Joined
·
1,316 Posts
I have had this tank behind the couch in my livingroom for a year, and it's time for a complete overhaul...
Here's the tank as of today, all cleaned out:
A fairly recent pic of its first iteration:
I learned a lot with this first scape, and am going to approach the new version differently. The biggest issue that I could never seem to overcome was flow. I was always robbing Peter to pay Paul with focused flow, and was always fighting the hardscape which ended up being visually overwhelmed by plants anyway.
I'm getting ahead of myself... first things first is some equipment upgrades.
Here's what the cabinet looked like fairly recently:
There's a lot going on there, and it's impossible to see in the pic how everything fit together... Basically, there was a big loop coming off the return line from the pump to the bulkhead. On that loop was the reactor and the UV sterilizer (gracefully placed atop the ATO reservoir with some mangled pool noodle). In between where the loop broke off from and reconnected to the return line there was a bypass valve. That bypass allowed a tunable, <100% amount of the overall flow to go through the reactor. It worked well, but was clunky and not easy to work with.
I was using an AC return pump (Eheim Universal) rated at 900GPH for V1. That sounds like a lot, but with the reactor and the winding path through the sump, I was tapped out and needed a bit more.
The two biggest upgrades in V2 are a redesigned reactor and a new, embarrassingly overpowered DC return pump. The reactor is based on the same 20" housing, but this time I'm using hard pipe to bring the bypass to the reactor and the front of the sump.
Cerges reactor:
In V2, a line of silicone tubing will run directly from the return pump to the reactor. Here's how they'll be arranged in the sump:
I also mounted the housing on a sheet of acrylic with aquarium silicone. Nothin makes me stabby like a tippy reactor!
Since I've got buckets of power with the new pump, I'm keeping the sterilizer, but it's now on the main line (it was on the loop with the reactor before to protect my overall GPH).
Here's everything in the cabinet:
Note that I have retired the pool noodle! The sterilizer is now riding on a 'raft' of PVC that spans the sump on the same rails that the ATO reservoir sits on. I've also recently added a flow meter to the CO2 setup. It takes a reading of 85/150mm on the flow meter to maintain a 1.3 pH drop throughout the lighting period. Fantastic. Couldn't live without the thing anymore.
The final equipment upgrade is a DIY spraybar made out of Loc-Line:
I think this is going to go a long way toward curing my flow woes!
That's it for now. More on substrate and plants next time...
Here's the tank as of today, all cleaned out:
A fairly recent pic of its first iteration:
I learned a lot with this first scape, and am going to approach the new version differently. The biggest issue that I could never seem to overcome was flow. I was always robbing Peter to pay Paul with focused flow, and was always fighting the hardscape which ended up being visually overwhelmed by plants anyway.
I'm getting ahead of myself... first things first is some equipment upgrades.
Here's what the cabinet looked like fairly recently:
There's a lot going on there, and it's impossible to see in the pic how everything fit together... Basically, there was a big loop coming off the return line from the pump to the bulkhead. On that loop was the reactor and the UV sterilizer (gracefully placed atop the ATO reservoir with some mangled pool noodle). In between where the loop broke off from and reconnected to the return line there was a bypass valve. That bypass allowed a tunable, <100% amount of the overall flow to go through the reactor. It worked well, but was clunky and not easy to work with.
I was using an AC return pump (Eheim Universal) rated at 900GPH for V1. That sounds like a lot, but with the reactor and the winding path through the sump, I was tapped out and needed a bit more.
The two biggest upgrades in V2 are a redesigned reactor and a new, embarrassingly overpowered DC return pump. The reactor is based on the same 20" housing, but this time I'm using hard pipe to bring the bypass to the reactor and the front of the sump.
Cerges reactor:
In V2, a line of silicone tubing will run directly from the return pump to the reactor. Here's how they'll be arranged in the sump:
I also mounted the housing on a sheet of acrylic with aquarium silicone. Nothin makes me stabby like a tippy reactor!
Since I've got buckets of power with the new pump, I'm keeping the sterilizer, but it's now on the main line (it was on the loop with the reactor before to protect my overall GPH).
Here's everything in the cabinet:
Note that I have retired the pool noodle! The sterilizer is now riding on a 'raft' of PVC that spans the sump on the same rails that the ATO reservoir sits on. I've also recently added a flow meter to the CO2 setup. It takes a reading of 85/150mm on the flow meter to maintain a 1.3 pH drop throughout the lighting period. Fantastic. Couldn't live without the thing anymore.
The final equipment upgrade is a DIY spraybar made out of Loc-Line:
I think this is going to go a long way toward curing my flow woes!
That's it for now. More on substrate and plants next time...