Blog Comments

Cool picture

Hard to believe that 90 snails fit into two glasses.

Neither of mine are in a high flow area. If you look at the FTSs, you'll see one is in the back right corner, and the other is walled next to the right overflow. The penductors create good flow in the tank, and a Vortech at each end creates competing water movement.

There is a smaller one that is in front of the bright green one, and it is under the path the Vortech pushes. It's the honey brown colored birdsnest, but is growing nicely. You can kind of make it out in the second FTS (full tank shot).

Looking awesome Marc! Those birdsnests are incredible.

Speaking birdsnests. I've been meaning to ask you how much current yours get? Mine is in a lower flow area of my tank, and while growning well, it has blunt, more random looking branches than yours do. Obviously I'm guessing the flow is the problem.

Originally Posted by Jnarowe

That July 2013 picture is epic!

Dang typos. Thanks.

That July 2013 picture is epic!

I have a Mag Float with a Easy Scraper glued to it. Because it's the back of the tank, I'm having to work from inside the tank with the wetside only.

Looks great Marc. What are you using to scrape the coralline off?

For the most part, it worked exactly as predicted. I didn't like that my anti-siphon holes created super jets (due to the backpressure of the penductors) that had to be dealt with. I ended up installing a blast shield beneath them to deflect that directional output. I was told by one or two people to use a check valve in reverse on the return line, somewhere over the tank. The idea was that when the pump was on, the water pressure would force the check valve closed, and when the pump was off and the siphon began, it would suck open that flapper in the check valve.

This would require that I install the check valve over the tank somewhere, because when the pump first starts some water would come out until the flapper shut fully. At the time I didn't want to look at that over my tank, but with the rebuild I may give it a shot this time.

Besides that minor issue, it worked great and I was very pleased with the flow. In this picture, you can see the surface movement was quite chaotic, no real pattern to it.

We are planning to put a penductor assembly into our 125g display/100g sump system. Our tank is arranged as a peninsula, with the right short side against the wall. We have two overflows, because when we purchased the first and installed it we were not happy with the amount of flow to and from the tank, and installed another beside it. The overflows are located on the back (long) side of the tank, closest to the (short)wall-facing end of the tank. The return is also there, closest to the wall. Our sump is in the basement, with a Little Giant 4 MDQ(can't remember the whole saltwater model number) pump to push the water back up to the tank. We get pretty good velocity at the return entry to the tank, but I would like to be able to direct the flow around the tank and introduce more chaotic water movement. Some places in the tank have slower, more laminar flow, and our corals have been placed accordingly. We have no other circulation pumps in the tank, and I've been trying to find a way around putting any in there if at all possible.
We have experimented with different configurations of the return and I want to try the penductors. We have 1" pipe, and I am planning on using 1" penductors.
My questions: Did you feel that you got enough water flow volume runnning from the pump through the two penductors to move water through the tank at the required gph rate? If there was anything you would change about the penductor assembly, what would it be and why?
Thanks Mark!

I may, but I doubt that the ATO would be affected if water enters and exits at the same pace. It should stay stable at the same height during that duration.

oh ok so that one pump will both remove and add water at the same time. that is ideal! are you going to run any type of switch to try to avoid the possible bad in this setup? or during the time that this is running turn off the auto top off just in case?

No, that's not what I'm saying. Both heads move at the same rate because they are twin units on a single drive shaft.

Once a day, say 3 a.m. the timer will turn on the Masterflex and run it for the duration required to move water both out and into the sump at the exact same time at two different locations until 4g has been changed.

so are you looking to have a constant drain or a type of solenoid that opens the same time as the doser turns on? or are you wanting to manually open a valve and turn on a pump? The way I read it was you dose in say 1% of the total water volume in a 24 hour period while the same volume flows in? If you created a sperate chamber that water levels could be read in so as to not interfere with the auto top off then you could set up switches similar to an auto top off.

say you have a container plumbed into a drain that has a valve on it and two float switches. one float switch activates the water coming into the tank and the other activates a small pump that moves water from the tank into the container. if you could get pumps at the same rating controlled by the float switches then all you would have to do would be to drain the old water out by opening that valve.

or you could get another separate container to drain a specific amount of water change water into with a switch hooked up to it to kill the pump when the water gets low in the holding container and then once again a container for the old water that stops the pump once it gets to a certain level.

Either one of those would require still some level of effort on your part but it would sure beat lugging around bucket after bucket of saltwater for that massive volume.

Nice to hear your thoughts Jimmy. And congrats on your presidency!

When I was living in Wyoming I read lots of articles and heard a lot of people citing Scott's work as gospel. And through my time in the hobby I have put into practice a lot of his suggestions in maintaining my reef tank. When I moved to California, it was great to finally hear him speak at RAP, and then finally meet him and pick his brain at one of the local monthly reef club meetings.

Now that I'm involved locally and have assumed the role as president of MASVC we've been working together to promote this hobby and Scott has played a pivotal part in bringing the SoCal clubs together to build camaraderie. He also graced us with his presence at MASVC FRAG swap (local yearly expo held in December) which was awesome to have someone of his stature on the venue. Hopefully next year he will be one of the guest speakers...

Since he has started Unique Corals which is mostly an online store closed to the public, he has opened his doors for us "reef nerds" to hold meetings and events there, but every time he hosts an event, I'm always busy (if only life didn’t keep getting in the way). I ran into him yesterday at CFM and he offered to give me a personal tour of his facilities anytime just call in advance first (you can definitely count on me taking him up on that offer).

Since the inception of Unique Corals they have made themselves available and have supported us to no end. It's only fair to reciprocate the gesture. I know that those throughout the US will benefit from their always growing coral selection.

I digress…

If you have the opportunity such as the one coming up at Next Wave , I wouldn’t pass up the chance to go listen to him speak, you will definitely walk away from there more educated than when you walked in.

Jimmy

Our fungia has spawned at least a dozen babies . W are fungia heavy!!!

woot! Good to see she's doing well!

It happens to all of us. Where do you think MY pictures came from? hehe Thanks!

Yes you can. Even though it's not very good advertisement on my part. LOL