A 750g SPS system is born

[dgasmd]

Any skimmate pics or pics of the skimmer up and runnig since it's broken in?

This is what it looked like when it first was set up. I have been running it since, and have not cleaned it once since. I am doing that tomorrow.

Below are a few from about 10 min. ago. You may notice that the entire body of the skimmer is dirty and not just the neck. The reason is because my garage doors are open 24/7 and the sunlight makes a ton of algae from on everything with water in it. My Ca reactor has to be covered or it will get coated with algae growing inside. I will be covering the body soon.

 

[Detri]

Wow that is a monster skimmer. Looks bigger in those photo's. How are things shapeing up since the power outage? Hope your doing fine and your tank is getting better. Love this thread.

 

[crab0000]

Wow that's nasty! But, that's a good thing when talking about skimmers right:lol: Seeing what is being pulled out by our skimmers makes me wonder how anyone could run a skimmerless tank.

 

[ldrhawke]

DGASMD,

Keeping the garage open 24/7. I assume it is to help air out the garage from moisture and odor. One little trick, I'll pass on which helps control odor. Put a tablepoon full of house hold bleach into your remote skimmer drain bottle after every time you empty it. It does a great job of neutralizing the odor.

Boy....you wife must love you right about now.....:badgrin:

 

[dgasmd]

One little trick, I'll pass on which helps control odor. Put a tablepoon full of house hold bleach into your remote skimmer drain bottle after every time you empty it. It does a great job of neutralizing the odor.

Thanks for the tip. There is no odor whatsoever in the garage because there is so much air circulation. The better part is that even if there was a stench there, my wife could sit in front of it for days and not know it. When she was a teenager she broke her nose and has not been able to smell a single thing since then I tell you, it has made for a wonderfull long lasting relationship :badgrin: :badgrin: :badgrin: :badgrin: :badgrin:

 

[ldrhawke]

Thanks for the tip. There is no odor whatsoever in the garage because there is so much air circulation. The better part is that even if there was a stench there, my wife could sit in front of it for days and not know it. When she was a teenager she broke her nose and has not been able to smell a single thing since then I tell you, it has made for a wonderfull long lasting relationship :badgrin: :badgrin: :badgrin: :badgrin: :badgrin:

I'm need to add that to my ideal woman list.....beautiful, rich, mute, nymphomaniac, that owns liquor store....that can't smell...:lol:

 

[RGibson]

dgasmd can you tell me how your wetneck is working and would get one in the skimmer again?

 

[dgasmd]

dgasmd can you tell me how your wetneck is working and would get one in the skimmer again?

It works well. However, as I suspected, you need a very level skimmer to make sure it works very very well all around the entire neck. My garage floor is slanted forward some, so I had put some shimming on the front of the skimmer thinking it would make it completely level. Turns out it was too much now the wetneck spills more on the backside than the front. I am fixing that today hopefully when I clean it and drain it.

Beware that wetnecks will make your skimmate wet and also rather very productive. Meaning, it will make more. This could be an issue with smaller systems.

After my experience with this skimmer in only a few weeks, I can tell you these beats are very much geared to larger systems. I would never run something like this, not even at a smaller scale, on a small tank. I think for those purposes, the needdle wheel skimmers are probably much better suited.

 

[Travis]

Alberto, could you describe the foaming action of the air driven skimmer? What I'm wondering about is after the bubbles reach the surface of the water they rise up the neck. With your skimmer, do they all rise up like a needlewheel or do they travel up, down, left, right, sideways, forwards, backwards, awkwards, and every way possible like a beckett.

 

[RGibson]

Alberto how high is the water in the skimmer with the air turn off?

 

[dgasmd]

Alberto, could you describe the foaming action of the air driven skimmer? What I'm wondering about is after the bubbles reach the surface of the water they rise up the neck. With your skimmer, do they all rise up like a needlewheel or do they travel up, down, left, right, sideways, forwards, backwards, awkwards, and every way possible like a beckett.

Travis:

It is a little hard to compare. One thing that is surprising to me in the needle wheel skimmers is the lack of turbulence inside the main chamber. Beckets have and can have a ton. Mine I think is in the middle of the pack. I think the advantage the needle wheel has over this one to prevent the turbulence is that since the pump making the bubbles also puts in a significant amount of water, it allows for the water to be moved in a swirling fashion breaking some of the turbulence. Since these skimmers have very little water input relatively and comparatively speaking, it is harder to create a swirling movement to organize the turbulence some. I don't know if that is even clear enough.:badgrin: :badgrin:

The forst week the skimmer was on was the same as the hurricane. I did not do any twiking, but it was sort of disappointing to me that the neck did not seem to work well and that the bubbles coming in were too large. What I found out was that it seems as if the bubbles are too large, but they are not. I took the top off the skimmer and turned it on. What I noticed from looking down is that the bulk of the bubbles were tiny and fine, but the part towards the outside was collecting air under the box (bottom of the skimmer) and as they came up they would go towards te sides making the whole thing look too big.

I am certainly making more and nastier skimmate than with my aerofoamer 848/iwaki 100 (becket) at 1/2 the electrical consumption, so in that regard it has been a winning situation. However, that was at a cost.

One thing is clear with this skimmer. I would not recommend it to anyone that does not have the patience to play with it. It is not set and forget like the Deltecs or others, which can turn off many people and disappoint a bunch of others. Do they require as much maintenance as the beckets or even the old generation air stone skimmers? Nowhere near!!

One thing I would seriously do is increase the size of the intake line that feeds the wetneck. I would go from the 1/4" OD RO tubing I am using now to 3/8" tubing instead. I think it would just supply the water better without making it come out in such a strong jet at the wetneck.

I am not sure if I answered your questions Travis, but let me know if I didn't.

Alberto how high is the water in the skimmer with the air turn off?

When the air is off, the water line is at about 85% of the height between the floor and the begining of the neck.

 

[dgasmd]

Well, today I just found the reason for 2/3 of my acros dying over the last 8-9 weeks. ACROPORA EATING FLATWORMS

I had checked for these maladies before and never saw one. Today I took a colony that was almost dead and after shaking it to the point of making sure it was retarded, I looked at the bottom of the bucket and there they were staring at me. There was like 8-10 of them!! The worst part is that regardless of how well I looked at the colony and others in the tank I never saw an egg mass, which is the easiest thing to see to begin with. I looked at the colony some more and could not see any more in it, but when I was shaking it again a couple of more fell off. So, in other words, these are true ninja/stealth bugs.

So, now comes the better question: How do I get rid of them?

I did a few searches on the subject a while back as I had some suspicions, but no concrete evidence. Now I have both I guess. Many dipping methods and no real concrete and replicable solutions. Speaking with Paletta about them, he suggested I use the Chelidonura varians or velvet nudibranchs. I will add a small army of these bad boys and see what happens.

I am so upset right now I couldn't tell you in words. So much work, so much selecting and hand picking certain corals to have a display of nothing but unusual stuff only to loose them to these bastards. If you can think of Charlston Heston in Planet of the Apes:

Damm you dirty flatworms. Damm you!!!!!!!!!

 

[nbd13]

Well atleast the good news is you found out why they were slowly dying.

i have done some searches also and like you cam up with mixed reports. i would try those nudi branches and see what happens.

i hope everything makes a full recovery.

Nick

 

[NaH2O]

Man Alberto, I'm sorry! Now you are going to make me take the formosa out of my tank and shake it in a bucket. This coral has been STNing and driving me crazy. Let us know how the nudibranchs work out for you, and/or post up more info as you find it.

 

[Maxx]

Alberto,
Sorry to hear of your recent infestation.... I hate those things....
I found several on an A.albrohensis frag I received from a friend. He warned about having seen some in his tanks while I still had my frag in QT. I looked carefully and found one. I was able to remove it by blowing it off with a turkey baster, and I dumped it down the drain. I put interceptor and flatworm exit into the tank in order to kill any other unwanted pests and moved on from there.

A few months later, I noticed one of the two albrohensis frags on the rock was closed up with no polyp extension. The coral looked really bad. However, the larger of the two frags, (the one I originally saw the flatworm on) was fine. After a couple of days of close observation, I saw a slightly off colored section of the coral. I pulled the entire thing our and placed it into a small glass of tank water. I used the turky baster again and was horrified to see a couple of acro eating flatworms come blowing off in the current. I moved the acro into a darker tupperware container with tank water and began to blast it with the turkey baster. Each squirt knocked 3-5 more acro eating flatworms off the the smaller frag. I was finally able to remove approximately 25 or so flatworms from this one frag. I carefully removed all of the flatworms and placed in the same glass the coral had been in originally.

I dosed Flatworm Exit in order to see if these were affected by it. After 10 minutes with no effect, I doubled the dose. After another 10 minutes, I again doubled the dose, (4 x reccomended dose). After 30 minutes of them sitting in the FE treated glass, I saw no visible effect on these flatworms by FE.

I added a few drops of Iodine to the glass with the flatworms, just enough to make the water a light tea color. The effect on the flatworms was immediate. They were all killed in less than a minute and began to dissolve within 5 minutes. I placed the albrohensis frags (same rock), into a fresh glass with more tank water and added a few drops of Iodine to the water. The corals closed up and looked pissed, a few pods and micro brittle stars died, but saw no flatworms. Again the dosage was just enough to make the water a light tea color...
I left the corals in the iodine treated water for 10 minutes and then placed them back in the tank.

The larger of the two had its polyps out within 30 minutes, but the smaller one (the one with the heavy infestation) didnt open back up again until the next day.
Both corals appear to be doing fine so far...growth continues to be good and the smaller albrohensis frag is doing much better.

Whats interesting to me is the fact the flatworms never moved over to the larger frag from the smaller.

I know my treatment was far from scientific...did the iodine work by itself, or was a synergistic effect of FE and the iodine? I didnt exactly measure the dosage of either the iodine or FE...so who's to say what really nuked the acro eating flatworms...

I'm just trying to be objective about what I saw and did.

I have more pics besides these if you'd like to see them as well....
The quality isnt that great, you definately wont be able to get an ID of these worms based on my photos....

First pic is of the two frags in QT. The frag on the left is the largest of the two. The white spot you see on the frag is the one flatworm I saw while the coral was in QT. (Its in about the lower 3rd of the coral, in between the two small nubs beginning to branch off)

This is the same coral after treatment.....as you can see the distance between the two frags is pretty small.

I dont want to hijack Alberto's thread, so I'll hold off on posting the other photos here...

Nick

 

[dgasmd]

Nick:

Thanks for the info. It does help. Most of the threads I ahve read about it had someone try FE at multiple dosages and times without replicable results of success. Iodine has also been reported by many people not to work even at very toxic concentrations. Like I said above, the only solid replicable and tank wide treatment was the varians nudibranchs. The problem with dips is that one has to treat each individual corals and even then there will likely be egg masses in other places that you won't be treating. A tank wide treatment is always a better solutin if possible.

I am getting a few nudibranchs and we'll see what happens.

 

[Maxx]

Yeah, I knew it wouldnt help out much. Tearing out corals to dip in iodine isnt exactly fun in a 58 gallon, let alone a 750 gallon.

I started a thread in the Advanced Topics forum so as not to clog up your thread.....

Acro Eating Flatworms
http://www.reeffrontiers.com/forums/showthread.php?p=113431#post113431

Come on over and throw in your experiances and pics if/when possible.

Nick

 

[Travis]

Alberto, do a search on RC for FW's and the username "mjcarl". That is Mitch Carl from the Omaha zoo. He has found a treatment with the medication "Levamisole" that is effective against the FW's but not harmful to the coral. I can't remember which thread it came from. He posted an exact formula to calculate how much Levamisole you need for "x" amount of water. This is only a dip. There is no full tank treatment that has been discovered yet, to the best of my knowledge.

When I had these FW's I used Seachem's Reef Dip. IME, the dosage required to even get the FW's to loosen their grip was too strong for the coral. I lost the coral. And it didn't even kill the FW's either. They were still alive in the dip container for a good hour or so, IIRC.

 

[dgasmd]

Travis:

Thanks for the heads up. I saw his post. It was the thread SeanT started about them. I am getting the nudibranchs to start the tank treatment and will see if I can get my hands on some levimasole to dip incoming stuff and the one colonies I can get out. There is lots of stuff in the tank I can't get out though.

 

[middletonmark]

Acro FW's ... something I've not seen yet, hope to never see.

Man, that sucks.

There was this good post on RC about Levamisole HCl:
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&postid=6094194#post6094194
Which links to [BRS thread]:
http://216.235.242.50/forums/showthread.php?t=17217

$43, but yet a source for it.

Best of luck on it, and please let us know any results [esp success] you find.