Disaster, Problems and Toys.

It's been a crazy week. As I mentioned previously my Calcium reactor sprung a leak, I've been attempting to fix it by repairing the pump with silicone until I can sort a permanent fix. This sort of worked, looks like its sealed for now but it rattles worse than a kids rattle. Also while I was on the case of the Calcium reactor I also purchased an adapter ring from JBL called U-M which allows me to use my solenoid with fire extinguisher CO2 bottles. This means I can use a 2kg cylinder which is cheap as chips to refill. So that was the problem.

The disaster, while doing some maintenance within the tank I managed to knock my LED light unit into the tank!!! One corner of the unit was submerged, luckily at the time the unit was unplugged. So after a mad panic which involved a air compressor, hair dryer and RO water to clean the electrics I decided to leave the unit to dry out over night. Next morning I plugged it in to find the controller, LCD screen and one channel of LEDs not working. ahhhhh. Panic mode, pricing up new light units. 24 hours later I managed to price up replacement parts and someone to repair it. Before sending the unit off I decided to create a new support for the light when over the tank, the support raises the height of the light, is strong and allows me to slide the unit backwards so that I can still access the tank. Once finished I test fitted the light and as a last measure I tested the light again, and would you believe it but its now fully working. Not sure how long it will last but panic mode is on hold for now.

Toys. On a rather brighter note, I've received some new equipment and additives for the tank. First up I managed to source a Maxspect Gyre 130, which also included every accessory under the sun for it. I've only just set the Gyre up and so far so good, it moves a huge amount of water in a linear line which is fantastic at keeping detritus and food in suspension. Plan is to run it in pulse mode majority of the time and in alternative gyre mode a few hours a day to mix it up. I will report back in a few days.

Additives. So I wasnt happy with the way my corals looked and decided to try NSW but also dose Red Sea Reef Colour ABCD along with AminoAcids and TraceHard. My dose scheme at the moment is 10ml of Aminoacids and TraceHard a week and 2ml every other day of the Red Sea ABCD. So far the aminoacids have made my SPS polyps extend like crazy.

DIY Tank cover

Keeping cool in the summer, and I don't mean wearing your baseball cap backwards with dark shades on!

My current seashell tank has a glass condensation tray which in the winter keeps the heat in well, but in the summer it keeps too much heat in. The simple answer is to remove the glass condensation tray however this leaves the top of the tank open giving the fish the perfect opportunity for carpet surfing (fish jumping out). What I needed was a DIY mesh cover, allowing the heat to escape, keep the fish in the water and still allow enough light to penetrate the water.

• Pros 
• Lets heat out
• Condensation tray not their to get gunked up and block light entering the tank
• Cons
• More evaporation means topping up with RO more
• Could potentially cause damp above the tank, however I have an extractor fan fitted to remove this issue, plus trickle vents in the windows always open. 

My DIY skills are a bit hit and miss, so first on the shopping list was fly netting. This stuff is cheap at around £2 for 2m x 1m and easy to work with. Next I needed to make a frame to hold the netting. I scourged the garage and found some plastic L shaped stuff, almost like trunking. It was perfect size and shape to make the frame. Cutting the plastic to shape I used hot glue to glue the 4 sides together and then used sticky back Velcro which came with the netting to secure the netting making sure to pull it tight so it doesn't sag into the tank. Pictures below show the DIY mesh cover and then fitted in place. Sorry for the poor light, I put this together at around 10pm last night so the moon lights were on.

Marine Tank Lighting

A big part of any fish tank setup is the light unit. Most people just see it as a way to light up the tank to display what's inside it. However in keeping Marine life the lighting unit is extremely important. Many corals are photosynthetic meaning they use 'light' to create its own food and as a results grow and thrive. Light also helps keep a stable PH, something often over looked, a stable PH is important to keeping your inhabitants happy and healthy.

In my tank I use a LED unit to light my tank, LEDs are cheaper to run than conventional lighting, they are also very customisable and programmable. What this means is that in my 3' long unit I can have a mixture of white, blue, red, and UV LEDs and each channel can be programmed from 0-100% brightness. There are 3 channels in my unit which can be programmed to change brightness every 30mins, channel 1 moon lighting 0-10% channel 2 blue and UV 0-100% and finally white, red, and green 0-100%.

Getting the right intensity of light for the corrent time period can be difficult. Below Image 1 shows how I originally had my light setup, ramps up slowly, peaks then begins to ramp down again. After seeking advice from a forum called Ultimate Reef I was advised to have a longer peak intensity and ramp it up and down quicker. Image 2 below shows what I am running now.

Image 1

Image 2

Marine Tank update August 2015 (part 2)

After attending a Wedding 4 hours away from home I decided to look around for a Marine shop. Anytime I go away I usually have a look around as the nearest LFS (Local Fish Store) to me is a 2 hour drive. I found myself in Kettering Aquatics. I was highly impressed by the place, their display tank was amazing to look at and something to aspire to. Their frag/coral tanks looked clean and tidy with a good selection of corals, fish and inverts.

For the last few weeks I’ve been researching new ideas to improve the flow in my tank, there’s 3 options I have narrowed it down to, Maxspect Gyre 130, Vortech MP40 or 2x Jabeo RW8’s. All have their pro’s and con’s however after visiting Kettering Aquatics I managed to narrow it down to either the Gyre which they had running in their display and was the only wave maker in there or the 2x Jabeo RW8’s which they had in many of their frag tanks. The gyre 130 produces a nice wide blanket type wave and has various settings such as pulse and gyre mode, this is a fairly new product which many reefers have ‘upgraded’ to over the vortechs. On the other hand the Jabeo RW8’s are also known for good cheap wave making capability. They don’t look too bad and having 2 allows the controllers to be pair and run in a sync’d mode. Still having a hard time on choosing, will research a bit more before I take the plunge.

While at Kettering Aquatics I made a few new purchases. 3x Green chromis, fighting conch, 5x turbo snails, maxima clam, toadstool softie coral, a few frags of xenia and a collection of sps frags.

I’ve add them all to the tank and so far all look ok, the SPS still looks like its sulking hopefully this will be ok and colour up soon. I have been researching Red Sea Reef Colour ABCD additives which I may give a go to see if it improves the colours.

Finally, I’ve always kept my marine tanks slightly higher temp than the norm due to having high powered lights that output a lot of heat or a hot house. Normal temps are usually 29-30c however I haven’t been that happy with them at that temp so I built a cooling fan which is hooked up to my STC1000 temp controller. The controller currently is set to bring the temp down to 28.5c, which over the next week I will drop it down to 27.5-28c and see if that has any improvement on coral colouration. Will talk more about this next week as a Tip of the Week. Stay tuned.

Test results this week.

CA – 390 (slightly low due to taking Calcium reactor offline to fix a leak)

KH – 8 (dropped to 6 recently now dosing sodium bicarb to bring back up to 8.5)

NO3 – 0

PO4 – 0

I will probably do a ICP test soon which costs £35 but you get results for a lot of parameters including some trace elements, it will be a good test to see where my tank is at now.

Tip of the week: Marine Tank

Water Changes Made Easy. 

Depending how you manage and replenish your water elements whether it be using triton, balling or good old fashioned water changes all these tasks can be laborious, time consuming and messy.

I run a calcium reactor to replenish the main 3, ca, kh and mg, however water changes are needed to remove nutrients and replenish trace elements. Previously I used a 2 bucket method for changing water, mixed fresh salt in one and used the other to remove the tank water. This resulted in a 10 litre water change which is less than 3% of my total volume. It was also messy, spilling salty water on my wood floor didn't go down well with the wife.

The resolution - I stumbled upon a product on various reefing forums. The company is called Reefloat and the product is the Automatic Water Changer.

It's a great bit of kit. I have the 32 litre version. Fill it with RO water add the salt and the internal pump mixes it. An hour or so later put the lid on put the 2 pipes into the tank and press the go button. It automatically changes the water and after the pre-programmed time it turns itself off. Water change done. No mess, no fuss just what I like.

Marine Aquarium Video

Short You tube video of my Marine Aquarium (August 2015)

Marine Tank update August 2015

Almost been a year since the last update. not much has happened, I let the tank settle and establish it self and just kept it ticking over. water change roughly once a month changing 32L.

Few problems along the way, the usual algae, had a weird brown sludge on the rocks which seems to be dying back. Green algae on the sand bed, thinking this is partly due to my RO water TDS creeping up in my storage container even though my RO unit produces 0TDS. My deltec calcium reactor sprung a leak around the aquabee pump, in the process of sorting this out, in the mean time I'm keeping an eye on the parameters and having to dose a little sodium bicarb as the KH dropped from 8.5 to 6 over a few days.

Other problems, I seem to have flow dead spots, my wp-25 and tunze 6025 dont seem to create enough of a wave effect so i get detritus settling in places, I'm looking at replacing the wp-25 with 2x rw8's or I may invest in a 130 gyre.

Stock wise, My 2 clowns that I have had for 10 years are well, spawning every 2 weeks. I added 2 bangaii cardinals however one of them seemed to hide constantly since i put him in and unfortunatley I lost him a few months later. I also added my favourite fish the Dwarf flame angel, had one previously in an old tank and really wanted one for this tank. Managed to pick up a 5+ head duncan for cheap and a few zoa frags. Future plans, heading to a wedding this weekend hope to stop in a few places along the way to pick up some new goodies. anyway, words are nothing without pictures Background in this FTS looks strange - think its just the way the camera captures the LEDs

Flame angel Bangaii Cardinal Duncans

New Bike - Trek x-cal 8

Recently got together with some friends and started mountain biking/trail biking. I bought a 4th hand bike a few years ago a Sarecen x-ray, unfortunately it has a tiny frame and 26" and with me being 6ft and 100KG the bike was too small. Plagued with gear and brake problems I decided to invest in a new bike. As I work for the NHS they provide their employees with the Bike scheme which allows me to purchase a bike through my employer and in return I sacrifice a small amount of my salary every month for 12 months.

I dropped into Summit Cycles in Aberystwyth to see what they had to offer and walked out with 2 quotes, Trek x-caliber 7 and 8. Reading the spec I instantly preferred the 8 plus I liked the Trek green/yellow colour it came in. 2 long weeks later and I had the call to say the bike was ready to be picked up.

Wow what a difference a good bike makes, It's smoother, fast and more comfortable to ride. I can ride for longer without killing myself and off road it rips up the local trails, both up hill and downhill. So to say I'm happy with the x-cal is an understatement. Stay tuned for more pictures and possibly some video's.

emby the new MB3

Emby the powerful home media application formerly known as Media Browser or MB3. You may have heard me or read my blog posts regarding Media Browser and how highly I rate it. The popular alternative to plex has undergone a name change, something sorter and trendier than the previous name. It was received with mixed reviews however I personally like the new name, its catchy short and keeps to its origins (say M B - emby). Along with the new name has come a new logo and again it suits the name perfectly and hopefully one day it will be as recognisable as leading brands.

So why am I blogging this? Well mainly to give you an update of what's happened to my favourite media application but also to inform people how the team at emby are progressing. Recently there's been a major server update which has seen a host of changes (screenshot 1). Along with the back end the web client has seen some minor improvements and bug fixes. The biggest changes are to the Kodi and Roku apps, both seen huge performance improvements and style improvements. Other apps such as the Windows mobile and Android have also followed suit. One of the biggest let downs at the moment is the iOS app. The previous iOS app was developed by some one not affiliated to emby so unfortunately hasn't seen any new updates, however the emby team have assured the community that they are working hard on their own iOS app which will be released in the near future, something I cant wait to see.

Site Moved

After 2 years with my previous host using word press I made the choice to move it to google blogger. There were a few reasons that pushed me in this direction which I will mention below. First things first, the move to google has been stressful, I am attempting to import all my old posts here over the next few days/weeks.

My old host was iPage, it was cheap and straight forward which is probably why I had all the problems. Firstly their support was slow and useless, often responding with one word answers or saying the problem wasn't with them. Secondly their hosting was slow, moving around the blog was sluggish which is never good for a blog site. Finally their renewal price was outragous, compared to the $2 a month I was paying for the last 2 years they wanted to up it to $9 a month and that was the final straw.

I'm a little apprehensive about moving from Word Press to blogger, but we will see what happens, stay tuned!

Audi S3 - Bi-Xenon Lights

The standard lights on the S3 are rubbish even dangerous. I decided to upgrade the standard xenon lights to bi-xenon. With standard xenon lights the dipped beam is xenon and the full beam is halogen. With bi-xenon the setup is similar to the standard however when on full beam there’s a flap inside the xenon projector that drops down to allow more light to be projected. Also with bi-xenons the projectors are large hopefully producing more light. Here a link to me post on Audi-Sport.net. Rather than post the write up I did here you can find the details in the How to section or by following this link.