently) and my nice big bali slimer. There are others but they didnt photograph well this time. Ill try again later. So here is the new sump in all its glory. Skimmer box and return. I'll be plumbing a hard line for the drain I think to make use of the dual drain lines. The Manifold. Now has two outlets not being used. One will go to the BC29 once its converted to a frag tank (soon). The other was going to go to the fuge but now its just extra. At least I have flexibility built in. Same with the push connect outlets. I've got a lot of them on purpose... Have my probes at the back of the sump, in the skimmer box so they never go dry. This is what we refer to, in the industry, as a mess. But here are all the electronics for both tanks. At least they are all in one place and away from any moisture at all. Let me know what you guys think! Things are coming together well on the tank! Cheers Malawian Link to comment
malawian Posted February 4, 2014 Author Share Posted February 4, 2014 Another Update! Arent you a lucky son of a bristletooth tang. lawl. So after another box of goodies from BRS I have all of my reactors working now! I'm stoked! and there's more...but youll just have to scroll down to find out... You can see the plumbing setup in its (sort of) final form. All 4 reactors. From left to right: biopellets, Seachem Matrix, GFO, and Carbon. The GFO and carbon are linked so they have the same flow but the other two each have their own valve which lets me regulate their flow how I like them. OK Ready for it? I dont think you're ready for it... You sure about this? Ok fine I get it... FISHIES! I made a major addition over the weekend. After much discussing with people I trusted on all matters fishy I decided on a majority of my stocking list for this tank. -A pair of Black Darwin Clowns, already mated and behaving well/healthy at the LFS -A Flame Angel -And a Yellow Eye Kole Tang I love them. They're all gorgeous. Everyone is getting along pretty well. There was a little aggression between the flame angel, Kole tang and the bicolor angel but they've calmed down quite a bit and seem to be showing hardly any aggression at all at this point. The flame angel took a bit of a beating at the LFS and got a little beat up from the bicolor as well but is quite active and hungry. I think she'll be just fine now that everyone has calmed down. Just a couple of coral pictures from the 75. The branching frogspawn just came out of the biocube and is still quite covered in hair algae. This is my first test to see if the CUC in the 75 will be able to strip the algae off of the stuff in there. And last but not least... Meet Lena. Lena is a homicidal psychopath. She hates rings, other clowns, hands, dogs, people, water and you. Lena lives in a 10g by herself now where she can't hurt anyone (including me). So thats it for now. Hope you enjoy! Malawian Link to comment
malawian Posted February 5, 2014 Author Share Posted February 5, 2014 Well the kole tang didnt make it... I'm really bummed about this one. I've been keeping fish for so long (and I've worked in the business) so I'm no stranger to losing fish. It sucks but you move on. For whatever reason this one really got to me even though he was only around for a few days. He seemed happy. Ate when he first got home. Wasnt eating a lot the last couple days but I chalked it up to being skittish. I made sure some food went behind the rocks where he was hiding so he didn't have to come out to eat. Today we couldn't find him anywhere and started to hunt. Eventually we found him... Even now parameters are literally perfect and everything else in the tank is happy as can be. Still preparing water for a change just to be safe but water quality isn't what did it. I guess the stress of moving just got to him. Sorry little guy. Hope you're enjoying the big reef in the sky. Swim well. https://imageshack.com/i/12xhx7j'> https://imageshack.com/i/n6t0duj'> Link to comment
I<3SPS Posted March 17, 2014 Share Posted March 17, 2014 Hey malawian, that's a nice looking tank! I'm from Athens as well and I'm trying to start a Facebook page/open discussion called Athens Reefers. It seems there are quite a few people in Athens that have reef aquariums and I would like to start up this page to get some discussion flowing and also increase frag swapping/trading/selling opportunities (thereby increasing sustainable coral propagation practices). If you're on Facebook feel free to join and invite anyone you know. I know there are people out there, but I'm having a hard time contacting them/inviting them to the FB page. Here's the link if you're interested: https://www.facebook.com/groups/611915055543246/ Thanks -Brad Link to comment
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.