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

[jcolletteiii]

 

The oolite that I got was perhaps a bit too fine grained. Going to try it and see how it goes. If it's a snowstorm after each gravel cleaning, I'll have to look at a larger grain size. My biospira was partially frozen - so we'll see how that goes. I'll post some pics later on when it clears up a bit. Kind of anti-climactic.

[jcolletteiii]

So the wife definitely doesn't like fish tank 'furniture'. To be fair - neither do I. We're both pretty particular when it comes to furniture. It should be solid wood, have cool lines, it should not be humadrum, and preferably be over 50 years old. We dig mid century, and right now the tank sits on a vintage walnut 1950's piece. But it's not finished in such a way that it's waterproof, it's too low, there is not enough internal support to keep my mind from racing, and the doors are kind of in the way in the tight space in which the tank lives.

 

So with all of that in ind, I've designed a plywood box that looks better than most plywood boxes. It will also be a strong a plywood box, with some internal bracing. It will be rabbeted and dadoed, and the back will be solid 3/4 ply. I'm just goinf to do the cabinet in maple cabinet grade ply, but the internal brace will be Baltic birch so I can see that nice laminate core. Going to put a slight tint on it to get a close match to our solid maple Paul McCobb pieces in the living room, which this case takes its cues from. The legs will be Florence Knoll-style 1" square tubular steel - they're about $25 bucks a set on fleapay. The doors will be 1/4" masonite covered with a grass-cloth and then painted orange. I need to keep my eyes peeled for a couple of aluminum McCobb style aluminum ring pulls on fleapay for the sliding doors. Should give me plenty of storage without the doors getting in the way!

 

Front, closed doors.

 

Front, opened door.

 

Front, doors removed to show brace.

[jcolletteiii]

Here we go - cleared up this morning.

 

 

 

The amount of light that the hood puts out is on the low side. It really doesn't have enough blue for my liking either. Before I put too many corals in, I'm going to be adding a Hamilton LED strip in back of the main board. There is about 2 inches of space behind the main board under the splash cover. It's painted black, but I think I can scrape that off - have to take the cover off and look. Hamilton has a couple different colors in their 'Kona Sun' 12" strips - I think I'll just do the 50:50 RB:W. Hamilton does the 12" strip in either 1w (x9) or 3w (x6) - I think the 1w emitters will be enough to bring this up to 'medium light'.

 

Anyone else try the Hamilton strips yet?

 

[jcolletteiii]

Water is perfectly clear now. Have to clean all the white dust off of everything though. Nitrates are at about 10, so the cycle is going. Will test again tomorrow to see whether its declining or climbing. Think I should throw a scallop in (don't have any shrimp)? There is quite a bit of crusty organic crap in the rocks for the bacteria to break down though...

[vlangel]

I love your scape. Actually I love the idea that this tank is to be low maintenance and simple with water changes being the main nutrient export. It looks great so far.

[jcolletteiii]

Nitrates still only at about 12. Taking off for a few days - will update when I get back.

[FiveGallonSea]

That scape looks perfect for endless coral placement options. Looking forward to se where this goes. That wire from the powerhead would drive me pretty nuts though. Haha

[jcolletteiii]

That scape looks perfect for endless coral placement options. Looking forward to se where this goes. That wire from the powerhead would drive me pretty nuts though. Haha

 

Thanks! I like how it came out! I think I'll have plenty of space for different things I want to try.

 

Just got back last night. A bit of cyano in a couple of places and some diatoms on the sand, but not too bad, so the bacterial additive appears to have done its thing. A bit of diatoms on the liverock as well. Added 4 blue leg hermits that are already after the diatoms - one little guy already has a 1"wide strip cleaned down the right side of the glass. Blew off the rocks, and cleaned the glass, will post an updated picture when it settles down. Ammonia is at zero and nitrates are around 40ppm, which isn't too bad at all considering the scallop I threw in there. Brewing up some water for a 5 gallon water change today. First corals show up mid week next week depending on the weather.

[ozzyvega]

Excellent scape! Look at marine pure for your bio media. Great stuff.

[jcolletteiii]

Excellent scape! Look at marine pure for your bio media. Great stuff.

 

Thanks! I have only activated carbon in there now, and I may try some Purigen down the road - like the idea that it can be recharged fairly easily. But one of the ideas behind this tank is low-tech. No fuge, no macro, no dosing. Nitrate removal will be accomplished through water changes only. But... no fish, so less nitrates hopefully. But, I do like to watch acans eat, so I can imagine I will need weekly 2.5 or even 5 gallon water changes. I plan on pre-mixing my IO water and keeping it in 5 gallon containers to make the process as quick and painless as possible. After yesterday's 5 gal WC, NO3 is down to ~15ppm. I'm seeing just a hint of green on the rock now in addition to the diatoms here and there. PO4 could be leaching out of my old, re-used rocks. Will have to keep an eye on the algae and grab some phosban if it continues to grow as nitrates approach 0ppm. The hermits have really made short work of the diatoms on the sand - but it's still on the rocks somewhat. I want to try seeding some purple calcareous algae, so I may get a very small piece of LR, pulverize it with a hammer, and seed it in that way. Not 100% sure on that though. If I add calcareous algae, it will start to cover the back, and I do like the black back. Conundrum.

 

Looking like corals may ship as early as Tuesday, but keeping an eye on that storm that will be moving through the lower midwest.

 

Here's another question: Where does everyone get those white 5 gallon jugs at? The 7 gallon blue ones at sprawlmart have leaky tops.

[Rehype]

Wow awesome scape cant wait to see how this progresses.

[jcolletteiii]

Wow awesome scape cant wait to see how this progresses.

 

Thanks! I'm already starting to think about coral placement and growth.

 

My first online coral order ever was placed last week with Monterey Bay Corals - through his ebay store, then some add-ons from his website. Great communication, worked with me on pricing, and says he'll be throwing in a freebie. Hopefully no GSP ! I ordered this WYSIWYG Bubblegum digitata...

 

...along with three green grandis polyps...

 

...two polyps of Sunny D palys (no pic), a three head frag of this neat blue favia...

 

along with one 'Interstellar' mushroom. Don't have pics of that one, but the photo from his website (when it was up) looked just like the photos of this all over the net.

 

There is a pet store locally that has a big Duncan colony that I can get a frag of, but I don't want too much green for now. So I still need a nice rainbow acan, a Pectinia, and the long polyp Turbinaria. Not too bad. Now, we're just waiting to see what the winter weather will be like in the midwest before finalizing a shipping day. Will post photos of the actual specimens when the corals show up.

[jcolletteiii]

One last pre-coral FTS: 1-3-17.

 

 

Fedex hubs all look good, weather looks good! Corals ship tomorrow afternoon!

[jcolletteiii]

1-9-17: Nanobox Large Retrofit Installation in a Coralife 16 gallon Biocube (PT 1)

 

I've been overy underwhelmed by the lighting capabilities Coralife imbued the new LED Biocubes with. During the day, with shades drawn, the stock biocube, under full 100% lighting, is visibly dimmer than ambient light (and this is with the shallow angle sun way up here in 'southern Canada' as my wife calls it (North Dakota). So I decided around Christmas time that I'd be putting something with more power in as soon as my corals arrived (which they have - more on that later).

 

So I began looking around at the various retro kits available for nanos and AIO's. I almost did a full-spectrum DIY based on Rapidled.com heatsinks, solderless LED's (I'd even picked out the combos of emitters and done a Sketchup of the pattern), Mean Well dimable drivers, and a Bluefish Mini. Then I stumbled onto Nanobox Reef designs. For the same money I was going to pay for the parts and supplies to DIY my own fixture, I could get one of their large retro kits (bottom of page) with one less channel and one less color (1 red emitter per grouping). BUT - it was already almost fully assembled, just figure out the mounting points and pop it in, plug in the single power cord, link the Bluefish app, and presto-whamo! Light capable of supporting the most demanding Acro. Dave at Nanobox was accommodating, answering all of my questions in minutes - so I ordered one up. I decided on the 'large retro kit', which consists of two separate emitter boards because I wanted to make sure I had even lighting across my tank given that I have a relatively tall piece of rock nearly in the middle of the tank, and wanted to get good coverage below. If you run lower rockwork, I am pretty sure that the small retro kit would be plenty.

 

I began by removing the hinge pins from the back of the tank. They pull apart with a bit of a tug with a pair of pliars on the outer flat tab, or by inserting a flat head screwdriver between the hinge and the inner hinge head and popping it off. Brought it to the kitchen, took off the clear plastic lens and this is what the guts of the Oceanic LED Biocube look like in the nude.

 

 

From there it was simply a matter of detaching the one multiwire connection from the board, removing two screws, and popping the entire assembly out. The emitter board itself is rather thin aluminum. Probably don't need much of a heatsink with these emitters - what do you think - 1/4w emitters? 1/2w?

Here is what the stock board looks like.

 

 

With the board removed, I could see exactly how much space I had to work with and what mounting points I'd be able to use to mount the new heatsink. As you can see from the photo above, built-in mounting points (screw holes) are extremely rare on the underside of the LED Biocubes.

 

What to do, what to do? I mulled over a couple of options that I could use to make my own mounting points in the stock Biocube hood with hardware available at either home dumpster or Menards:

1 - pick up some kind of ABS plumbing piece from home dumpster, cut it up, cement it in, drill it;

2 - pick up some nylon or PVC standoffs, epoxy those in, mount to those;

3 - drill through the hood and mount with stainless hardware.

So, off to home dumpster I went.

 

After walking around plumbing, electrical, and the hardware department for what seemed like an eternity (I think the HD associates were beginning to think I was a vagrant), I finally decided that none of the available ABS would work, so back to hardware. I picked up some stainless steel 1 1/4" flat head machine screws (#8 - 32), and a small box of assorted SS washers and nuts of varying sizes. I also picked up some black plastic #10 screw head caps and covers. These are in the drawers in HD in the hardware aisle. This is what they look like below.

 

 

I didn't just want to hack the stock mounting points out though. This is a nice light, well-capable of lighting up a 40 or even 50 gallon tank. I may want to upgrade down the road, so I needed to retain the mounting points to reinstall the stock lighting in that event. But if I didn't remove something the new heatsink would be too far rearward to cast light evenly. So what I ended up doing was dremelling off the webbing inboard (toward the stock board), but leaving the outer plastic strengthening webbing and mounting point intact. That gave me exactly the space I needed to mount the new heatsink. Here is what the heatsink looked like with the webbing cut away and set in.

 

 

In the above image, you'll notice two screws inserted through the bottom of the heatsink up through the top of the hood. I put these in to keep the heatsink exactly in place while I drilled the remaining holes through the hood. Yep, drilling the hood. It won't look bad though, I promise. So I drilled the holes, inserted 1 x 1.125" SS machine screw through a black plastic screw cap, inserted this through the hood from the outside in each of the 4 holes I drilled. I added 1 SS washer and 1 #8-32 nut and tightened these up. These would hold the heatsink steady and also provide a standoff to allow air to circulate around the heatsink. Then I slid the heatsink onto the screws, added another washer and nut, and tightened it a quarter turn past finger tight. Here is what I had at that point.

 

 

In the image above, I still had to add the SS washers and nuts. At this point, I realized I have no more mounting points for the controller board or for the Bluefish board. So I routed the wires as best I could, and placed them where they would not make any contact with metal or with each other or with the now disconnected stock LED controller. I routed the two wires from the entire assembly out through the waterproof grommet, then popper the clear splash guard back on. Put it back on the tank, plugged it in, linked it up, and started playing with color settings on my phone. Really, really cool app! Here is what the finished product looks like (from the top side) on my tank. I think that the screw covers make the install look very good - if you didn't know this wasn't stock then you'd have a hard time detecting it! Will post photos of the lighting and corals later tonight.

 

 

I think it came out great! Now I have to try not to fry my corals!

[basser1]

Very nice, clean job!

 

Well done.....

[DaveFason]

Great job! I am working on a heatsink that will not need any "modding" to the hood. You did a really good job however.

 

-Dave

[jcolletteiii]

Great job! I am working on a heatsink that will not need any "modding" to the hood. You did a really good job however.

 

-Dave

 

Thanks Dave!

 

The thing that really sucks about this hood is the near complete lack of mounting points. Right now, for example, I just have the driver board 'set' in there. It's to the back of the splashguard area, so it doesn't move around nearly at all, but I have nowhere to screw it down to. Can't really glue tapped nylon spacers in either as it's really hard to bond anything to the ABS that is itself not abs. I am thinking that I need to order some 1/2" ABS rod stock, and use plumbing weld cement to get some mounting points in there.

 

The other problem is that I don't know for sure that the hood is ABS. It could be polyethylene.

[jcolletteiii]

Well, just found in the JBJ Nanocube specs that the hood is made from ABS, so that's good enough for me. Going to assume Coralife is using the same material. Just ordered some ABS rod stock from Amazon to weld to the underside of the hood to make some mounting points for the cards.

[jcolletteiii]

Will try and get more pictures of the corals ASAP, but the semester is just getting started and I will soon be quite busy. So a few for now under the new lighting. The first shot is from the right side looking at Sunny D's. Does anyone know for sure whether these are Paly's or Zoas? I always thought they were Palys, and I think they are still attached because the small one budded.

 

 

and a FTS. The mushroom is still in the specimen cup on the left middle shelf. It has one edge of it's basal disk detached from the frag plug, but the rest of the polyp is attached now. It looked like it was starting to but the upturned piece off, but now it doesn't. Will try to get a photo of the mushroom when it finally inflates to full size - it's a really cool looking coral with a deep, dark base and bright orange spots.

 

[jcolletteiii]

Really loving this nanobox retro! The control that you have over the coloration of the light with the Bluefish controller and app is phenominal. I think that the large retro kit is probably overkill for this tank size in general, but with the rockwork up so high nearly in the middle in this tank, I think it worked out perfectly. This is how my lights are set right now. There are more RB emitters in each board than white, so the tank still has a nice crisp blue-white hue with a tinge of violet in person. Still playing with the color a bit, but I like this alot.

 

 

having a bit of a battle with blue-green cyano right now - phosphates leaching out of the dead rock no doubt. I do 1x per week WC's of between 3-4 gallons. As I have no fish, nutrient input is minimal - I feed the corals some reef chilli 2-3 times per week (will increase as the cyano declines), and nitrates are now undetectable with the API. I'm sure there are some nitrates present though. I had some minor GHA come in on my coral frags on the plugs, so yesterday when I cleaned the tank, I took all of the frags off the plugs and mounted them on small pieces of rock - I hate the look of frag plugs anyhow. I used a scalpel to gently scrape off the remaining hair algae that was on the coral skeleta, and now they are predominantly algae free. This is not a very correct rendition of the true lighting color - the metering in my phone is nothing like the metering in my D800, and the white balance in my phone is not very good with these LEDs. In person it's a bit bluer and a tad more violet.

 

 

Right now in my middle chamber media chamber, I have a bag of purigen on the bottom, carbon in the middle, and I've just added phosban to the uppermost chamber with floss on top. I only run the floss for a few days after I clean to catch all of the detritus that gets stirred up. Yesterday, I scrubbed the hell out of the rock with a tooth brush to dislodge as much of the cyano as possible before throwing in the phosban. We'll see how that goes. The purigen has been in there for a couple of weeks now, the only change this week was the addition of the phosban - we'll see what effect that will have. I have an elos PO4 test kit coming this week so I can see if there is detectable PO4 in the water - but if it's leaching out of the rock and they cyano is utilizing it at the source, then it may be a long haul to eradicate it.

 

This damn mushroom has been a thorn in my side since it showed up. It was partially detached from the frag plug it was on and was flopping around on the rockwork wherever I placed it. I'm afraid that if it detaches completely, it'll go under the rockwork in the back, be hard to find, and the hermits will dispose of its remains - all at night of course when I won't see it. I've had it in some manner of container for the past couple of weeks, but it stubbornly refuses to completely attach. I keep thinking it may be budding, but I wish it would hurry up an make its mind up already! I want to get this container out of my tank!

 

[reefone]

loving the rock scape you came up with.

[jcolletteiii]

loving the rock scape you came up with.

 

Thanks! I've been thinking if I were to do it again, I'd put the lower right shelf up a bit higher so that there would be more of a hanging effect. But, when whatever coral I end up putting down there grows up, I think the floating effect will become more obvious.

 

I'm also thinking about changing out the sand to something a bit larger-grained. I love the color and the texture of this oolitic sand, but because it's so fine-grained, it tends to clump together when a bit of algae or cyano is on it, which becomes very distracting to my eyes. Plus, the powerhead really blows it around if it's not angled exactly right. I'll give it a few weeks to see if things change and if not, I'll begin to siphon it out with my water changes gradually and replace it with a larger grained aragonite I think.

[J-Ranko]

Beautiful 'scape! I like this concept of 'hanging' rockwork. I've wanted to do something like this before to make room on the sand bed and get a more striking aquacape, but I hesitate because it seems you have to permanently affix it to the sides or back to make it stable. How do you clean around it or catch fish?

[jcolletteiii]

Beautiful 'scape! I like this concept of 'hanging' rockwork. I've wanted to do something like this before to make room on the sand bed and get a more striking aquacape, but I hesitate because it seems you have to permanently affix it to the sides or back to make it stable. How do you clean around it or catch fish?

 

Thanks!

 

Cleaning is done with a mag float and toothbrush, and I don't plan on having any fish. Cleaning around the rocks on that one side doesn't take any longer than getting the hard to reach places in any other tank I've ever had - there are always places that it's tough to get your hand into! It's taking a bit longer right now because when I clean, I scrub the cyano off of everything, and that corner is next to the wall, so if I miss a little bit it's not really an aesthetic problem.

 

If I were to get 1 fish, it would be something small like a firefish that I wouldn't worry about needing to catch - but there is always the DIY fish trap if needed I suppose. Down the road, I may do some kind of shrimp for a bit more interaction, but for now I'm happy with the lack of fish.

[uwharrie]

I so love your rockscape

 

One last pre-coral FTS: 1-3-17.

 

 

Fedex hubs all look good, weather looks good! Corals ship tomorrow afternoon!