Summer Heat and your Reef Tank.
9 June 2008
In the Northeast U.S. the past few days we’re getting our tank cooling methods and techniques tested. I don’t know if this is considered a heat wave, though it’s certainly close. Here a heat wave is three consecutive days over 90°F. In fact, today threatens to break the record of 96° in Boston.
It’s interesting keeping watch on the local message board to see how people are coping with what can be very stressful times for reef tank owners. Those with air conditioning or chillers are of course doing just fine. Others are struggling with temps of 90°+ in their apartments and keeping their tanks cool with clip-on fans and bags of ice.
People with basement sumps are also generally doing just fine as the cold damp basement climate combined with a big sump is enough to keep their whole system cool.
There are two tanks in my mostly finished basement, which has one exposed wall. The tanks with their metal halide lighting have pretty much changed the climate in my basement. I’m forced to run a dehumidifier, which not only dries the air, but warms it as well. The past few days, the temperature has been hovering around 80°F down there. With fans, I’ve been able to keep the tank temperature in check at 79-80° without modifying the light schedule.
Two well-known reef aquarists, Randy Holmes-Farley and Greg Hiller explained their interesting cooling methods, both using cold tap water in DIY chillers to cool their systems.
They run a very long coil of plastic tubing through their large sump, perhaps 250 feet worth, or an entire box from Home Depot. The cold water running through the coil provides a large surface area for transferring heat into the tap water and out of the sump.
The basic setup has the tap water running directly through this tubing and out into the garden to water plants or the lawn. The flow is managed by an on/off solenoid that’s rated for home water pressure, controlled with a temperature controller. Greg runs his water through the additional step of putting it through his RO/DI. He mentions this is risky as he’s adding pressure to the tubing making it susceptible to it breaking and flooding his sump with tap water.
Randy says his system uses approximately 1 gallon per 5 minutes and is generally operating only half of the time.
My own tap water is very cold coming from a deep well. This sounds like a very effective solution if the water consumption is not too high. I do need to worry about taxing my well too much.
It also requires a central sump in order to cool all tanks, which I do not currently have, though I would like to get there some day.
Do you live in a climate that reaches these high temperatures? If so, how do you cope?
Virtual Tank Tour: Oceanus Inland Reef
6 June 2008This week I had the opportunity to visit a fellow reefer Michele Wronski to pick up a pair of tank-raised clownfish.
Michelle runs a non-profit organization called Oceanis the Inland Reef which focuses on community education on marine life and coral reefs. Michelle teaches and inspires the people of all ages in her community to care for, understand, and respect, the coral reefs. A noble cause.
She’s got over 20 tanks and more than 1500 gallons of reefy-goodness. She raises clownfish, bangaii cardinals, and seahorses. Hopefully soon she’ll be breeding dragonface pipefish.
Having read the high praise that many people have for Michele on the Boston Reefers Society forums, I was prepared to be impressed. But my expectations were exceeded by the vast variety of fish and corals that Michele cares for in her facility.
Knowing that I was in for a treat, I asked Michele if I could video-tape my visit and she graciously agreed. Michele was a fantastic guide as she took me through her many fish tanks.
In case you don’t get the opportunity to get all the way out to Barre, MA (it is worth the trip), here’s a sample of the hour-plus that I spent with Michele.
A Match Made in Heaven
1 June 2008Last night I visited a fellow member of the Boston Reefers Society, Chris. It was a small get together to drink some scotch and swap fish stories, so to speak.
Chris has a 92 gallon corner FOWLR tank in which he’s got a big lionfish, a monster wrasse, a cool dogface puffer, a zebra moray eel, a damsel living on borrowed time, and a few others.
A while back, he dropped a clown in the tank which was intended to be food for the lionfish. As Chris tells it, the lionfish tried to eat the clownfish but spit it out.
It chased it around, but something happened and the clownfish was ultimately accepted into fightclub.
Now the clownfish actually hosts in the lionfish’s feathery fins. I’m not sure which one is which’s bitch, but I caught it on video. Judge for yourself.
Vornado Clip-on Fan for Tank Cooling
30 May 2008
Here in Massachusetts we get some crazy heat spikes, and we had one a few days ago bringing the tank temperature up near 84 degrees. That served as a hard reminder that something needs to be done to help keep the heat down from the two 250W MH lamps on my 75G tank.
I went on Amazon and picked up two Vornado 540B circulating fans. (One for each of my two tanks.) I figured that I could use them elsewhere in the house if they didn’t work out.
They arrived in a few days and while they’re a little bigger than I expected, they pack a big windy punch. And the two speeds should easily serve the dual purpose of both a quiet vent fan as well as a more urgent evaporation cooling when things get too hot.
Here’s a quick video of one of them in action, demonstrating the two settings and the noise level.
Reverse Durso to Quiet a Noisy Drain
26 May 2008A common situation with reef tanks is the drain plumbing dropping down into the sump, creating loud splashing noise as well as spray caused by water hitting water.
Generally, noise and splashing can be eliminated by submerging the drain pipe below the surface of the water. Putting a pipe straight under water, however, can create other problems such as flushing, trapped air that causes the water to drain in a noisy rush. It can also create a siphon which can cause the unintended draining of water when the pumps are powered off.
The solution is to create what is commonly referred to in the hobby as a “reverse durso”. I’m not sure of the spelling of this. I’ve seen it spelled both Durso and D’urso. I think it is someone’s name.
In this video, I show how I did some quick plumbing with pvc connectors commonly available at your home improvement store.
I’m no expert, but it works for me. If you know of any improvements I can make, please let me know in the comments.
Reef Tank Update
22 January 2008Wow, I’ve let this blog go fallow. While I’ve let this blog go stagnant, my fish tank activities certainly haven’t.
Last time I wrote here in May, I was running a 20 Gallon long reef tank. Lot has happened since then. Over the summer, I had a crash in that small tank. Newbie + small tank = likely disaster as it is very difficult to keep the water parameters stable. I had an incident where I added a cup or so of top-off water and all the corals shriveled up to nothing. A few of them died within hours. The rest took a week or more to recover.
At that point, my top priority was to get a bigger tank. I quickly moved everything into a 40 gallon tank and ran that for a few months while I looked for an even bigger tank.
The end result is this, that I set up in November, a 75 gallon tank.
And here are a few random pictures from it.
I’ll leave it at that for now. Though I’m going to try and get back active on this blog again. Shorter posts and more of them!
Eunice Worm - Terror in the Tank
30 May 2007One evening while sitting and staring at the tank, as I often do, I caught a glimpse of a worm that took a bite at a snail. Before I could really register what happened, it had darted back into its hole.
I have a red LED so I can see the tank at night without disturbing the fish. So I grabbed my camera and got comfortable to wait and see if it would return. It actually didn’t take long. I got the following pictures.
At first, I thought it was some sort of bristle worm. But after posting these pictures on a message board, someone suggested that it may be a Eunice worm. Eunice worms don’t have the distinctive bristles and are much more aggressive. That describes my worm MUCH better.
Unfortunately, this thing is injuring my snails which had been unwittingly crawling right over it’s cave. I found several snails laying on he bottom of the tank below the ledge in the rock where this thing lives. All snails except one seem to be ok. One snail did die and the other animals in the tank moved in for a feast.
I think this thing is quite cool and would hate to kill something so interesting. I may set up a separate tank for it and get it into solitary confinement.
New Corals
26 May 2007It’s been a busy few weeks here and I haven’t had much chance to post updates, though a lot has happened.
I replaced that peppermint that died. I decided that I probably killed it with a bad water change that affected the pH too much. That’s the only explanation that I have there. The current peppermint is doing very well, and has so far survived a water change for which I was much more careful. I’ve been using some Superbuffer-DKh to make sure the pH doesn’t drop too much on the changes.
I’ve also acquired a few new corals, three actually. The first was an open brain coral that has had my eye at the pet shop since I started this hobby. As you can see, I really like the LPS corals.
I rearranged the rock to make room for this guy in the middle. Pushed it back and created a gap. As I learn more about this hobby and what I would like this tank to look like someday, I get better and more practical ideas about how the rock should be set up.
Most recently, I got a few LPS coral frags from a local guy (contacted through the Boston Reefers Society, a very active local club with a message board). He gave me what I thought a great deal on some coral. It may have been too much to add too soon, but I couldn’t resist.
The first is a beautiful frog spawn coral with pink, white, and green tips. It has 4 heads.
The second is a nice torch coral, also with 4 heads, a few of which are splitting.
Here’s how the tank looks now.
Life and Death
12 May 2007Just like the in ocean, I suppose, things die. They’re replaced with new life. Now someone doesn’t just plunk down a replacement in the ocean like I can do in the tank. One cannot deny the god-like role we play as aquarists. Maybe that’s what makes it fun.
Coincidentally, I was at the pet store chatting it up with my favorite shop-keepers. All the while, my tank inhabitants were feasting on the peppermint shrimp.
The first sign that something was wrong was that my Bonsai Cardinal
was looking particularly guilty as it swam around the tank. Note the shrimp antenna protruding from its mouth…
First order of business was to capture him and get the antenna out of there. Once I had him in the net, I was able to pull it out. The other end was easily down in his stomach with just a little bit of meat left on the end.
Next… find the shrimp. Didn’t take long…
Way in the back corner of the tank I found several crabs munching on various shrimp parts. All that was left was the tail that you can see here. There’s no shrimp body on the front end of that tail, by the way.
I don’t know what happened. Previously the shrimp had been acting fine. I had just a few days before done a fairly significant water change (maybe a 1.25-1.5 gallons in this 20g tank), so maybe that did him in. I’ve noticed that there are few empty snail shells around as well.
Fish and corals are doing great, as are the other snails and crabs. Will keep a close watch.
So that’s the bad news. More to come on coral status as well as a new LPS coral…
New Polyps
8 May 2007I’ve added a few new corals to the tank this past weekend. I’ve been going pretty small since it’s only a 20 gallon tank. I figure I can get more smaller things in here and let them grow.
The primary purchase was these button polyps.
This rock, however, came with some nice bonuses. First, in the above picture you can see a few of the calcareous feather duster worms that came along for the ride. I’m used to seeing these tubes all over the live rock, but not actually anything in them! This rock has probably 7 or 8 of them on it. Unfortunately, they surround the rock, so this is pretty much the only way I can position it without covering some of the worms.
They are a pretty pink color when fully extended, but are super-sensitive to light and motion. if I merely tap on the floor, that’s enough to send them all into hiding. Here’s a closer picture:
Also, this rock had a fragment of a green star polyp that had spread from a much larger colony in the same tank at the store. It is quite small, but they were good enough to include it. It wasn’t hanging on to the rock very tightly, so I removed it and tucked it into a crevasse in a larger rock in the tank. Actually, there was a small piece of rock that remained attached that acted as a bit of an anchor, so it’s quite stable. I’m hopeful that it will set up camp here.
It was nice getting a few bonuses this time around. I’d actually felt previously that I’d spent a little too much on the zoanthid, which was quite small compared to the other specimines at the shop that weren’t that much more money (several times as large at only 50% more cost). Plus the cleaner shrimp that up and died, not that that is their fault. There are no guarantees in this hobby!
Total price for this addition: $39.99
