Project 58!! (Image intense)

[Maxx]

Wrightme,
thanks for the kind words, and you're right about the addiction thing.
I was careful though....made sure that I had the important toys before I proposed, (Reef tank and Motorcycle) so they were "grandfathered" in.
She's much happier now that the tank is downstairs in the basement and out of her dining room. My set up was so "Macguyver'd" together that it really sorta looked like a science fair project, (according to her anyway).
Oddly enough, she's a big proponent of the "in wall" tank set up. So the upgrade will be to an inwall tank.

Brandon,
Thanks for the kind words and the congratulations as well. I'm glad I could be helpful to others....that you got some laughs out of it was a bonus IMO.
Where on Oahu are you living? My parents were station on Hickam when I was a kid. I lived on Oahu for 4 years,(12-16 years old). We started out in Aiea, just above Pearl Ridge mall, moved to Waipahu where my parents bought a house, (and I learned fight hard and run fast for a Haole kid), and then we moved on base to Hickam. My very first job was at Coral Fish Hawaii working for store credit since I was too young to get legally paid.
That was back in 1987. Worked there for 2 years and loved every minute of it.

Nick

 

[big t]

Nick, that is tuff to move and lose a lot of your babies. I recently went thru that and lost most of my colonies that I had grown out from frags. Luckily a managed to save small frags of quite a few of them, but not all. So that sounds great that your wife is all for a inwall setup! I would love a inwall but at my house there just isn't anywhere to put one with the way it is layed out, so I will just have to settle for the underground reef.

 

[Porkfat]

Nick,
Born and raised, on Oahu. I used to live out in Waipio near Waikele, after I hit college I moved into town and I'm in Manoa atm, nice place. Rains a lot though.

Coral Fish Hawaii, lol I don't even know if I've been there I think so though, the one by the stadium? next to ice palace? If so I haven’t been there in a long while. I gotta go check and make sure; I hope it isn't, because it was a little dinky if I remember correctly. I'm in search of a good LFS atm. Only other decent place to find fish is at aquatic dreams out by alamoana and they are a big ol' rip off. Either way I'll have to go find them (they better still be around).

It's cool meeting people who've lived in Hawaii, quite a few here on the boards. Not too many still live here though... wierd... I like it here, maybe you could come back home waters warm all the fish you could shake a stick at heh and the police dept here is always advertising on the radio trying to get people to "join up."

~Brandon

 

[shallowreef]

Thats gonna look awesome when its done. I didn't read a lot of your posts so you may have already said this but what kind of lights are you going to run? Also are you going to do all softies, all hards, or a little bit of both? Either way it looks like its gonna be one hell of a conversation piece. So how much longer do you think until its completely finished?

Good Luck!

Nick

 

[Krish]

Nick..That tank looks great! You guys are really teasing me now...

 

[Detri]

I have really enjoyed this thread. A lot of reading but hey, price of good material hehe. Thanks Maxx

 

[Maxx]

Brandon,
CFH should still be around...
Here's the address info:

CFH
98-810 Moanalua rd
Aiea, HI
488-8801

MoananLua road runs just above Pearl Ridge mall, if your heading from Waikiki side towards Ewa. Assuming its still there, the old Kamehameha Drive in will be on your left, and some high rise condo's/apartments will be on your right.You'll go down a hill and see a small shopping strip mall kinda dealie on the left, (some sort of grocery store inside it...cant remember what it is) and you'll see a bunch of wharehouses on your right....CFH is on the right in the farthest corner of the wharehouses...
I doubt Randy, (Owner) would have gone anywhere, and if its still there, I dont think you're gonna find a better place for fish or local inverts.

I've thought about moving back several times, realestate prices are completely nuts. We bought a 1000 sq foot house in Waipahu for 148K back in 1987. We sold it 2 years later for 197k and it hadnt even been listed yet...this was word of mouth form the agent.
My understanding is that the same house would cost 300K today, and it was a damn shoebox w/ a teeny-tiny yard. Thats my only real complaint about living in Hawaii.
Here's a Mapquest link for ya Brandon.....http://honolulu.citysearch.com/map?mode=geo&id=3189801&map_lat=213907&map_lon=-1579504&fid=10&

Nick,
the tank is more or less done. I did have abit of a meltdown when I moved recently, a heater malfunctioned and cooked about half of my corals....
I'm currently running dual 250 HQI DE bulbs, (10K AB's) and two 75 watt VHO's in a dawn/dusk kinda of mode. The MH's and the VHO's are on together only about 10 minutes each day. The VHO's come on first for an hour, then the MH's come on, and 5 minutes after that, the VHO's go off. 5 minutes before the MH's go off for the night, the VHO's kick on and then run for another hour and then shut off leaving the tank in total darkness.
I'm going with primarily an SPS and clam reef, but I have one large maze brain in the tank and am thinking about adding a nice frag of a neon green Galaxia coral that a local reefer has under similar lighting and flow. I plan on adding some Ricordia, after I get the SPS corals all grown in comfortably, just to sort of fill some areas. Thanks for the compliments, but I'll be happier with the tank when things get back to normal.

Krish and Detri,
Thanks for the kind words guys.....I'm glad you guys are getting some info and enjoyment out of the thread, thats what its there for.

Nick

 

[Porkfat]

Nick,
That's definately not where I thought it was I'll have to go check it out this weekend.

About the house prices, ya it's pretty nutz, your place at 1k sq ft if it had a lot about 2.5 - 3.5k lot it would probaly go closer to 400k heheh, it's that bad.

Brandon

 

[Maxx]

11-23-05

Been kinda interesting lately......

I went to a Reef Club Meeting (http://www.seasl.org/) and picked some great frags from a freind of mine there....(Thanks Chris!)

It took a bit to acclimate them...and I lost one of them, and thought I might have lost a few others......

Chris hooked me up with:

Unknown Fuzzy acros....I dont know if they are all from the same acro or different acros. One of them has a blue axial corallite....
Several Geen Montipora digitata frags
A green Monti capricornis frag
A purple Monti capricornis frag
A green Slimer frag.....(RTN'd)
A neat Tricolor frag....(Started to RTN....stopped and is looking better every day.


While I was acclimating these corals and mounting them to rock and shells....I noticed my OceansMotions Unit had quit rotating.

Not good.

I checked to verify that it was actually on....yup....sigh...well at least it had been rotating when i first came down there a few minutes ago...

Turned off the OM unit, but left the Iwaki 55RLT running. I didnt want the OM motor to burn out, but the pump was still movign water from 2 ports.(This is where the rotating drum had frozen).

I got the frags mounted and put in a call to OM. Cass answered the phone and siad that Paul was gone for the day, but took my number, and made sure that Paul would call me the next morning.

Sure enough, he called, and began to walk me though the situation. I disassembled the OM and closed loop. The drum was stuck and wouldnt turn. Turns out the motor is very strong, and the nylon driveshaft that connects the motor to the top of the drum had been cored out. The $4.00 part did exactly what it was designed to do in this situation...and got shredded. This allowed the motor to continue turning w/o being damaged. The only problem, was that I didnt have a spare.....

You can see how ragged this hole is...it should be smooth and shaped like an oval race track.

Nick

 

[Maxx]

Thats the top of the driveshaft. The bottom of the driveshaft has a small tab that fits into a slot on the top of the inner rotating drum.

You can see the top of the drum with the slot in this pic....

After speaking with Paul, he had me take the drum out the housing of the OM unit.....It didnt fall out like it was 'sposed to. In fact I had to take a hammer and a socket extension to tap it out. It seems that a mineral build up had caused friction between the drum and the housing to a point that eventually the driveshaft couldnt take it and got "Cored" out by the motor...

Paul said that he had shipped me a version of the OM drum with pretty tight tolerances because I run my tank BB. He said he would ship me out a new drum with looser tolerances, ("A couple of 1000th's of an inch smaller) so I shouldnt have to deal with this again. He also offered to send me a replacement nylon driveshaft or he gave me the offer of a new magnetic driveshaft adapter for my OM unit for $45.00 shipped. He said the mag drive version didnt need a nylon driveshaft, and if this sort of thing happened again, I would hear the magnets inside "clicking" as they went from postive to negative (Push to pull). I took the mag drive upgrade, popped in a couple of powerheads to keep water flowing....and waited for UPS to bring my toys...

They arrived 3 days later....
The new drum was what he called a version 3 drum...it has 2 opposing ports, so 2 port would be open simultaneously, (1+3, 2+4, etc). I popped in the new drum, attached the new mag drive and watched to see how I would like the new drum....
1000 GPH coming out of four 3/4 inch loc-line ports was un-impressive to say the least....


Nick

 

[Maxx]

Paul had said I could remove the little white ring on top of the old drum and it would work with my new Mag drive upgrade.....so I got busy....
I had to drill the damn thing out enough to pry it out....but one I got it off, I could see that it was just like Paul said it would be...
Next up was sanding off the mineral deposit. Interestingly enough, Paul said that he suspected I would find magnesium on the drum as opposed to calcium. He'd seen this issue before, and when he got the drum sent to him, he soaked it in vineager and got no reaction... So before I got started, I tried the vineager thing...no reaction. I dont know what it was....but it wasnt calcium buildup on the drum.

I spent 5 minutes with a small corner type sander and was able to make the drum good as new...I made sure I made it slightly smaller than it was when I first bought it...

Now that I have my original version 1 drum (1 port open at a time....1,2,3,4 etc) the flow my Iwaki is better. I can see how the version 3 drum would be impressive if I had double my current flow...say maybe 2k gph as opposed to 1k....might hafta look into it. Need to find a good pump that doesnt draw too much electricity....I dont think I really need a pressure pump if I have 2 port open simulatneously...

Anyway....

Nick

 

[Maxx]

Time for pics.....

Here is the purple montipora cap I got from Chris....The one behind it is a Tricolor.....

Green cap...looks more brown in this photo....

Green Digitata......

Here is the unknown blue corallite fuzzy....the tips of the polyps almost look frosted...you can see what I'm talking about if you look close. The bare spots are from where the coral was trying to decide if it wanted to RTN or not....
The purple coral above it is the "rescue coral" that Jan from Clayton gave me...

Nick

 

[Maxx]

Here are the two smaller fuzzy's...again no idea what species.....I suspect its the same coral as the blue corallite fuzzy...but cant be sure.

Here are two neat frags...

The white bleached looking one is one of GRiss' and is actually white with blue polyps...its not bleached. Honest.
The other is from the same blue polyped acro I had in the tank as one of my first corals. I lost the other one during the move.....

Here is the pic of the two together....

And here is the original blue polyped acro I had in the tank.....

Nick

 

[Maxx]

And finally, here are pics of a neat green colony I got from Clayton Pet as well...its green with pink corallites...Its also got two red acro crabs in it....Bonus! I love those little guys...

And finally, the Chicken foot has colored up to its flourescent potential....

Before (29 July 05)

Today 11-23-05

Nick

 

[cheeks69]

Ohh the adventures of reefing you could fill volumes !
Love the new additions Nick, now we need a full frontal

 

[NaH2O]

Glad to hear the OM unit is back on track. Love the way the chicken foot is looking!

 

[Krish]

Tanks is looking great as usual Nick IMO! Nice pics too! Thanks for sharing...

 

[Maxx]

01-23-06

Update.....

Wow...been pretty busy and havent had a chance to do much with the tank, or pretty much anything else lately. Oddly enough, its been two months to the day since my last update.

Anyway, things have been good news/bad news lately.

I wanted another anemone for the tank, but wanted another LTA, (M.doreensis) since I'd had one before and knew they were pretty hardy.

www.phishybusiness.com had several in that looked gorgeous in the pictures, so I went ahead and ordered one.
It came in cold and not looking well at all, and didnt survive 3 days.

I called Serdar, the owner, and explained what happened. He graciously offered to either replace the anemone with another one, or give me store credit for the anemone. I was concerned about how poorly the other one had shipped so I decided to go with frags from his store.

They arrived in great shape, and packed to withstand whatever Fed-ex could dish out. I'm not kidding when I say PhishyBusiness packs their livestock better than anyone else I've ever seen. Its really just amazing. Most of the frags were huge, 2.5-3.5 inches in height with multiple corallites on most of them, the two smallest were only 1.5 inches in height. Serdar also included a tube of superglue gel and liverock rubble to mount the frags on.

I treated all the frags with interceptor and introduced them into the tank.

One frag wound up RTN'ing, (really pretty blue mille...I was bummed) but the others looked fantastic.

I started having flow problems with the tank. The OM started clicking again indicating that it was binding up. Had to dissassemble that whole thing again and sand it down. This time I used the dremel I received for Xmas and got the drum and the inside of the housing it rotates in. Paul also talked me through the whole thing, since he was not happy with what it was doing. We discovered that the pump, (Iwaki 55 RLT) is pushing the drum against one side more than another, (I have the version 1 drum...one port open at a time), causing the drum to bind and click. If I closed the ball valve between the OM and Iwaki, and slowly opened it up all the way, the drum was no longer blown against the housing and wouldnt bind up anymore.

Then my return pumps quit working on me. I came downstairs one morning and heard something horrible........silence. No water movement from the overflow to the sump. I quickly ran over to the tank and saw everything in the tank was fine, (OM unit and Iwaki on closed loop was fine), but my two return pumps had quit for unknown reasons. I took them out and dissassembled them both, and discovered the Mag 7 had stopped due to calcium buildup. I cleaned it and was able to get it started again immediately. The Iwaki 40 RLT running to my chiller started up when I turned the switch off and on...so I didnt realize what the problem was there.

A week after that, my Iwaki 55 RLT, (Closed loop) quit working. At this point I was pissed and beginning to loose my temper. Fortunately, I had a spare Iwaki 55RLT I had bought used form someone here on the board. I was able to slap that one in place and take the other one offline. When I disassembled it, it didnt look all that custed up with calcium deposits, and the motor still turned when I plugged it in with the impeller assembly removed....so I'm soaking that in vinager right now.

Important lessons you should take from this:

1...Dripping Kalk will clog up your pumps reletively quickly, (Under a year in my case). If you drip kalk, you should soak your pumps in vinager for 24-48 hours, at least once every 6 months.
2...If at all possible, plan for redundancy and back ups to your system so that mechanical failures become an annoyance instead of a lifethreat to your system. If I'd had a spare for every pump on my system that crapped out, I would have taken 10 minutes to swap them out, and been able to disassemble, diagnose, clean and or repair whatever had caused the pumps to quit working.

 

[Maxx]

While all of this was going on, some of my corals were not looking happy.

A closer inspection showed that I had acro eating flatworms...again...and I saw redbugs on my tricolor acro. I looked all over the tank and only saw redbugs on the one tricolor coral. I had already treated for both flatworms and redbugs once before, and thought I'd beaten them...guess not.

Somehow I re-introduced the redbugs. I have enough interceptor to treat my entire tank, but I wanted to avoid treating the entire tank if possible. I was able to get a glass over the redbug afflicted acro, and get it out of the tank. I put it in a small LFS specimen container in the sump to keep temp regulated, added interceptor and inserted an airstone for water movement. The next morning, I checked out the acro and saw no redbugs on it, so I placed it back in the tank. Its been about two weeks since I treated for them and havent seen any since.

I want to stress, that you really shouldnt try that and expect to eradicate the entire redbug population in your tank. They do swim, and can jump from coral to coral. I went this route because I didnt see any redbugs anywhere else in the tank, and this coral was in a highflow area so the bugs were hanging out pretty low on the coral and werent inclined to move much if the coral was jostled. Still, I wont be surprised if I have another infestation of redbugs within the next couple of months.

I went after the flatworms and I suspect I removed them from the system, but who knows for sure, I'll have to wait and see.

Finally, my little brother is a photographer up in NY. I'm very proud of him for a number of reasons, not the least of which is he's very talented.....just ask him, he'll tell you so.
Anyway, my little brother was finally in a position to give me a "hand me down", and sent me his Canon 10D to use. So now I have no excuse for crappy pictures of my tank or anything else, other than the idiot behind the camera...me.


Nick

 

[DonW]

Happy it worked out. I can pretty much count on my iwaki shutting down every 6 weeks like clock work. Once a month I dose the sump with 3 cups of muratic acid for 30 minutes, so I dont have to remove the pumps.

Don