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I run 2/2/2 ... 2 aquablue special, 2 blue plus, 2 purple plus. Straight blue colors don't bring out warmer colors very well in my opinion.
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Apr 1, 2011 07:17
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SniperWoreConverse posted:Yep, they only have blue (that I saw), and minimum order is 1k for the type you used. So unless someone wanted to experiment with the weird little ones, or the entire forum did a ridiculous group buy... CREE is popular because of the high lumen/watt ratio. There are significantly cheaper LEDs that are nearly half the cost, but are also often half the lumen/watt ratio. A big selling point of the LEDs is the energy efficiency so it doesn't make a lot of sense to invest in cheap LEDs with a poor lumen/watt ratio. There are other companies that produce high quality LEDs like luxeon rebels, but they are harder to find. I was mistaken about digikey, they do have the LEDs but they are about $7 each without the star solder board ($1), so they don't really work out price wise compared to rapidled.com If you're wondering why royal blue and why clear white, it's mostly because those are the most visually attractive. The clear white are a wide spectrum light that will work as good as any other white light for coral growth, the royal blues are however an extremely limited spectrum of about 10nm in the blue. The royal blues look like actinic lighting on crack. Some individuals have reported good results with mixing in a few single LEDs of other colors as well such as reds, light blues, and greens. 
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Apr 1, 2011 09:56
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How much does it cost to DIY your own led setup nowadays? I know the commercial units are way, way out of my price range.
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Apr 1, 2011 13:43
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Are any of you guys electronics geeks? I am only allowed to live the saltwater dream vicariously right now, but I bet you could do some PWM modulation on the drivers to add some shimmer if you wanted to.
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Apr 1, 2011 14:57
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MrFurious posted:Are any of you guys electronics geeks? as long as you have some sort of direct light and surface break, you will have a nice shimmer effect. I don't think PWM is necessary.
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Apr 1, 2011 15:07
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PWM isn't necessary for shimmer. You just use PWM to dim the drivers via controller to customize your color/intensity and also to simulate the natural light cycle (possibly even the lunar cycle!)
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Apr 1, 2011 15:36
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AHHHH! WWC near me just got in a casper tang. Sooooooo drat cool, I wish I had a bigger tank. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwDzwQT7SZI
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Apr 1, 2011 16:10
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ludnix posted:CREE etc Yeah, best bet is to get them premounted on a star. I was looking at their (Cree's) site and figured the star system would be a waste. But after reading some of the pdfs they have I realized that the star is exactly what they recommend to use, as in they give you the exact dimensions on it for best results. I suppose you could try and make an alternate system, but why bother? If you mess up you just blew out critical equipment. I suppose you could bond the led directly to like copper tubing and run some fluid through a radiator for silent running, but It'd never be worth the work unless you know your surface mounts, and have the patience of a saint. What would be cool is if you could take the heat from the lights and use it to warm the water. I mean, it wouldn't go up even 1°, but it would still be kind of cool. More likely even if you had some kind of safe heat exchange between the lights and water, the water would warm the lights too much and you'd lose product life. One thing that could actually work is to set up a system with a computer that monitors temp, ph, nitrates, everything, and is able to graph it. Set it up so the lights can be controlled and powered as well. You could replace the air cooling with oil (but leave the dumb case thing out). Once the computer gets up to temp you can put a salt-safe radiator in the tank. It should keep heating the water until it hits equilibrium. Now, depending on the computer's load this temp can be very high. As most corals aren't native to death valley, It will be important to manage convection and all that. The larger mass of the tank should distribute the heat well, and the max heat can be kept within normal range with a combination of load management and evaporation. It'd be super important to minimize any leaks. The tank would (hopefully) be fine because the oil would just float to the top and is pretty nontoxic, but if any water got in the computer you would be immediately hosed. If the computer fails or loses power, the oil will actually stay hot for hours, so if the pump still worked everything could still be ok. It might be an actual advantage in an emergency situation. It's kind of a dumb sperg idea, but I'm wondering if such a thing is possible. I think I'm going to set up that tank I have and run it like this with no stock for a few weeks as a feasibility study, purely for information.
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Apr 1, 2011 18:54
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Just out of curiosity, how much do you guys feed? I feed daily, but I target feed everything (all fish, all my corals eat light/scraps).
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Apr 1, 2011 19:39
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Any Chicagoons in need of a reef ready tank? Older 110G Oceanic, like 5' by ~20" x ~20". Bought on consignment from Sho-tank like four years ago and I never put water in it. Has a stand that I think is all in one piece. I have a half-finished DIY canopy that is hideous and poorly constructed.
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Apr 1, 2011 19:47
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SaNChEzZ posted:Just out of curiosity, how much do you guys feed? I feed daily, but I target feed everything (all fish, all my corals eat light/scraps). I rarely spot feed my corals, there are enough pods/live mysis/frozen brine that find their way to them, but I feed my fish once a day with mysis and every 2 or so days I mix in Rod's food. My fish are fatties but I definitely limit the amount of food they ingest. My clowns and especially my tangs will eat until they pop if allowed.
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Apr 1, 2011 20:17
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If anything, I broadcast feed. I swirl a stick of frozen cyclopeeze in the water a little bit with the pumps and skimmer off.
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Apr 1, 2011 22:32
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SniperWoreConverse posted:It's kind of a dumb sperg idea, but I'm wondering if such a thing is possible. I think I'm going to set up that tank I have and run it like this with no stock for a few weeks as a feasibility study, purely for information. I was thinking of some sort of system with selenoids and pumps to recirculate saltwater through titanium tubing into a radiator when the tank is warm enough and through the tank when not. If you were looking at manufacturing the LEDs you obviously would not want stars, since you can make your heatsink boards with traces instead of wiring it, but that's out of the realm of most DIY work. For anyone wondering the cost is around $10 per LED. That figure includes all needed materials excluding your labor, time and soldering iron. For my 84 LED fixture with heatsinks, drivers, wiring, and thermal paste it came out around $800. While there are few commercial units that compare to 84 LEDs, several modules to achieve the same brightness would be around $2000. PWM will let you play with the brightness of the LEDS using the standard ELN drivers, but I have not seen anyone use it for special effects on a DIY fixture. Most special effects involve running the LEDs in parallel which requires more fine tuning and selecting the proper individual LEDs for balanced voltages across your parallel lines. It's much easier for a DIY to do them in series.
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Apr 2, 2011 03:14
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Dono posted:I rarely spot feed my corals, there are enough pods/live mysis/frozen brine that find their way to them, but I feed my fish once a day with mysis and every 2 or so days I mix in Rod's food. Okay cool that makes me feel a bit better. The clowns don't get too much because they're fatties but my YWG picks up a lot of scraps I guess.. he doesn't get target fed because he refuses to come out of his shrimp hole at feeding time.. nevertheless somehow he has a double chin. Yeah, a fish with a double chin.
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Apr 4, 2011 21:15
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Have you ever seen a truly obese mandarin?  
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Apr 4, 2011 21:31
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@arioch I have some questions for you about your mandarin. is that an ORA or wild? how long was your tank up before adding him to the tank? what does he eat? Do you supplement pods for him? Do you have a separate fuge from your sump to export pods?
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Apr 4, 2011 22:06
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That's one I took some pictures of in the store, I didn't pick that up. ORA is only shipping juvenile spotted mandarins as far as I'm aware of, not fully-grown green mandarins. I do have a pair of green mandarins in my tank, however. Both are wild. They were added pretty quickly after that tank went up. I only have a fuge in my sump which is heavily populated with mysis, copepods, amphipods, etc. They spend their day pecking pods off the rockwork, and I don't specifically target feed them (they don't seem very interested when I do scatter a frozen mysis cube in the water).
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Apr 4, 2011 22:27
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arioch posted:Big day for me, I posted my first For Sale thread on my frags in my local club forum on RC -> http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?p=18578861 Made $82 worth of free space on my racks so far, so now my frags aren't as likely to randomly burn the crap out of each other anymore! (Also, that's about enough cash to keep me supplied with D+D H2O salt for another 6 months)
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Apr 5, 2011 00:16
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arioch posted:ORA is only shipping juvenile spotted mandarins as far as I'm aware of, not fully-grown green mandarins. http://www.orafarm.com/products/fish/dragonets.html According to their site (and my LFS I am going to be ordering from) they provide two other varieties. Currently though, ORA is so backed on orders that the only mandarins they are shipping for the next 3-4 months will be the blue mandarins
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Apr 5, 2011 01:56
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Neat. Unfortunately, with the spotted mandarins at least, the forums are filled with stories of them regressing to live foods only, so it's probably going to be a crapshoot with the greens (called blues on that page) and reds as well. I'd probably give it a whirl if I didn't already have a pair that's more or less happy in my tank though.
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Apr 5, 2011 02:42
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Still picking away at my 90g display's equipment. Picking up a Reef Octopus NW-150 and a Nova Extreme Pro 8x54w T5 48" fixture if the sellers dont flake out on me. I figure if I spend a little extra money up front I'll be much less likely to feel the need to 'upgrade'. When I actually get something in it, I'll post pictures.
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Apr 5, 2011 05:10
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Melchior posted:Still picking away at my 90g display's equipment. Picking up a Reef Octopus NW-150. That's the same skimmer I have in my 75gal and I love it. Since Im upgrading my sump though I'm still wondering if I should have gone with the 200 instead. And that fixture comes with a lot of 'white' (10k) bulbs, are you going to use stock bulbs or order a new set?
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Apr 5, 2011 16:29
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I have a small dilemma someone might be able to help me with. I use two of these powerheads and they are built to create a constant flow of 1400gph. This is way to much flow to have both of them running at one time in my tank. Are there any wavemakers or timers available for these model powerheads that will create changing motions in my tank? I was looking at something simple like this, but I dont know if it is compatible or not. I'd rather not have to replace my powerheads at the moment and buy a controller with it until the end of summer, so Im looking for a temporary fix.
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Apr 5, 2011 20:17
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If they're the newer versions of those Koralias, they should be able handle being connected to a wavemaker. They used to have a specific line of Koralias for connecting to their proprietary wavemaker device, but the new ones don't knock nearly as much as the old ones (I have an old 3 and it sounds like death when you first plug it in).
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Apr 5, 2011 20:48
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optikalus posted:If they're the newer versions of those Koralias, they should be able handle being connected to a wavemaker. They used to have a specific line of Koralias for connecting to their proprietary wavemaker device, but the new ones don't knock nearly as much as the old ones (I have an old 3 and it sounds like death when you first plug it in). Thats what Im not sure about. these arent the adjustable flow rate koralia powerheads, just the evolution model. My powerheads definitely dont make a knocking noise when they turn on and they are a newer version of them (bought them new from Marine Depot like 3 months ago).
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Apr 5, 2011 21:29
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Then they should be controllable. I'd definitely do some more reading on RC before running out and buying a $500 controller but you should be good to go.
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Apr 5, 2011 21:57
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http://www.marinedepot.com/JBJ_Ocean_Pulse_Wavemaker_External_Wavemakers_for_Aquariums-JBJ_Lighting-JB6111-FIWMEW-4-vi.html This is what I used when I had a pair of maxijets.
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Apr 5, 2011 22:03
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arioch posted:http://www.marinedepot.com/JBJ_Ocean_Pulse_Wavemaker_External_Wavemakers_for_Aquariums-JBJ_Lighting-JB6111-FIWMEW-4-vi.html Oh holy poo poo, I love you! Just did some googling on this wavemaker and apparently it works well with my model koralia powerhead. Thanks a bunch! I'll report back on how it works out when it comes in.
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Apr 5, 2011 22:06
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I guess this is the appropriate thread to post this. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/04/05/world%92s-2nd-deadliest-poison-in-an-aquarium-store-near-you/#more-4232 //edit: SA doesn’t like the link it seems, try this: http://bit.ly/fbaksY eames fucked around with this message at 09:14 on Apr 6, 2011 |
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Apr 6, 2011 09:10
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Dono posted:That's the same skimmer I have in my 75gal and I love it. Since Im upgrading my sump though I'm still wondering if I should have gone with the 200 instead. The owner replaced most of the bulbs with blue-spectrum ones, so I assume I'm going to be getting a fixture full of 460s and 420s with a few 10k daylights on it.
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Apr 6, 2011 12:40
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eames posted:I guess this is the appropriate thread to post this. I was just reading about this last night. I actually read the study they did on this case. What was scary was looking at the pictures of the zoos that poisoned him; we have very similar ones in our tank. I bought a rock with orange zoos and then they died and these pale ones took over.
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Apr 6, 2011 13:52
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I'm pretty sure palytoxin is not the world's deadliest poison, but rather one of the most potent organic toxins. Either way, wear goggles when working with zoos and don't eat them. There are several cases of people's dogs eating their corals and dying, but I don't think there are too many with hobbyists to worry about. If you're interested in it, I suggest checking out Anthony Calfo's famous Coral Propagation book, in which he poisoned himself three times with palytoxin. He said it made everything taste like silver and made him want to listen to pink floyd in the dark.
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Apr 6, 2011 15:15
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arioch posted:Have you ever seen a truly obese mandarin? On melev's reef there was a pretty chunky one.  Video: http://www.melevsreef.com/video/diner4.wmv At our store we got a giant wild caught one that was eating prepared foods. Unfortunately it ended up dying in out frag system for some reason. It definitely wasn't starvation, but who knows what it really killed it.
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Apr 6, 2011 15:24
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Those are "Texas Trash" palys and should be eradicated before they spread into the rest of your tank. Because they will. And then they will choke out whatever was there and take over. Also, I assume that nearly everything in the reef is poisonous to some degree or other.
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Apr 6, 2011 15:26
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Dont worry about paly toxin. Like the other people here said: Wear goggles (or glasses), grab a pair of those long yellow rubber gloves for when youre fragging, dont boil your rocks with paly/zoa on them and inhale the vapor, and if you're really nervous then buy a small pump to pull water out of your tank for WCs instead of sucking it out and siphoning. I was super nervous about paly toxin the first month or two I had livestock because I bought three different zoa colonies and didnt know much, but proper precautions limits your chance of being poisoned to pretty much zero.
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Apr 6, 2011 17:16
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Last month: This month:  The Kenya Tree is almost twice as big! Also the leather is quite a bit larger but you can't tell from the picture. Water quality continues to improve even though I haven't done a water change in a couple of months.
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Apr 6, 2011 17:22
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what is the green hair-like coral on the left?
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Apr 6, 2011 18:07
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GSP
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Apr 6, 2011 18:14
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Water quality is improving because the tank is primarily softies which take in and hold a disgusting amount of nutrients. That's also why your softies are growing so big. This is definitely one way to run a successful reef tank, and one I considered for my pico.
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Apr 6, 2011 18:16
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I absolutely love your GSP.
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Apr 6, 2011 18:40
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