60G Cube - I can do this cheaply, right? AKA the Mars Mission

[VintageReefer]

Yes much like i over rated my panels to 3.5kva but my mppt will only convert 2.7kva.

Most of the high quality products really are only rating at 80% of true cell capacity - as cells will have some level of variance by batch etc…

And the low quality cheapo companies drastically overrate / embellish

I have a “1000wh” power station that has less real world runtime than my 537 wh big blue

The 1000wh also has Bluetooth or wifi so I’m sure that eats up extra battery and contributes

 

[kamitera]

I had a good laugh reading your journey… When I started with a 13 gallon system in late August this year because my son wanted to use his first summer job paycheck on Nemo, I didn’t think the budget was going to explode to NASA levels…I had a goldfish bowl and a betta jar growing up and that wasn’t hard or expensive at all…How hard can this be? Well here I am, 3 months later with a solar generator just so I can keep the tank alive in case of an outage. We had a one day outage and I am not willing to take any more chances …

 

[Fenral]

So I want to look for a portable power station with lifepO4 battery? Is that whats best?

Are you using hydros???

 

[Fenral]

I had a good laugh reading your journey… When I started with a 13 gallon system in late August this year because my son wanted to use his first summer job paycheck on Nemo, I didn’t think the budget was going to explode to NASA levels…I had a goldfish bowl and a betta jar growing up and that wasn’t hard or expensive at all…How hard can this be? Well here I am, 3 months later with a solar generator just so I can keep the tank alive in case of an outage. We had a one day outage and I am not willing to take any more chances …

Welcome to this little corner of r2r. Seeing as your not far from me - and your saying little solar generator - I assume the tank is still small?

 

[Fenral]

I have so much to do still.. i’ll make a “regular post” soon I promise - seeing as i have several pms poking me to write more “story”…

But i just got home - and immediately had to go shoulder deep into my tank…Less I loose several corals to fratricide…now I hope as I have cuts on both my arms and hands from other projects that I don’t get to take a trip to the er with some exotic infection…

 

[VintageReefer]

I have so much to do still.. i’ll make a “regular post” soon I promise - seeing as i have several pms poking me to write more “story”…

But i just got home - and immediately had to go shoulder deep into my tank…Less I loose several corals to fratricide…now I hope as I have cuts on both my arms and hands from other projects that I don’t get to take a trip to the er with some exotic infection…

If you go to the ER I would drop the mars act. You might get sent to the special ward

 

[pwfess]

Are you using hydros???

No. I run apex system. Do you like the hydros?

 

[Fenral]

If you go to the ER I would drop the mars act. You might get sent to the special ward

If you knew the cost over runs - i’d sill be sent to the special ward. Besides as the village idiot, i already locked myself in a padded room once…. Besides the hospital already knows me - type 1 diabetic + several still unknown diseases that neither Johns Hopkins nor mayo have been able to figure out…

So at most they would just go… you again…

 

[Fenral]

No. I run apex system. Do you like the hydros?

That will be part of the “story” too…

But i asked - cause at least for dc power the kraken and a wave engine gives you a good backup power option… with a pick your own battery or batteries option.

In my case the 12v battery terminal goes to my 12v battery bank, and the 24v power source got swapped out and replaced with my own solar equipment.

 

[Fenral]

Mission log update 11/4/2024:
Communications restored.

Security: Incident report
lockdown over - incident related to drunken teenagers in costumes, minor damage....

Facilities Management:
New staff arrived, and temporary quarters were arranged.

Science Officers Log(S):

Notes:
The Maintenance department took primary life support offline to perform cutover; this was also after the sabotage of the plankton reactors. Spikes are detected in the environment, going from zero to 160ppm nitrates in 24 hrs. Nitrates returned to reasonable levels by the following day. However, an ammonia spike occurred the day after the maintenance. It is believed to be partially a backlog in the process due to filtration being offline and partially due to the die-off of coralline algae that was exposed for 12 hours to the atmosphere.

Maintenance Report:
System repairs were performed during the blackout:
14 hours of work to be invoiced
Three hours were spent shutting down all the safety interlocks in the hydros system before physical removal of the equipment and primary pump shutdown could occur.

The defective equipment has been removed:

The process is currently at the midway point for the cutover, but efforts have been paused to allow the system to stabilize.

Damage occurred during the upgrade and cutover. One Sole Dosing pump got kinked, blowing the internal tubing out.

Maintenance requests assistance, as the new pump is causing significant interference to the probe telemetry.

Work backlog:
1. Remove all sole pumps and remount them into new positions behind the sump.
2. Remount Hydros equipment that was under the tank to behind the sump.
3. Install new lighting above the sump, and reinstall old lighting above the second area of the sump.
4. Engineering will build a new drain manifold from the sump to below the sump so backup pump capability can be restored, and the main pump can be removed from the sump and installed externally.

(Removing the main pump from the sump, I am hoping, will cut the system noise off of the probes. Building a siphon overflow from the sump to the pumps - unlike the display, if this siphon fails, it's not going to result in a flood)

5. Engineering will build a new distribution manifold and return it to the tank flow connection.

6. Engineering will evaluate options for cover to sump as evaporation is now an issue.

/***********************************************
Initially, I was going to write a more detailed narrative of the process and give the maintenance staff more of a "Voice," but after certain comments about "If you go to the ER, I would drop the Mars Act. You might get sent to the special ward," I decided it may be a bad idea to give the voices in my head different names and personalities. I leave it up to you all to decide if that was good or bad.
~~ The Village Idiot
*************************************************/

Technical reference:
Primary filtration is a "magical" yellow reactor, per the science officer's description. It is still offline and will probably stay offline as I migrate the functionality into the new sump to simplify the plumbing involved in my system. However, if it does not work out, I'll put the yellow bucket back into action.

Before, algae reactors and refugia were standard. We used to keep many things in buckets: DSB, reverse-flow sandbeds, etc. Essentially, this reactor was a 20-gallon bucket filled with various live rocks, miracle mud, and random ceramics at the bottom; a partition was placed above this material, screening it from direct flow and light (Cryptic zone). The screen itself was lifeguard aquatics aqua mesh. Above the mesh were various macroalgae, hair, or whatever else that would grow on the aqua mesh. Additional life was also present in sponges, filter-feeding worms, copepods, and snails that somehow wandered in. There was a screw-on lid with a small round hole above this reactor, and on top of the lid was mounted a Kessil H80 refugium light. I never once opened or cleaned this reactor style in my prior run in 8 years of operation. The capability of life to find its balance without concern about appearances while being provided an energy source of light and nutrients should not be underestimated. This can be seen by the fact that my nitrates, phosphates, etc., rapidly returned to zero when it was running. It's also untrue that my tank never went through an "ugly" stage - it did - it just happened in the bucket, and the cleanup crew kept the main tank pretty clean and clear. You will find that many old reefers have some form of this bucket or methodology going on minimal maintenance tanks.

For all the technology involved in my tank, none of it can compete with the life in the bucket; we don't have that level of technology available to us yet.

Bucket:

 

[VintageReefer]

I love the narrative btw!

Also I would question your officers focus. The nitrite spike to 160 is likely a testing error that day

 

[Fenral]

If you go to the ER I would drop the mars act. You might get sent to the special ward

Why did I end up coming home and going shoulder-deep into my tank? Much like Bob Ross, my girls have a role in that story, too.

The first time my new arrivals got rearranged, I thought some random snail had shuffled some stuff around as it bulldozed it's way through. Well, today, upon returning home, I found multiple corals stacked up and embedded into the rockwork, most unusually—mixing hammers, micro-Goni, and my new mushrooms. Thus the omg fratricide comment. One of the hammers was so wedged into the rockwork that I accidentally broke part of it trying to get it free.

Sorry for the bad photo, it was a quick snap and dive time...

I did not mind so much when the leather got moved, and I left it there, but now my daughters favorate fish has gone around and some how picked these corals up and clear moved then a foot across the tank, dragging them into his hole. Not sure what i'm going to do if the dusky jawfish continues to try and decorate his/her front yard.

But I ended up rearanging the tank a bit, moving some rockwork and corals around, bring my main hammer colony up to the "front", moving a torch back... bunch of other stuff...and giving the dusky jaw fish some more rock fragments to play with by his/her door.

Now the tank looks like this:

 

[Fenral]

I love the narrative btw!

Also I would question your officers focus. The nitrite spike to 160 is likely a testing error that day

I wish it were. I had her test it twice, and then I used another kit a third time. Then I also tested it myself..., and as you see, she also gave a reading out in mg, not ppm. I feed a lot of food into my tank, considering the population, plus reef roids and amino acids - so the loss of my plankton dosing (it will form a green dust over everything...but the snails clean it up) which did actively reproduce for a while in the display and then get exported via the skimmer, plus the shut down of ALL flow that was external to the tank, left only the live rock and sandbed to deal with things, zero export, and not nearly the amount of biological binding the system would typically have. That nitrite spike was genuine, and it pushed one of my on-the-edge birds nest corals fighting with stn over the edge. (I am probably a bad person for thinking this, but I didn't intentionally buy the birds nest; it came as a random part of a pack - and I would not choose one usually for my tank, as they tend to grow like weeds... So I'll take it as a blessing in disguise. )

 

[Fenral]

Oh, just for the record - I don't do windows and rarely clean the glass on my tank... I would be robbing my baby snails and pods of a food source They generally keep things pretty clean, but the tank is a little dirty in the prior photos. (No surprise considering the chemistry of the last few days)

 

[Fenral]

Also, for the record, the photobombing tang is the one and the only thing I really picked for a stock for the tank...

I blame @pwfess for egging me on at the TG R2R sale for most of the new additions...I had only planed to buy enough to get free shipping on my stomatal snails...

 

[VintageReefer]

Awesome tank, awesome thread

In my sump I run an algae turf scrubber and a cryptic zone with live rock, lots of wild sponge, and a 4” fine deep sand bed as my filtration. Near zero maintenance. Just empty the scrubber once every 7-10 days. I keep a skimmer in the system but it’s offline. If I need additional support it’s ready to go.