Blog Comments

The Additional opening on top of the wood cabinets makes it really easy to work with lighting from above, lift up a pendant for cleaning or bulb maintenance instead of reaching from below.

All pendants, Rack are attached to the cables and pulley rope by steel quick release attachement so the complete rack can be taken out in 5 min for maintenance. Just release the steel cables quick release, drop the rack with the pulley till its held on the tank bracing, disconnect Pulley quick release and then 2 persons can easily take it out.
Will be adding a couple of roll bolts in the wall with quick release attachement which will make raising the rack to a specific height much easier, thinking 2 fixed points one at mid height and one at max height, which should be more than enough for added accessibility if I need to go in the tank and well as for 3 step light acclimation...
And some pics from above


Still need to take out the rack and reinforce it for the slight bending I'm seeing, as well as add support for T5 supplemental lighting.

Will use Rubber coated steel cables for support and this rope and Pulley rollers for the Pulley system.Rollers are rated for 50 KG (around 100 pounds each) so much more than the weight I have.






When in normal operating height (Bulbs at 21" from water level for Lumenbrights) the pendants will be held by individual Steel cable from ceiling, and rack will be held by 6 Steel cables so no stress on the pully system. When/if I need more space for major maintenance or maybe when light acclimating the Pulley attached to 4 points on the rack will be of course supporting the complete weight. I'm notticing some beding in the rack du to missing support for the internal beam holding the MH so this will be corrected next week by adding additional supports so weight is better distributed.

Light Rack drilled and hooks installed to suspend it:

very nice, I am at home so I can finally see the pictures

@ DJ The lighting article says "Combining the addition of extra plankton with extra light may yield significantly higher coral growth rates, by removing other limiting factors such as nitrogen availability." Am I reading this to say that the copepods that come from the refugium are feeding the coral and that if you can produce more of them along with the proper lighting your corals should grow better? How do you limit the nitrogen availability?

I have cultured food before but not anything you would want to feed your tank

Soon as I get my tank ironed out Im going to start of culturing live food. I read another article that showed sps trapping baby brine shrimp, so since I have plenty of time Im going to give it a shot and would have to be better than pouring in bottled stuff. Im not sure why but I know every time I feed it my skimmer stops foaming and I would think the opposite would be the case.

Interesting article DJ makes you wonder what is the balance point between not enough and to much light

NP,love the cap cant wait till my stuff starts to grow in I got a problem some where not sure what it is but im not getting near the growth I should. Some sps have 2x and some have not grown in 5 months. and colors come and go. I run a Berlin setup with a fug and just been doing water changes instead of dosing, I broke down and finally order a bunch of test kits and some two part additives and going to try running some carbon on the tank though I hate to because of lat line problems it can cause in tangs. Hopefully I can get some growth going it getting pretty depressing here

Thanks for the taking the time to find the link. Very informative.

hey I knew I read a article on this not long ago but couldnt remember where ( do alot of surfing) I found it after about a hour of looking and I think it directly relates to your question
http://www.coralscience.org/main/art...igh-irradiance
hope it helps

Originally Posted by DJ in WV

Are there 2 different tanks in those shots looks like the same one two sets of the same photos?

Sorry messed up the photo links. Fixed it, Thanks.

Are there 2 different tanks in those shots looks like the same one two sets of the same photos?

Thanks for the replies.
The tank on top is lit by a mix of 10-12K
the bottom one is under 20Ks

Growth looks good and stable I wouldn't change a thing. Are those 10K?

If you feel growth and coloration are good, you should not change anything. Why fix a problem that does not exist?

I'd say those PAR values are pretty good and are likely a contributor to the growth. Coloration is debatable. If you want to play around with colors, perhaps you can try changing bulbs to something bluer without dropping PAR too much.

At the end of the day, it's how you feel about your tank. If you like it... don't change it.

nice looking aquarium

yep was very weird for me as well, only reason I can find is the wrasses completely decimating them which i think is not possible (only had 2-3 wrasses in the tank at a time) Another theory would be som high toxic buildup in the sand killing themn but that would have killed some fish at least. Nitrates did go up in the last 6 months and had many STN events on many corals and lost some... Will be breaking down the frag tank in line with the tank in the coming days which has a 6 inch DSB and we'll see if there are any worms or critters there.

That seems weird to me Ive never had any trouble keeping a pop of bristleworms had lots of trouble trying to rid my first system of them when they were on the hit list years ago.

What was his favorite part of MACNA this year? I need to write him.