Coolhandgoose's 55gal build

It looks like Caribbean live rock...which is really heavy and dense and looks just like that. I have a bunch in my tank.

So far so good! Those diatoms are a pain in the ass though, aren't they?
 
There is a lot of rock in there, I think almost too much. There is about 20 lbs of fiji LR and the rest is dry rock called touffa,which is estremely porrous rock.
 
So I've been doing some reading and it seems that skimmers need a certain break in time to get a good slime coat and then the microbubbles coming out of it should be less. I also tried raising the water level in the sump so there isn't as big a waterfall after the bubble trap, seems to be helping a little bit. The next thing to try is putting a tee off the return line to try and reduce the flow rate of the water through the sump.

I'm not extremely motivated at the moment though since I just had to spend 700 bucks on a new water heater today since mine decided to start leaking. ARGH!
 
OUCH.Thats an expensive water heater.:shock:

But yeah.Skimmers do settle down after they've got that bio-film built up.
Is your return pump blowing bubbles in the tank? If so,it may be causing a small whirlpool and sucking air that way.If thats whats causing it,just put a 90* elbow on the pump intake and turn the 90 down toward the bottom of the sump.
 
Hmmm, I may just try the elbow thing, that seems simple enough. It always seems like the simpler the better in this hobby.

Well it's 700 which includes install and the removal of the old water heater. The thing was 12 years old so it was probably time for a new one anyway. Necessary evil but you sure don't get much satisfaction at dropping 700 bucks at home depot for something you already have.
 
troybuckle said:
Looks good so far, your sump turned our great looks like a bigger version of mine lol. Do you have any livestock in at the moment?
Click to expand...

Thanks, the sump is working out pretty good so far. The only problem is the overlow line is pumping in a huge amount of bubbles which my bubble trap can't seem to handle at the moment.

I've got one clownfish in there right now from my old tank. I'm looking at getting some snails this weekend since the diatom phase is done and the green algae phase has begun. My finace says it looks like a lawn on one of the rocks LOL!
 
So since the tank looks like a lawn, what better fish to get than a lawmower blenny :)

So here he is acclimating. It took me awhile since the store water salinity was at 1.018 and my tank is at 1.026
blenny in a bag.jpg

As you can see he has lots of work ahead of him. This pic is taken with the lights off and a flash on the camera.
lots of work.jpg

The new best friends.
best friends.jpg

Up to his gills in algae.
up to his gills.jpg

And a shot of the tank
fts.jpg
 
So I think I managed to kill two birds with one stone the other day. I was getting massive bubbles coming out of my drain lines into my sump that my bubble trap could not handle getting rid of. So I put a filter sock on the drain line and voila all the bubbles in the sump are gone. Not only that my skimmer decided that this was a perfect time to finally start working properly. So I'm wondering if too many bubbles in the sump was causing it not to work very well?

Oh well, I'm happy with the progress so far.

I also added some snails, 6 nassarius, 2 turbos and 2 trochus.
 
coolhandgoose said:
Not only that my skimmer decided that this was a perfect time to finally start working properly. So I'm wondering if too many bubbles in the sump was causing it not to work very well?
Click to expand...

Yea, I made the same mistake before. You don't want any external random bubbles to interfere with the bubbles inside the skimmer, or they won't work properly.
 
Huge not to self, whenver I turn off the return pump, make sure I unplug the skimmer first. I had almost a full cup of :pooh: then turned off the return pump to do a water change. Well the sump starts to fill up, as expected, but my skimmer is super sensitive to the water level and just started overflowing with water spilling all the :pooh: into the sump. So I did a water change to the sump :mrgreen:

Vertex Pro Bio Pellets Update :

I've found out some more info on the biopellets I use. I asked the LFS guy about using it and the current hair algae battle because it's kind of a weird pattern of algae growth. Pretty much all the hair algae is centralized around one rock, the first rock I ever got which of course I used tap water which had a huge amount of phosphates in it. None of my other rocks have the hair algae problem expect the dry rocks that the bad rock is on.
So here's what he says is happening. The biopellets are in fact doing their job really well, as noted by 0 nitrates and 0 phosphates. What they are doing is drawing the phosphate out of the rocks which is a good thing, however hair algae lives off this stuff. So until the phosphates are completely leeched out of this rock I will have to battle the algae by pulling it off. It sucks, but good to know that it should dissipate and things will be good.

That's all for now, sorry for the long update.
 
coolhandgoose said:
Huge not to self, whenver I turn off the return pump, make sure I unplug the skimmer first. I had almost a full cup of :pooh: then turned off the return pump to do a water change. Well the sump starts to fill up, as expected, but my skimmer is super sensitive to the water level and just started overflowing with water spilling all the :pooh: into the sump.
Click to expand...

Not just yours. All skimmers do that. If you don't have a stable environment to guarantee the water level for the skimmer area, do expect to flood again and again, unfortunately.

I thought the external one would be better since it doesn't depend on the water level, but actually it's even worst. It depends on the water pressure. And I thought it would be fine if I have a dedicated pump just for it. Wrong again. The water pressure also depend on the water level where the pump sits... You can never win...

Thanks for the update by the way. We love to see tank built and updates. It'll never be too long. :)
 

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