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How Not to Build A Reef Tank... I've got a question I'd like to pose to the collective wisdom of the net, but first let me give you some background on my tank.
I have kept freshwater tanks for a number of years, and decided to try my hand at a marine system. The only aquarium I had available at the time was an extra 10 gallon all glass stashed away in the basement somewhere. I took off looking for it, prepared to find it covered with dust and spiders, but man, I was pleasantly surprised to find out otherwise. I seems that my wife had put it to good use these past several years. I guess she had been having a problem with leaking bottles of laundry detergent and other cleaning supplies and so she just placed them in the aquarium to keep the stuff from running every where. The excess seemed to just run under the UGF plates and keep the bottles relatively tidy. Obviously, cleaning up this tank was going to be a snap! I tossed out all those bottles, (the seemed fairly empty by then) and got to work. My first problem was removing those filter plates. It didn't look as if they were wedged in there very tightly, but I certainly could't pry them loose! I thought that bleach or battery acid or a good soaking with WD-40 would free it up, but they wouldn't budge, so I guess they were supposed to fit that way. I cleaned up the thing as best as I could, and also scraped away most of that grey-green tar-like stuff, and started planning the rest of the system. Now I knew that UGF's were not the filter of choice in marine systems, but hey! It was there so I used it! There was that part of me that wanted to `do it right', though, and so I built myself a trickle filter. It's really easy to do, and I would recommend it to any one. My first attempt used a 40 quart kitchen garbage pail as the tower. I filled this with chopped up IC tubes for the bio-media. I was a little worried about the printing on the side of the tubes saying they were anti-static coated, so I soaked the first batch in acetone, to remove the coating. The less said about that, the better. I finally resorted to soaking the pieces in hot water, until the water doesn't turn quite so grey. I did try frappe-ing one bunch in the blender, but the smell wasn't very nice and it took me almost an hour to get enough plastic out from around the blades so that the motor would run again. Anyway, I piled all those pieces of chip tubes into the garbage pail, and filled it up. I got a used pump from an industrial surplus house (only $15.00!!!) and hooked it up as my water return, after scraping most of that yellow stuff off of it. Now I know Thiel says to pump lot's of air into the trickle tower, but That Fish Place wanted over $75.00 for the Whisper 1000 Thiel suggested. Not while there's that old air conditioning blower from my '72 Chevelle out in the garage. I just got some drier vent hose and cut a hole in the side of my garbage pail, and hooked the two up. I decided to test run this setup a little, and when I fired up the air blower, I blew darn near every single chunk of media plastic clear out of the tower! I knew then that I needed a drip tray over the top of the tower. I fashioned one out of tupperware and an old piece of plexiglass I had lying around, and fixed it firmly on top of the tower. Pouring water in the top assured me that the drip tray was working out pretty well, so I turned on the fan again. The most interesting thing about that was, the water that didn't actually fly out and onto the walls and ceiling seemed to be little droplets suspended about 8 inches over the drip tray and moving from one air stream to another. Fascinating, but not what I was actually looking for. Once again, I hauled out the shop-vac to clean up, and suddenly it hit me! I knew the perfect way to make a wet-dry filter! I would use this great old shop-vac! It's made for wet or dry! It has the capacity I need! So I fitted the shop-vac OVER THE TOP of the display tank. That's the key! I suck the water out of the tank, into the vac, over the media, with plenty of air, and I drilled out a return hole in the bottom to drain the vac back into the aquarium. Perfect! Of course, I probably should have cleaned out the shop-vac little better before actually trying out the system, but it turned out OK. It is kinda surprising how small a wet dust bunny is. One drawback, however. I had to remove the telephone from the room, 'cause somehow the new filter affected it's operation. It seemed like no one could hear me, and I know I could hardly hear the callers. Moving the phone to the basement cleared it right up. I decided to have a protein skimmer on my system 'cause by now I had been reading the aquaria newsgroups long enough to figure out that those reef aquarium keepers seem to be having all the excitement, and they all rave about skimmers. Besides, there seemed to a fair amount of foam being generated in the new "shop-vac power trickle" filter. I had some GREAT ideas on how to build one myself, from scratch, but my wife absolutely insisted on buying me one for my birthday. Watta gal! Needless to say, I got a nice, big, free standing, powerhead driven, counter-current, venturi style protein skimmer with ozone! Arr Arr Arr ooh ooh ooohhhyesss! Sorry, about that, a little Tim Allen lingo crept in there! I fired that bad boy p. skimmer up, and dang if it didn't suck half of the water out of the tank! The foam was just a-churnin' out! I topped off the tank water, and just sat back to admire the system for a minute. I did wonder at the quantity of the foam, considering that I hadn't yet put any animals in the tank yet, but I supposed that dissolved organics might not be all that it may be good at removing. Now I needed a light for the system, but this was even easier than the tricle filter. Natural sunlight! What could be better? I just replaced the panes of glass in the south window with low refectivity, high transmission glass, and bingo! Bright, correctly color balanced, natural light! One of the advantagious fringe benefits of being a ham radio operator is the fact that there is an antenna tower just outside the window, I was able to mount a pair of big reflecting mirrors on the tower to shine full strength into the tank. Of course, here in Minnesota, the days get kinda short in winter, so I picked up a pair of 500W Halogen bulbs, and an old carbon arc projector bulb to supplement. I placed them in concentrating reflectors I made by pounding out some old hub caps (Chevelle again!). Man, when I turn those babies on at night, motorists on my street can turn their headlights off! Since adding the lights, I haven't really seen the need for a heater, and it seems to take the better part of the night for the temperature to come back down anyway. Soooo let's see, I've covered the tank, the filters, lights, heat... What's left? Oh yeah, the water. There is a fairly inexpensive product commonly referred to as 'Ice Bite' and this is mostly Calcium Chloride. I figured that using this stuff and some off the shelf table salt, I could get by, no problem. However, after considering more carefully, I figured that you just can't be too carefull about what you put in your tank, so I just used tap water and Reef Crystals. I ordered a case of live rock, which I thought would be great way to set up the tank, and so I just plopped that stuff in there, turned on all the equipment, and set off to the fish store for some critters to stock this thing with. I wanted a real nice assortment, and ended up coming home with: 1 pair of Neon Gobies 1 Cleaner Wrasse 2 Copper-Banded Butterfly fish 1 Percula Clown Anemonefish 1 Pink Tipped Anemone (Candylactis?? (sp)) 1 Angelfish whose exact type escapes me for the moment 1 Brain Coral 1 Leather Coral and finally, 1 of those really nifty little Peppermint Shrimp things Wow, did that all look great! I needed to rearrange some of the rocks a little to allow all the fish to get completely in the water, but that was really no problem at all. I set the lights on a timer I picked up on the way home from the pet shop, after getting the groceries, and left the fish to get used to their new home. I was late for work the next morning, so I don't know what the situation was in the morning, but when I got home that night, I was shocked. The corals and the butterfly fishes had both spawned! No, only kidding. Sadly, the whole mess seemed pretty dead, and was well on it's way to smelling strongly, too. My question is : What did I do wrong? |
If you have any aquarium hobby related Anecdotes or a Humorous Mishap that you've "heard" and would like to have them posted here to share with everyone, please send me an email with the anecdote to Saltwater Aquarium Guide. You will be credited for the submission. Thank You!
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