Scooty, The details are on here somewhere but I can do it again, no problem. I have no sump. They were not heard of when I started the tank. I use a 5' homemade venturi skimmer with 50mg/hr ozone. There is no controller or calcium reactor. I built a calcium reactor but have not hooked it up yet. The water intake is automatic and goes from a RO to a DI to a stirred kalk container then into the tank. That is all the equipment. and it is all homemade. The lighting is 300 watts MH lights (I had them left over when I lit up the outside of the Plaza Hotel in Manhatten) and 150 watts of PC actinic. The actinic is just at the water surface and the MH is about 8" high.
The reverse UG filter is run very slow, 50 gph down each tube. I know I am the only one doing this. My theory is that with such a slow flow anerobic bacteria will colonize spaces between the gravel, which is dolomite. The dolomite has been in there about 40 years, since it was a brackish tank. There is an algae trough above the water and to the rear that is the length of the tank and on an angle. There is a cement encrusted plastic screen at the bottom which can be rolled up to clean. Lighting for this is the main MH lights on the tank. It is at the rear and shields the back of the tank from light which I want to do anyway. The water is provided by the skimmer outflow.
The tubes from the UG filter were bent at the gravel line and all three come up at one rear corner of the tank. I did this so I could put one container over the water and pipe all three tubes into it. I use one powerhead to run it at 150 gph.
All of the rock I collected myself or I build from concrete, some of it is asphalt that I collect underwater in NY.
In the summer I collect NSW and in the winter I use ASW. I collect amphipods and other things under rocks on muddy beaches and dump it all in.
I really don't know what the answer is but my animals never get ich. I have been putting animals in there all those years from many different stores and they are fine. I feed all the animals with something I built, something like a large turkey baster. I feed frozen food and live blackworms that I feed Selcon. Most fish die of old age or I give them away if they get too large. Sometimes I treat NSW with bleach (but thats for another post)
I will try to put a picture up of the UG filter container and the algae trough. (these pictures are on here somewhere also.
Thats about it. Have a great day. It's snowing hard here and we are supposed to get a foot.
Paul
One is the algae trough, I built a nicer one since this prototype and the other one, the green thing next to the rusty fan is the container where the three UG tubes are connected to. You can just see the sponge filter sticking up on the powerhead to filter the water before it goes under the gravel (very important)
The last picture is one of my lettuce slugs. (elysia crispata) I had over 100 of these which grew in the tank
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