Cali Kid Corals

The 225 Gal Monster

Arvin R said:
Drilled a siphon break into the bottom of all my returns at the first loc line and was able to get 5 more gallons of water into the system which is a much better level for my sump while running and fixes all my air bubble issues going into the display. Now to just wait for my skimmer to finish breaking in as it's throwing off a bunch of air bubbles and the bubble catch isn't helping much between the skimmer chamber and return pump chamber in my sump. If it doesn't go completely away I may just run my skimmer at night so I don't see the bubbles.
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Good stuff. Glad it's working.

That being said, sorry to be that guy, but I have to ask just in case, are you confident at having that little hole being the only thing preventing your floor from getting 5 gallons of water dumped on it? I generally viewed these sort of things as extras that are nice to prevent pump off/on from leading to a bunch of bubbles, but I'd be leery of depending on it for safety. Just takes a bit of hair algae or tank sludge to plug them.

If going this route, it might be worth drilling some secondary holes and bigger ones. Also would be a great tank to have a leak sensor in.

I say this having had my previous diy frag tank setup with a dangerous amount of water in it. It worked fine, until it didn't and when I toggled the pump one time I got a gallon or two of water on my desk and dripped down onto a non-gfci power outlet. Many mistakes were made.
 
richiev said:
Good stuff. Glad it's working.

That being said, sorry to be that guy, but I have to ask just in case, are you confident at having that little hole being the only thing preventing your floor from getting 5 gallons of water dumped on it? I generally viewed these sort of things as extras that are nice to prevent pump off/on from leading to a bunch of bubbles, but I'd be leery of depending on it for safety. Just takes a bit of hair algae or tank sludge to plug them.

If going this route, it might be worth drilling some secondary holes and bigger ones. Also would be a great tank to have a leak sensor in.

I say this having had my previous diy frag tank setup with a dangerous amount of water in it. It worked fine, until it didn't and when I toggled the pump one time I got a gallon or two of water on my desk and dripped down onto a non-gfci power outlet. Many mistakes were made.
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There are 4 of those little holes. I do plan on keeping them clear and poking something through them during maintenance/also pulling the whole loc line assembly for cleaning every so often. As a safety, the bottom of my stand can easily hold whatever amount of water would overflow (as I have it lined with shower pan liner) until the display empties down to the siphon breaks in the return nozzles.

A leak detector will eventually be added once I go automation, just haven't decided between GHL or Apex.
 
Coral reefer said:
There’s always the dreaded check valve as an extra level of safety. Not a fan usually, but sometimes it’s worth it
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Not a huge fan of those either. If I were to use one I would probably install it with a union on both sides and keep a swappable straight pipe on unions too. Do check valves reduce flow at all?

I feel pretty comfortable with what I have now. I was debating what ATO to use (currently using a Duetto and pretty happy with it aside from having one optical sensor fail in the past but it failed off which is my preferred way of failing, and the unit beeped to let me know something needed tending to) I was debating adding a float valve to the outlet of the ATO and setting it just above my typical water level in the return chamber for redundancy and preventing an "overfill" situation.

I know the Tunze is always the recommended since it has both optical and float switch but I don't believe it beeps or alerts you when your ATO res is low (please correct me if I'm wrong). The duetto does beep when ATO is low and I very much like this feature. I may just stock a new optical sensor as backup.
 
Just added this guy knowing I may never see him again. Hoping it will find my pistol shrimp and pair up. But 10 min later doing some work on my sump I see him...lol back to the display he went.
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Got all lights mounted.

I was able to get the kessils mounted up by modifying the stock mount and using a T-nut and screw from my spare RMS arms. I used a dremel with a cut wheel to grind out the welds that held the receiving nut on the kessil mounts and then just screw through into the T-nut in the RMS rail.

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Very happy with the look of radions+kessils. I'll be posting a video later of kessils on/off to show the shimmer that everyone loves kessils for. After doing this a+b comparison I couldn't ever have a display tank without the shimmer.
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Here's a video of Kessils + Radions for the Kessil Shimmer vs without (at 20 sec in). Video was taken in the evening so the Radions are already ramping down (with exception to the one on the right as I can't get it to connect to Mobius) but even with it dimmer without the kessils on, the difference in shimmer is very obvious.
 
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Kensington Reefer said:
Thank you
That was very helpful

@Da_Neefer
Do your new lights give the shimmer that the kessils do?
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Not as strongly as the Kessils. There is a shimmer but it’s more subdued. Even under evening blues it’s there. If there was no shimmer at all I’d not be happy but I enjoy the more subdued effect. Sent you a quick video but the camera doesn’t really pick it up well.
 
Arvin R said:
Very happy with the look of radions+kessils. I'll be posting a video later of kessils on/off to show the shimmer that everyone loves kessils for. After doing this a+b comparison I couldn't ever have a display tank without the shimmer.
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I agree! Looking good @Arvin R! That depth is it!!
I have the same setup running. Just on a 4’ so XR30 Blue in the middle and 360’s on the ends. I’ll be switching it up one last time very soon though. UNO 2.0s on the ends and a 360 in the middle.
 
I finally got all my Radions programmed! So the first time I did it with the two lights, it combined both my gen 5 and my gen 3 into one lighting control widget. I think this caused issues as the gen 5 has a lot more color sliders than the gen 3 and my gen 3 wasn't coming on as scheduled. I did a factory reset on the left gen 3 and reprogrammed it for this tank and this time I got a 2nd lighting widget for the gen 3 (obviously with much less color sliders).

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Now onto troubleshooting the right gen 3 light. I tried factory resets with the buttons, I tried factory reset with ecosmart connection manager, I tried updating firmware. Through this whole thing I couldn't even get it to he recognized on ecosmart live website client. I decided I was going to take my mobous chip from my working gen 3 and install it onto this unit to see if I got a bad mobius chip from ecotech somehow (I've had one go bad in the past from sitting unpowered for too long). After opening both lights I realized my dumb self installed the new mobius chip backwards...lol

After fixing my error I finally see the light under "update legacy devices" I put my phone into airplane mode, turn Bluetooth back on and do the mobius update.

Viola! I have all 3 lights programmed! Now to see if the gen 3s come on as per schedule tomorrow. I've noticed when I had them up and checking their info on ecosmart, both XR15 gen3s said "clock power - no". I hope that doesn't mean these can't hold time internally anymore. Tried searching online with no info about this line.

For now I'm going to call this a win. And will see if I still need to fight another day with it. Lol.

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My Kessil A360WEs are still just turned on manually as I need aux cords with a 90deg elbow connector to fit between the light and the RMS rail with the way I mounted them. Should be getting one in the mail tomorrow and another on Thursday.

Next up is going to be looking for a big grow light for my fuge.

Here's my old setup from my 45gal.

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And.....just as I'm about to post this, my left XR15 gen 3 turns off.....maybe I just need to pony up and give up on these gen 3s and get 2 more gen 5 or gen 6 xr15s or 30s.

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