Cali Kid Corals

Andrew's Red Sea Reefer 250

That ato is basically the same as XP Aqua Smart ATO Lite. I do like that it beeps loudly if the pump runs for too long and the sump water level doesnt come up indicating the ATO res is empty (something my tunze nano didn't do and I'm not sure if their higher end 3155 does or not). On rare occasions my unit will beep indicating an error when nothing is wrong and will need to be power cycled to get back to normal.
 
Arvin R said:
That ato is basically the same as XP Aqua Smart ATO Lite. I do like that it beeps loudly if the pump runs for too long and the sump water level doesnt come up indicating the ATO res is empty (something my tunze nano didn't do and I'm not sure if their higher end 3155 does or not). On rare occasions my unit will beep indicating an error when nothing is wrong and will need to be power cycled to get back to normal.
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Good to know about the error under normal condition. Definitely need to keep my eye on it for a while before I trust it enough while I'm on vacation...
 
PizzaOven said:
Good to know about the error under normal condition. Definitely need to keep my eye on it for a while before I trust it enough while I'm on vacation...
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I've only used one of these units so hopefully it's just an issue with mine and not a common occurrence. But I will say the extra money for the XP Aqua Duetto ATO was well worth it for me (I have two of them). Overall smoother operation (aside from 1 optical sensor going bad about 8 months in but the company sent out a replacement quickly). Knowing optical sensors go out eventually, it is now an item that I keep a backup of on hand (especially since the XP Aqua ATOs aren't sold locally to me knowledge).
 
PizzaOven said:
I added a webcam to my sump, so that I can keep an eye on things while at work/on vacation. The webcam is light enough to mount to the cabinet ceiling with double-sided adhesive tape. Cool thing about this webcam is that you can pan/tilt from the web application, which is a nice feature.

View attachment 44541
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View attachment 44542

I also have a webcam for the display:

View attachment 44544

Happy reefing!

-Andrew
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Great idea about placing a webcam in the sump. What kind of lighting are you using for your sump as it helps when trying to tinker around down there.
 
musclebenz said:
Great idea about placing a webcam in the sump. What kind of lighting are you using for your sump as it helps when trying to tinker around down there.
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For sump lighting, I'm using LED strip lights and a magnetic LED bar. Everything is motion activated, to keep photosynthetic stuff from growing.

SumpLighting.jpg


For the fixture around the perimeter:
1673802734137.png


I can make disco parties with the different colors, but honestly white is the best functional setting.

The magnetic fixture:
1673802948591.png


The webcam has night vision, so it works even when the cabinet is closed.
 
That motion activated light is a great idea. I was thinking of building something to automatically do that with my door, but I didn't honestly think about just buying one like that. I too use the LED strip lights.

Mine are also multi-colored. What I was going to do was write a little thing to see if my controller (Reef-Pi) was alerting, and if so, flip on the light and switch the color red. I also get email notifications, but the light I thought would be cool.

Regarding the ATO, I think the gravity one has a ton of benefits, particularly that it's easy to control a very slow drip rate and it's completely silent. However the lack of alerting and fickleness can be pretty annoying. My middle ground was keep the gravity feed, but have the electronic ATO dump from the external reservoir into the gravity fed ATO reservoir. So in your setup it'd end up as effectively 5gallon + 3 gallon = 8 gallons of reservoir. I then just have it enabled 30min a day, so I can reduce the amount of the day I'd have to hear it (run it off-hours) and minimize the amount of water that could accidentally dump into my tank.

Good solution you have though.
 
richiev said:
That motion activated light is a great idea. I was thinking of building something to automatically do that with my door, but I didn't honestly think about just buying one like that. I too use the LED strip lights.

Mine are also multi-colored. What I was going to do was write a little thing to see if my controller (Reef-Pi) was alerting, and if so, flip on the light and switch the color red. I also get email notifications, but the light I thought would be cool.

Regarding the ATO, I think the gravity one has a ton of benefits, particularly that it's easy to control a very slow drip rate and it's completely silent. However the lack of alerting and fickleness can be pretty annoying. My middle ground was keep the gravity feed, but have the electronic ATO dump from the external reservoir into the gravity fed ATO reservoir. So in your setup it'd end up as effectively 5gallon + 3 gallon = 8 gallons of reservoir. I then just have it enabled 30min a day, so I can reduce the amount of the day I'd have to hear it (run it off-hours) and minimize the amount of water that could accidentally dump into my tank.

Good solution you have though.
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Oh man, that would be cool to change the LED colors for status/alarms... I could imagine:

Green : OK
Yellow : Warning (ex. dosing reservoir is low)
Red : Alarm (ex. temperature out of range)

You've got me thinking about how to set this up with my Neptune controller...

And yeah, I think running both ATO's makes sense in certain situations, since I don't entirely trust either one. I plan to do this while I'm away on vacation. I'm thinking I'll run the optical ATO as primary and gravity fed as backup.
 
Update:

I found a pretty good deal on another Kessil A360X, so I decided to add a third fixture:
IMG_3109.jpg


There is better coverage now, I'm running them at 50% peak intensity:
IMG_3143.jpg


Mandarin hunting for pods. I give AlgaeBarn my money every 1-2 months to keep this guy well fed:
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New micromussa I picked up from Neptune Aquatics:
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Digitata flippin' me the bird :mad:
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Almost 1 year in, and I have never been so happy to see coralline algae!!
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Happy Reefing!
 
Today I noticed some sponges in the cryptic zones of my sump:
IMG_3171.jpg

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I think these are pretty neat, and a sign that my tank is maturing. Almost at the 1 year mark...

Did some maintenance on my algae turf scrubber. This is an air driven unit from Santa Monica:
IMG_3174.jpg

I probably could go longer before scrubbing the algae off, but I had to clean out the holes in the body to allow water to pass through, so decided to give it a quick scrub while I had it taken apart.

Also picked up this teeny-tiny-baby jawbreaker:
IMG_3179.jpg


I'm hoping some of the red speckles develop further as it grows, but that would just be icing on the cake, I love the texture and color as is.

Happy reefing!
 
I took a trip to O'ahu for 8 days. My tank ran mostly un-attended while I was drinking Mai Tais on the beach and snorkeling with Moorish Idols.

I did have a friend stop by once to check on things, change the poly filter, and feed the fish some frozen food. Left a bribe:

IMG_3189.jpg


I was worried about my Alkalinity, but it turns out I had my doser dialed in pretty well. Left at 9.5 dKH and returned to 9.5 dKH :)

As expected, lots of cyano on the sand bed and algae on the glass.

IMG_3247.jpg


After cleaning things up:

IMG_3254_C.jpg


I'm in a losing STN battle with the ORA frogskin acro :( Other than that, everything looks OK.

Happy Reefing!
 
CaseyP said:
Always a bit of anxiety and relief coming back from vacation knowing shit didn't hit the fan.

If the frogskin doesn't make it, I have a colony I can frag you off a piece when you want to try again.
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For sure, I'll take you up on that when I'm confident my system can sustain Acros. I just ordered an ICP test to rule out anything I can't test for at home.
 
Invictus said:
Looks great! How often do you clean your protein skimmer? Seems you have very few fish.
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Thanks! Yeah I guess it is pretty lightly stocked. I have 2 percula clownfish, 1 chromis damsel and 1 mandarin dragonet. I'm planning to add another fish, just can't decide what yet...

I clean the skimmer about once per week, and my nitrates stay around 10ppm and phosphate around 0.05ppm.
 
Got my ICP test results back today.

Tin detected at 5ug/L:
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Slight Potassium, Molybdenum deficiency, elevated lithium:
1676045486979.png



I was really surprised to see elevated levels of Lithium. Apparently this is common with Reef Crystals salt (which I use), but not really harmful at these concentrations, so I plan to do nothing about it.

I do plan to address the Potassium deficiency and maybe raise the Iodine level just a tad. I'm not sure where the Tin came from, anyone know if it's harmful at 5ug/L ??

Happy Reefing!
 
PizzaOven said:
Hi All,

Decided to start a tank journal for my RSR 250. I'm about 11 months in, so a lot of this is written after the fact.

I decided to upgrade from my old acrylic 55g. Below is a photo of my mature 5 year old reef tank, which really sparked my interest in reefing:

View attachment 44124

I really enjoyed this tank, but the acrylic was getting pretty scratched up from scraping coralline, and starting to annoy me. I also had a lot of zoas/discosoma which became somewhat of a pest.

Out with the old, in with the new! I purchased a new Red Sea Reefer 250 and planned to build it with the following equipment, some of which I harvested from my old aquarium.

Equipment:
2x Kessil A360x
2x MP40
2x Eheim Jager 100W heaters
Reef Octopus Classic 110SSS Skimmer
Neptune Apex Jr. + PM1, PM2 modules
Current USA eFlux 1900GPH DC Return Pump
Jabao 4 channel doser

The aquascape:
View attachment 44126

Filled with water and started cycling:

View attachment 44127

About a month after the cycle finished, I decided to try a few test corals from my old tank, so far so good!

View attachment 44128

View attachment 44130

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10 months later, with everything I wanted to keep transferred + a few new additions. I ended up selling off a lot of my old coral:

View attachment 44133
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I'll continue to update this thread as things change.

Thanks for looking, happy reefing!

-Andrew
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I think I picked up a tub of dry rock from you in Sj last year!
 
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