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The Island Reef
- Thread starter PmRg
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PmRg
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PmRg
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Hi everyone 
News.... just upgraded from Gen3 Radions to Gen4 Radions, first impressions the spread of this fixture is AMAZING, reminds me of my old T5 lights with the PLUS of LED shimmering, took some PAR measures and the PAR measures all around the tank is very consistant the values in bottom do not change from below the fixture towards the glass this is really nice at the moment I have a consistent PAR value on the bottom of ~230, middle of the tank ~400 and top of the tank ~550, I'm very impressed with the new lens.
Here it is the install video, "sort of" vlog style ahah hope you like it
[media
Pedro
News.... just upgraded from Gen3 Radions to Gen4 Radions, first impressions the spread of this fixture is AMAZING, reminds me of my old T5 lights with the PLUS of LED shimmering, took some PAR measures and the PAR measures all around the tank is very consistant the values in bottom do not change from below the fixture towards the glass this is really nice at the moment I have a consistent PAR value on the bottom of ~230, middle of the tank ~400 and top of the tank ~550, I'm very impressed with the new lens.
Here it is the install video, "sort of" vlog style ahah hope you like it
[media
Pedro
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PmRg
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Hello everyone,
Updated pics... after escaping a tragedy on the 23rd of December when one of my solenoid valves failed and drained 20-40L of RO water into the sump, bringing salinity down to 1.021 in 48h lost a cleaner shrimp nothing else.
I need to install an aquarium computer to save me from future troubles uffff
Will post some comparison pics on the 14th of Jan.... it will be around 1month and 2weeks since I installed the new Radions G4.
So for now some pictures I took today
Pedro.
Updated pics
... after escaping a tragedy on the 23rd of December when one of my solenoid valves failed and drained 20-40L of RO water into the sump, bringing salinity down to 1.021 in 48h lost a cleaner shrimp nothing else.I need to install an aquarium computer to save me from future troubles uffff
Will post some comparison pics on the 14th of Jan.... it will be around 1month and 2weeks since I installed the new Radions G4.
So for now some pictures I took today
Pedro.
PmRg
Registered
Yes, not that bad but Aquarium Controller is more of a backup
----
NEWS. The new sump has landed. Very excited to install it, just need a few more parts to adapt it to the system
meanwhile... a couple of pics of the details.Congratulations to Seadreams for this amazing piece of art, the level of detail and planning applied into this sump is outstanding, with a top of the line build quality.
Will post more pictures tomorrow of all the details and describe the new The Island Reef filtration system, planned for the Triton Applied Reef Bioscience method.
Pedro.
PmRg
Registered
Hello again,
A few pictures of the sump, still sitting on my garage. At the moment I'm waiting for the rest of the parts to be able to install it
Description the project.
On the first section in the left there are 2x 32mm inlets that receive the water from the DT, the water falls into a bubble breaker and then into the filter sock section. The filter sock section will not have a filter sock installed most of the time since the Triton Method does not advice it I will only use the filter sock when I do major DT cleaning. Then the water enters the refuge on the algae bed ensuring that a lot of flow passes by the algae bed and eliminating the need for flow pumps.
The refuge is lit by an Ecotech Marine Radion XR15w Freshwater, full spectrum, installed on a custom made support made by Seadreams.
The second section is the equipment section that will hold a skimmer, return pump, 2x Aqua-Medic Titanium 200w heaters, probe supports etc...
Dosing, there are 10 inlets for dosing tubes 4 of them are situated above the filter sock this is where the Core7 will be dosed to ensure a VERY good flow and directly in the algae bed like the manual says because "Core 7 reacts with bio-chemical compounds after dosage ( white cloud effect ). A lot of this "reaction partners" can be / are produced by the algae and are a perfect match in that case ;-). so not realy important for the algae but very good for the Core7 reaction."
On the other side there are the rest of the dosing inlets that will be used to dose trace elements and other things that might be necessary along the way.
The 4 Core7 recipients are also created by Seadreams to fit the back side of the sump or can be installed in other sections of the equipment cabinet will decide further on.
Here it is my new filtration system created for the method I'm following.
Pedro.
A few pictures of the sump, still sitting on my garage. At the moment I'm waiting for the rest of the parts to be able to install it
Description the project.
On the first section in the left there are 2x 32mm inlets that receive the water from the DT, the water falls into a bubble breaker and then into the filter sock section. The filter sock section will not have a filter sock installed most of the time since the Triton Method does not advice it I will only use the filter sock when I do major DT cleaning. Then the water enters the refuge on the algae bed ensuring that a lot of flow passes by the algae bed and eliminating the need for flow pumps.
The refuge is lit by an Ecotech Marine Radion XR15w Freshwater, full spectrum, installed on a custom made support made by Seadreams.
The second section is the equipment section that will hold a skimmer, return pump, 2x Aqua-Medic Titanium 200w heaters, probe supports etc...
Dosing, there are 10 inlets for dosing tubes 4 of them are situated above the filter sock this is where the Core7 will be dosed to ensure a VERY good flow and directly in the algae bed like the manual says because "Core 7 reacts with bio-chemical compounds after dosage ( white cloud effect ). A lot of this "reaction partners" can be / are produced by the algae and are a perfect match in that case ;-). so not realy important for the algae but very good for the Core7 reaction."
On the other side there are the rest of the dosing inlets that will be used to dose trace elements and other things that might be necessary along the way.
The 4 Core7 recipients are also created by Seadreams to fit the back side of the sump or can be installed in other sections of the equipment cabinet will decide further on.
Here it is my new filtration system created for the method I'm following.
Pedro.
PmRg
Registered
Greetings fellow reefers.
I STOPPED DOING WATER CHANGES 3 MONTHS AGO hum... I'll explain further on...
More than one month has past since I installed the new Radions G4, and it's time for some comparison shots of coral growth over 1month. On the 14th of December I took a lot of topdown shots and today I tried to take the same picture from the same angle to have a good idea of growth and color.
Before I start posting pictures... A bit of background story of what I've been doing so far.
On the 6th of June I started following the Triton Method, coming from the Zeovit method(previous tank) I had no idea what I was getting into ahah... But it was alright because on this system I was doing a different approach, I didn't want to dose stuff with fancy names (this time I leave the fancy names just for the corals hehe) I wanted to learn about the elements and what was the consumption of trace elements on a normal tank... So I went with the Triton method.
In the beginning I was trying to get a stable Kh, but it was a bit hard the system had something unblanced and the corals were not looking as good as I liked, but I keeped doing what I was doing.... Water changing even more and finally the Kh was stable.
Then it was time to send a triton test to check how was the elements, so I did and found out that even with all the water changes I had a few elements missing and very low potassium and strontium plus another ~6 elements very low or missing if I remember correctly, I keeped on doing water changes... But still there was something missing so I sent another triton test and even with my correction doses plus the maintainance doses the results were not satisfying.
On one of my forum threads I met Orz and he told me that he has not done a single water change for 12+ months and when he sent me a picture of his tank looking like a zeovit tank I couldn't believe it... Still I was afraid of not doing water changes(new concept/I always did water changes) also because at the time I had a very small refuge, this being one of the main requirements for nutrient exportation I had to do something, so I managed to raise my algae volume while I was waiting for the Seadreams sump and decided to STOP making water changes.
It was being impossible to calculate elements consumptions while doing water changes at the same time, I send a NSW sample to analyse everything looked good but then we reached a conclusion that NSW values will probably change seasonally so calculations with NSW variables were too complicated to keep up with, I felt like doing a water changes was actually making me spend more ml of trace elements trying to fix the water change unbalanced from my tank values.
On the first couple of months I keeped a close eye on the nutrient levels I started with a Po4 of 0.02 Hanna (~0.07 Triton normally) and No3 0.25ppm Red Sea Pro test so I had a bit of high Po4, anyway this reading was gone when I raised my chaeto algae volume, a friend of mine got me around 1.5L of chaeto and after a couple of weeks I was reading Po4 0.00 Hanna (by experience I believe this is 0.02 on Triton), No3 0.00ppm on Red Sea Pro test kit... This was very low so lately I started noticing the corals more pastel with a crazy polyp extention.
I've been feeding frozen food for long time now, one washed cube per day and also on alternated days frozen Ocean Nutrition Microplankton.
So on the 4th of January I reached 3months with no water changes just propper elements tuning by calculating doses with the help of the Triton tests and the system is now veryyy stable.
- Correction… I had a problem on the 23rd of Dez with my ATO unit and 20-40L of RO water went into the system in 48h, by the time I noticed it I had my salinity come down from 1.026 to 1.021 in 48hours so it was 3am that day and I made a 50L water change to raise the salinity and the elements and on the following day another water change of 70L to raise another salinity point… and stopped at 1.023… started to topup with NSW until the salinity was 1.026 again, this messed up all of my fine tuning I had been doing for the past 2months and a half… but the system looks OK, not as good as before but still looks good. I sent a water sample to Triton on last Monday and hopefully I'll have the results next week.
At the moment I have crystal clear water, using only Triton Carbon and still no need to use any GFO. The corals are growing a lot with good colors and very good polyp extention.
Some final toughts, in the beginning I was afraid of stopping the water changes but by analysing the results I noticed that I could hold the system just by maintaining the trace elements and controlling the nutrients… at the moment I feel that my system is really stable (apart from the RO disaster). Going back and thinking about my previous system with KZ I find that it's also a good method but needs different husbandries like any other method out there it consists on putting trace elements in "blindly" and make lots of water changes to keep the system stable just my personal opinion…. I also reached the conclusion that doing only water changes is impossible to maintain certain trace elements unless you do massive water changes almost dailly, at the moment with a relatively low coral load I notice a LOT of trace consumption.
This is why I'm loving what I'm currently doing with the ability to analyse and get a feel of what's happening with thmany different ele trace elements.
So let's see some growth photos... these photos were taken on the 14th of December, the new G4 Radions were installed on the 29th of November, so let's see the coral growth and corlor between 14th December and 14th of January.
Note that between this period I raised intensity from 70% to 80% and also raised warm white from 5% to 10%, also lowered the nutrients to make the corals more pastel like... maybe a challenge to make them look like "zeo" colors humm
Pedro.
I STOPPED DOING WATER CHANGES 3 MONTHS AGO hum... I'll explain further on...
More than one month has past since I installed the new Radions G4, and it's time for some comparison shots of coral growth over 1month. On the 14th of December I took a lot of topdown shots and today I tried to take the same picture from the same angle to have a good idea of growth and color.
Before I start posting pictures... A bit of background story of what I've been doing so far.
On the 6th of June I started following the Triton Method, coming from the Zeovit method(previous tank) I had no idea what I was getting into ahah... But it was alright because on this system I was doing a different approach, I didn't want to dose stuff with fancy names (this time I leave the fancy names just for the corals hehe) I wanted to learn about the elements and what was the consumption of trace elements on a normal tank... So I went with the Triton method.
In the beginning I was trying to get a stable Kh, but it was a bit hard the system had something unblanced and the corals were not looking as good as I liked, but I keeped doing what I was doing.... Water changing even more and finally the Kh was stable.
Then it was time to send a triton test to check how was the elements, so I did and found out that even with all the water changes I had a few elements missing and very low potassium and strontium plus another ~6 elements very low or missing if I remember correctly, I keeped on doing water changes... But still there was something missing so I sent another triton test and even with my correction doses plus the maintainance doses the results were not satisfying.
On one of my forum threads I met Orz and he told me that he has not done a single water change for 12+ months and when he sent me a picture of his tank looking like a zeovit tank I couldn't believe it... Still I was afraid of not doing water changes(new concept/I always did water changes) also because at the time I had a very small refuge, this being one of the main requirements for nutrient exportation I had to do something, so I managed to raise my algae volume while I was waiting for the Seadreams sump and decided to STOP making water changes.
It was being impossible to calculate elements consumptions while doing water changes at the same time, I send a NSW sample to analyse everything looked good but then we reached a conclusion that NSW values will probably change seasonally so calculations with NSW variables were too complicated to keep up with, I felt like doing a water changes was actually making me spend more ml of trace elements trying to fix the water change unbalanced from my tank values.
On the first couple of months I keeped a close eye on the nutrient levels I started with a Po4 of 0.02 Hanna (~0.07 Triton normally) and No3 0.25ppm Red Sea Pro test so I had a bit of high Po4, anyway this reading was gone when I raised my chaeto algae volume, a friend of mine got me around 1.5L of chaeto and after a couple of weeks I was reading Po4 0.00 Hanna (by experience I believe this is 0.02 on Triton), No3 0.00ppm on Red Sea Pro test kit... This was very low so lately I started noticing the corals more pastel with a crazy polyp extention.
I've been feeding frozen food for long time now, one washed cube per day and also on alternated days frozen Ocean Nutrition Microplankton.
So on the 4th of January I reached 3months with no water changes just propper elements tuning by calculating doses with the help of the Triton tests and the system is now veryyy stable.
- Correction… I had a problem on the 23rd of Dez with my ATO unit and 20-40L of RO water went into the system in 48h, by the time I noticed it I had my salinity come down from 1.026 to 1.021 in 48hours so it was 3am that day and I made a 50L water change to raise the salinity and the elements
and on the following day another water change of 70L to raise another salinity point… and stopped at 1.023… started to topup with NSW until the salinity was 1.026 again, this messed up all of my fine tuning I had been doing for the past 2months and a half… but the system looks OK, not as good as before but still looks good. I sent a water sample to Triton on last Monday and hopefully I'll have the results next week.At the moment I have crystal clear water, using only Triton Carbon and still no need to use any GFO. The corals are growing a lot with good colors and very good polyp extention.
Some final toughts, in the beginning I was afraid of stopping the water changes but by analysing the results I noticed that I could hold the system just by maintaining the trace elements and controlling the nutrients… at the moment I feel that my system is really stable (apart from the RO disaster). Going back and thinking about my previous system with KZ I find that it's also a good method but needs different husbandries like any other method out there it consists on putting trace elements in "blindly" and make lots of water changes to keep the system stable just my personal opinion…. I also reached the conclusion that doing only water changes is impossible to maintain certain trace elements unless you do massive water changes almost dailly, at the moment with a relatively low coral load I notice a LOT of trace consumption.
This is why I'm loving what I'm currently doing with the ability to analyse and get a feel of what's happening with thmany different ele trace elements.
So let's see some growth photos... these photos were taken on the 14th of December, the new G4 Radions were installed on the 29th of November, so let's see the coral growth and corlor between 14th December and 14th of January.
Note that between this period I raised intensity from 70% to 80% and also raised warm white from 5% to 10%, also lowered the nutrients to make the corals more pastel like... maybe a challenge to make them look like "zeo" colors
humm
Pedro.
pelici25
Registered
Nice work, Pedro. What a difference in a month's time. Super!!!
Maximum enjoy, minimum efford. I love it!
My last waterchange was about 4 years ago.
Except:
When cleaning the sump, aprox. 25l/year.
When selling some frags sallinity drops... Or exhausting cyano alswell.
I work with DSR, every 3 months I send in a Triton or ATI test.
Very nice sump you have, that's an eyecatcher aswell.
Maximum enjoy, minimum efford. I love it!
My last waterchange was about 4 years ago.
Except:
When cleaning the sump, aprox. 25l/year.
When selling some frags sallinity drops... Or exhausting cyano alswell.
I work with DSR, every 3 months I send in a Triton or ATI test.
Very nice sump you have, that's an eyecatcher aswell.
PmRg
Registered
PmRg
Registered
PmRg
Registered
Hello
After getting my Triton test results back... with a lot of stuff to adjust due to the problem I had with the RO spill :/, I proceeded with the adjustments and after 15days the corals are looking much better
For now here it is a timeline of FTS's
Dec 2015
May 2016
Ago 2016
Nov 2016
Early Jan 2017
End Jan 2017
A couple more pics
.
After getting my Triton test results back... with a lot of stuff to adjust due to the problem I had with the RO spill :/, I proceeded with the adjustments and after 15days the corals are looking much better
For now here it is a timeline of FTS's
Dec 2015
May 2016
Ago 2016
Nov 2016
Early Jan 2017
End Jan 2017
A couple more pics
.
PmRg
Registered
Hello,
Well it's time for some more monthly growth pictures the tank has been very stable plus I made a major trace elements adjustment been noticing very good improvements.
Pictures were taken with the same camera settings, using the same edit values and also tried to keep the same camera position but that's the hardest part…
Not only SPS is growing but also my nemesis a Maxima Clam ahah
.
Well it's time for some more monthly growth pictures
the tank has been very stable plus I made a major trace elements adjustment been noticing very good improvements.Pictures were taken with the same camera settings, using the same edit values and also tried to keep the same camera position but that's the hardest part…
Not only SPS is growing but also my nemesis
a Maxima Clam ahah
.
PmRg
Registered
Looking better every time Pedro
Thank you Philip
Nice growth, Titon does all the hard work.
How giant is your T. Maxima? I allway had a problem with the smaller (4-5 cm)ones... 3 years ago I added 12cm clam, no problem so far...
Keep up the happy reefing!
yes, very pleased with Triton
T. Maxima is around 4cm... this clam was tiny.... never had such luck with a clam before... I think that having it up on the rock, plankton feeding and trace element dosing is the key.
Pedro.
PmRg
Registered
Hello again, updates... another RO disaster, errr I need to replace my whole topup kit errrr I can't be having regular failures like this :/ after having all the elements in check ... Im back to 0 and have to start adjusthing everything again :/
Coming around to the second issue... Hello Cyano algae :/ the system got into a very low nutrients corner :/ 0.00ppm Po4 (Hanna) / 0.016ppm Po4 (Triton) and No3 (RedSea Pro) errr I really hate cyano algae :/ but will go away soon ... I hope lol
For now I'm dosing 1mg/L of No3 per day... to try and understand the tank consumption of No3 and try to keep 0.25ppm in the system.
Considering this road bumps lol corals are looking fine... I hope they stay that way
Here it is some pictures taken before the RO failure 2.0
FTS and new live stock
Growth of the T. Maxima is looking very nice
Macropharyngodon Choati added on 1st of Feb and I only get to see him in certains times of the day... very hard to see lol still I love Macropharyngodons
Pedro.
Coming around to the second issue... Hello Cyano algae :/ the system got into a very low nutrients corner :/ 0.00ppm Po4 (Hanna) / 0.016ppm Po4 (Triton) and No3 (RedSea Pro) errr I really hate cyano algae :/ but will go away soon ... I hope lol
For now I'm dosing 1mg/L of No3 per day... to try and understand the tank consumption of No3 and try to keep 0.25ppm in the system.
Considering this road bumps lol corals are looking fine... I hope they stay that way
Here it is some pictures taken before the RO failure 2.0
FTS and new live stock
Growth of the T. Maxima is looking very nice
Macropharyngodon Choati added on 1st of Feb and I only get to see him in certains times of the day... very hard to see lol still I love Macropharyngodons
Pedro.
