Tank Thread Tank reached 38 years old...in 2009!

[Paul B]

My tank is doing very well but I now fear I can't maintain it the way it has always been maintained. The SPS are growing in to many places so I can't move rocks any more. My main maintenance was blowing everything around in the tank and that meant I had to move some rock around. The LPS is easy because that doesn't grow to the rocks like SPS does. If I move any rocks, I will break a lot of coral and I really don't want to frag everything.
My 2 pistol shrimps are very busy making a mess out of my gravel. I can't believe how good they are at engineering these tunnels. They find every correct size rock to shore up the roof and their tunnels extend to all corners of the 6' tank. I think this is good for my gravel as it is dolomite and from all the years is loaded with shells, sea urchin spines, rocks, twigs, pieces of glass and plastic etc.
Here is a video of the 2 shrimp.

 

[Paul B]

My skimmer was hardly working, barely was drawing any water so I took apart the surface overflow to see what was in it. The problem with keeping equipment in the tank for many years is it gets filled with those tiny tube worms and their tubes clog everything. The water could hardly get through and the space that was left was loaded with brittle stars. So I trimmed the tube worms and chased the brittle stars out, not it is good for a few more years.

This is the surface skimmer. Yes I know. State of the art. :lol:

 

[Paul B]

Video of my possum wrasse,(he's the brown stripped one) They almost always hide and when I saw him near the front, I figured I would get a video.

 

[Paul B]

This morning I went downstairs to do some tinkering and I noticed my tank was cloudy.
OMG, (I said to myself) my tank is never cloudy so I looked around for something dead, I smelled the water and all was good. So I quickly mixed up 30 gallons of water, adjusted the temperature and changed some water. Still cloudy.
I went outside to check the weather as we are going boating and it was foggy. Then I went into my workshop and noticed that everything was foggy. I then cleaned my reading glasses and miraculously, the tank was clear as was everything else.
So now I know, I don't have to change my water, just clean my reading glasses. :shhh:

 

[yesjenks]

Hahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[Paul B]

The tank is doing good, no problems. There is no algae growing anywhere and I don't know why. That silly bio reactor is reacting away or whatever it is supposed to do. I need to put some more pellets in it. It will screw me up in the near future because I am going to Hawaii and it is mounted in the place where I invert a 5 gallon jug for an emergency tank fill in case my regular top off thing doesn't work. I need to design something for that purpose. I have been feeding the fish more worms than clams or Mysis because I have so many white worms. I mix whiteworms and blackworms and that is what they usually get. A couple of times a week they get clams and Mysis. The summers are hectic and worms are faster for me to feed.
A large piece of montipora broke off and was up side down for a few days and started to bleach a little in the middle. It's no big deal and I will glue it to something when I get time. I am waiting for my Grand daughter to come over and I will Babysit for a few days.

The only problem I could see coming up with the tank is that there is SPS growing all over the place so I can't hardly move any rocks any more. When the tank was all LPS, it was easier because those don't grow all over the rocks and I could move them. But the SPS is growing on the large rocks so I can't remove anything for the yearly typhooning. I like to move some rocks out and stir up all the gravel. That is hard to do now so I don't think the tank will last another 40 years. (I know I won't)

Last week 3 of my LEDs stopped working and I changed them, now I notice another one that died. I have one more so I will change it when the little Polywog leaves.

 

[Paul B]

I just came in from my garage and noticed a fairly large chunk of the ceiling came down. About 2'X5'. So I guess I have some work to do. It is not sheetrock but cement plaster so it is heavy and I have a shelf built under the ceiling so I have to take down all the Christmas stuff, crawl up there and put in new sheetrock. I am getting to old for this, but it is what it is and besides, I am retired. :frown:

 

[Paul B]

So now with this experimental Bio-Reactor I built and installed as a test, my tank is a little disheveled. That surface skimmer about 5 posts up is floating in the tank, not doing anything as it does not quite fit on the pump any more because I had to re position the pump to make it more condusive to run the reactor. I may re build the surface skimmer or retrofit the old one. I have not decided but I want to do something because there is a surface film on the tank now.
I really don't want to do this permanently because it is just an experiment and I may take it apart in the near future and put the tank back the way it was.
I am very busy this week because my little buddy, Greta, is sick with a little fever and I may do some more babysitting. She lives in Manhattan and it is a big deal for me to just drop in there for an hour, as I did last night.

 

[Paul B]

I was looking at my tank and I am embarrassed by the look of it as it needs some maintenance. The 2 pistol shrimp dug up so much that I have corals falling over and corals I can't even reach because they fell in the back. There are corals hitting other corals or shading each other. I hate to do this stuff in the summer but I really need to remove a little rock so I can get my hand in there without breaking to much to do some re-aquascaping. It is difficult to clean the glass due to corals almost touching the glass. The SPS makes this difficult as they are very delicate and very hard to move. Most of them are growing on either a bottle or a large rock.
Whenever I attempt this I need most of a day to do because I also want to create a typhoon and stir up the gravel. I hope I don't break to many SPS as I have to many frags now. Luckily, I don't think of this as work, I just need time to do it and would like to pick a rainy day as it is boating season. This week I am babysitting my Granddaughter so it aint happening yet.

 

[Aqua Pro Builder]

She is so lovely. BTW, you should edit the title-the tank is way more than 38 years old

 

[Paul B]

It will be 42 this year, or 43, I forget. What is 1971 until now?

 

[Paul B]

I am in the process of cleaning the tank for a little maintenance. I left everything in and stirred up all the gravel where I could reach with a rigid hose connected to a diatom filter. I think I am going to add another diatom filter to get the job done faster. I do this once or twice a year and this system would not run long without it. When it is fairly clean, I will remove as much rock as I can so I can re-aquascape and move the structure towards the back. Right now it is hard to clean the glass as the reef migrated to the front due to all the digging from the shrimp, the spawning fish and the normal growth of the corals. I only broke a few acropora's so far but I will glue them back when I am done.
The fish are carving curses at me on the inside of the glass and the hermit crabs really hate this as they get buried all over the place. But they get over it.

 

[Paul B]

I found a fish. I have not seen one of my threadfin cardinals in a couple of months so I naturally assumed he went home for a vacation.
Now I see him happy and healthy hanging out with his three friends. I think that because the other threadfins are spawning he felt left out and he may have been sulking behind the rocks, or like I said, maybe he went home. I really don't know.
It also looks like the mandarins will spawn again soon as will the yellow clown gobies.
The tank looks decent after I re did the aquascaping on half the tank. It is not the best it ever looked because I had it really nice with all the long branching rocks holding up the structure, but then it partially collapsed and with the stupid acropora, I can't get to crazy because that stuff breaks when a brittle starfish sneezes. I got broken pieces all over the place.
I also removed quite a bit of live rock because for some reason, every time I stick my fat hands in there, it never goes back the way it was. I am keeping it in a bucket of water until I figure out if I want to put it back in again.
If not, I will just let it dry and put it away for posterity or if I ever need a paperweight.
I still have that ridiculous bio-pellet reactor connected and I am not sure if it is doing anything. If you ask me, that would make a better paperweight than the rock. If I get tired of it I may take it apart and make a vacuum cleaner out of it. :worried:

 

[Paul B]

Mandarins getting ready to spawn.

Here he is getting ready to put his moves on her

She is very pregnant. Cute little thing that she is.

I just took these, because I can

 

[Paul B]

I had to do some maintenance today as I may go on a trip in the future. I had to repair a leak in the bio pellet reactor, that was easy, then my pump wasn't strong enough to operate my skimmer, I don't know why, that pump ran the thing for decades. I kept the same pump and just built a new adjusting valve for the skimmer. Now it works beautifully. I re built the venturi valve the other day.
Then two of the three LED strings over my algae trough burnt out as the waterproof LEDs are not as waterproof as they are supposed to be. I got two of the thre strings working. The last one is fried to much and needs to be replaced. That is for another day.
I also had to tweek the overflow skimmer that feeds the protein skimmer. I found that if the water level drops a few inches (like what happened the last time I went on a vacation) the thing will suck air and stop. That is fixed.
Now I need to make an emergency water feed if my auto top off fails. I can't invert a 5 gallon container on top of the tank anymore as there is no more space.
But I am working on 3 designs and one of them should work out well.
You have to keep making fail safes for the fail safes.
Then my only problem is to feed my copperband for a while if I am not here. The other fish will eat anything but he will not. I am working on a solution. :bagfish:

 

[Paul B]

I just finished building and installing this device. I have always had trouble with my ATO because it is gravity fed and every week or so, it stops because it is such a slow flow that a few bubbles back up through the float valve and stop the flow. This should keep any bubbles from backing up the tube as there will be a tube coming from it 9where the valve is) that will go up higher than my resevour that is hanging on the ceiling in another room. That tube will exhaust any air in the system. The last time I went on vacation the fill stopped and the water level went down 7" killing all the corals that were above that water line.
Don't pay any attention to the brass line next to it as that goes to the boiler thermometer guage. :shhh:

 

[Paul B]

Today my wife and I went to the east end of the north fork of Long Island which is one of my favorite places. The water out there is very clear as Long Island is a 150 mile protrusion into the Atlantic Ocean and if you can get to the end, that would be the cleanest water off Long Island and maybe the north east coast of the US. I use this water all the time and it is full of life. Seaweeds like codium grow prolifically there and it doesn't grow much west of there on the Island.
I am sure many people on this site go out there all the time.
My favorite park is out there, which is a very large nature preserve surrounded by the sea and there are the two remaining natural salt ponds left on the North East coast there. We spent some time in that park on the beach which faces Plum Island where for many years the Government did experiments on incurable animal diseases, or at least that's what they say they did. There could be aliens, UFOs or clones of Paris Hilton there, I have no Idea.
Nelson DeMille wrote a book titled "Plum Island" I kind of know Nelson, he lives near me and we were in the same unit in Nam, although he was there the year before I was.
But the water is great to collect. This marina is the most eastern marina on the north fork and of course I ate my favorite meal at the restaurant right next to it.

 

[FMF0331]

Wonderful , enjoy your retirement.

 

[Paul B]

The tank is doing well but I am a little concerned about the little female mandarin. She has been very pregnant to long and I think she is egg bound. That sometimes happens in fish when they become loaded with eggs and for some reason, she can't deliver them or the male is a nerd and is not in the mood to spawn. I could easily deliver the eggs for her but that would require taking everything out of the tank, and that aint gonna happen. She seems fine, eats well, smiles a lot and has a nice complection but is just to fat.
Time will tell.
One of my clown gobies is also pregnant and I know that is from all the white worms she eats. Whiteworms are smaller than blackworms and they feast on them, mostly because I don't give them Pizza. White worms are their favorite food and they are also the favorite food of the mandarins although they get lots of pods and new born brine shrimp.
I am not sure if the annoying pistol shrimp are spawning because they spend most of their time together in their cave which they keep moving and causing my rocks to fall. I really need a lot of time to re design the tank so they don't do that but that is a major undertaking and will cause much coral breakage. I can't keep the montipora together now as I keep breaking them and I have frags growing all over the place. My biggest expense is glue. :hmm2:

 

[Paul B]

Oh no, my skimmer is not making bubbles. I cleaned the venture but it was fine. I think the pump that feeds the venture may be clogged. I don't know why, I cleaned it in probably 1995 or so. It has been running since then but I think I bought it in the 80s. I know I was a lot younger because it is buried under the tank in a place that is going to be hard to squeeze myself into tomorrow. I can feel it running but I don't think it is putting out anything. Maybe the impeller croaked. You just can't buy dependable stuff anymore. :scratch: