New 65 gallon tank Build

[McCarrick]

Today marks day 76 of my cuc being in qt. I moved my Turbo snail, Emerald crab, my two larger hermit crabs, one conch and a few stomatella snails that I could find into the 65. I left my small red leg hermit and the other conch in the 16 gallon coral qt tank to help keep it clean. Today I am also going to rinse out the extra 40 lbs of sand I have to out back into the 65 gallon since it's now officially 100% ick free.

 

[Gumbies R Us]

Corals in the qt tank. Stock biocube lights (daylight, no filter).
Pictures in order- Zebra hermit, purple mushroom and zoa, dragon soil favia, mini maxi carpet anemone, acan, conch, Emerald crab, gold tip hammer, purple tipped frog spawn, green tipped frog spawn, more purple tipped frogspawn, candy canes, unknown hermit crab and a small leather coral.

Coral look great!

 

[McCarrick]

I bought into it. We will see if it's true that after 10 weeks I will have coraline algae around my tank. There seems to be quite a lot of small particles in the container. My "reef" currently has 0 coraline right now because I hadn't introduced ANY until yesterday when I added my one qtd snail in. I bought both the purple helix and the pink fusion.

 

[McCarrick]

Welp, ran into an issue today (glad I did qt with the corals!) . We have Waminoa flatworms. I've only seen them on one hammer coral (which was one from petco that I wasn't ALL that attached to). Now this might have been a mistake but I read about someone doing a 30 second freshwater dip and killing some and so I tried that, for less than 30 seconds. Maybe 10- 15 of just swishing it around. A few did fall off but now my coral is very unhappy. I did test with one worm I could get off and it did die pretty quickly in the water. The next step is probably flatworm exit.

 

[McCarrick]

A few weeks ago I got a used pair of gen 1 radion xr30ws, the only problem was that the fans didn't ever seem to come on and so they would shut off due to overheating if they got turned up more than 5%. Today, with the help of my dad fixed the fans! Lucky for me, I was a circuit board technician for 6 years and my dad is an electrical (semiconductor) engineer. There are also 2 leds on one puck that are not coming on. That will be another project.

Tools needed- Phillips head screwdriver, a flathead (for removing the back panel if it doesnt come out easily) and an entire set of Allen wrenches. Ecotech used a ton of different Allen key sizes, which I didn't keep track of which sizes... so just make sure you have all of the ones for smaller heads.

To disassemble the lights, you need to remove the 8 screws and then remove the back panel. Disconnect the lights from the circuit board and the power.

Remove the two Allen screws from the circuit board and carefully remove the it. Note that there is a ribbon cable underneath that connects the board to the buttons on the unit. You will also need to remove all of the screws holding down the heat sink since the screws for the fan are on the underside of the plastic piece. I also cleaned the heat sink since I had it apart. I also taped over the led pucks since I didn't want to blind myself every time I tested the light. My light also had hot glue holding down the fans. This did peel off fairly easily.

After disassembly, it had to be determined that it was the fans that were bad and not a circuit board problem. Measuring between the Leads of the fan, we should have seen some resistance but instead we saw the value slowly rising. This is because the coils in the fan are faulted and have created an open circuit so what we are seeing is the capacitor charging. In the gen 1 fans, there is a "filter" consisting of a 100 micro Farad axial capacitor and a choke. The choke is essentially a coil of wires that acts as a sort of check valve for the electricity, preventing it from backfeeding electricity into the circuit.

Together the capacitor and the choke serve as a filter to keep electrical "noise" out of the cpu. To tell if these components are bad, you can measure them with a multimeter. The capacitor should read around 100 and the choke should read a very low resistance. In my case I read 105 uf and .87. If yours does not read this, you will need to replace the part.

Capacitor

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/vishay-beyschlag-draloric-bc-components/MAL213826102E3/13999056?utm_adgroup=General&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=PMax%20Shopping_Product_Zombie%20SKUs&utm_term=&utm_content=General&gclid=CjwKCAjwxOymBhAFEiwAnodBLGyxkWUgxkXumIZ7OQlTzwctkKEvM-eKPCGsErMW_yDuEs1sbOmHfRoC6V8QAvD_BwE

Choke

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/bourns-inc/5800-331-RC/774836

Since the components of the filter are good, we can move on to working on the fan. My connectors on the board were broken as well so instead of replacing the connector, I simply hard wired it into the board. Note that the positive (red) goes to the side with the square pad surrounding the hole.

Since the replacement fan with the filter cost $60 a piece, I used the same filter by just reconnecting it to the replacement fan. I bought each fan for under $10 each. The holes are not tapped but some of the screws in the fan are self tapping. The other screws go into the plastic easily enough that even though they are not specifically self tapping, it will make the threads.

12V 0.35A NEW Fan F-8015H12BII for Ecotech Radion XR30W Pro LED Lighting System | eBay

Type: Cooling Fan. Current: 0.35A. For COFAN F-8015H12BII.

www.ebay.com

Here I'm showing the direction of the filter. The input from the board should be soldered to the black wire. Then solder the other side (fan side) of the wire to where the capacitor and choke are connected. Then solder the red wire to the other end with the capacitor so that it branches off of the wire. Enjoy my quick and terrible drawing of the filter components.

Once I had it connected I tested the light after plugging the power to the circuit board in and voila, the fan came on. I then put new shrink tubing around the filter and reassembled the light.

Note about reassembly. Make sure that the fuse is not dirty before you reassemble it.

Stay tuned for a replacement of individual leds in a few weeks.

 

[McCarrick]

Tomorrow I will be running the lights at 10% and hopefully all will go well. I have a par meter coming in the mail so I will also post par readings- both with and without the missing leds.

 

[McCarrick]

There are also 16 new corals that I will be posting pictures of soon.

 

[McCarrick]

I had to move all my coral around to make room.
My euphilia corner
Frogspawn, gold hammer, torch and another hammer that's coloring up so not sure what it is.

Flashlight torch (aquasd)

Zoanthids from a local reefer (don't know what kind)

Pink diamond zoa, rainbow goni and bubblegum digi and a green acan from the same reefer friend

Rainbow pocclipora (aquasd)

A terrible photo of cars zoas (aquasd)

Ring of fire ricordea (aquasd)

Purple center duncan... supposed to have a purple center and green tips... we will see if it colors up (hopefully) this is the only one I am disappointed with from aquasd

I also got a mosaic rug mushroom from aquasd but it's in a bad place for pictures. They also sent me a freebie that I haven't identified yet.

Overall this was my first experience shopping online for coral and after reading lots of people saying aquasd had lots of pests- I didn't find a single one. It also looked like all of my frag plugs were glued on right before shipping. Customer service is great, shipping is great and I'd say that everything was pretty true to what I expected. Granted, everything is currently under stock biocube lights so they're obviously not going to look as cool as the online pictures- but I was still pleasantly surprised. I do plan on ordering from them again!

 

[McCarrick]

Maxi carpet anemone

Acans

Psychedelic blue mushroom

Key lime chalice

My new lettuce nudibranch in my qt system (and bumblebee snail)

 

[McCarrick]

I am now one of the few reefer using the Felix smart controller. Here is what I've learned so far.

When connecting Felix to the internet, the instructions say no special characters. I learned that this also applies to numbers. Even though my internet password was correct, it contained numbers. It didn't like that. I'm a renter and couldn't just set up a new ssid and password on the router. I happened to have a spare router and configured it as a transparent bridge so that it was on the same internet but with a different name and passowrd. Now, the name of the router had numbers in it. Felix didn't like that so I renamed the router and changed the password to have only lletters. After two days of messing with it, I was finally able to get it connected. Now my tank is also on its own router. Fancy!


I also learned that the customer service at Felix is very responsive and really want to help you get it resolved- even though they knew I bought it used from someone else. They were emailing me back at 8 pm pst! I had a response from my first email within half an hour. So far, customer service 10/10.

 

[McCarrick]

I live in California where it gets pretty warm. I am currently renting and do not have control of the ac (for a few more weeks anyways when they go on vacation). I suppose this is my first actual update with how my experience with Felix is going since getting it set up. I have almost all of my equipment hooked up to it- except my primary heater and one wave maker that I have in a battery backup in case the power goes out. I have been able to go in and add all of my equipment on it. I can set my alarms and have the controller turn thing on and off based on my "if this then that" (iftt) logics. You know, all the stuff a controller should do. But I like it so far. I just can't get the camera to stream clearly- my internet sucks so that's probably why. I do feel like an non-waterproof camera is sort of pointless without setting up a tripod- but then I have a tripod in my living room. But so far all is well in the Felix world. I'm so far just not sure what it does that's supposed to make it better than anything else out there.
But I liked the alarms since I had problems with my tank not cooling down because it was 85+ in my house and Felix alerted me. So I went and added a household fan over the tank to bring it down and had Felix control turning the fan off. I actually just heard it turn off while writing this. So far so good. This is also the first time that my pH has been the target 8.3 since dosing kalkwasser in my ato. Yay!

 

[McCarrick]

So I really think that my seneye thermometer is simply just not accurate I got a new heater that also has a digital readout of the temperature and the seneye is definitely reading high. I did also place another thermometer in the tank to verify. I trimmed the sensor in the app but the warning light on the seneye is still on which is a little annoying. In other news, enjoy more pictures of the tank.

 

[Macbalacano]

Hey there, saw that you had waminoa flatworms. Any luck with getting rid of them? I have them as well and Coral Rx did not seem to do anything. Please let me know and thanks in advance

 

[McCarrick]

Hey there, saw that you had waminoa flatworms. Any luck with getting rid of them? I have them as well and Coral Rx did not seem to do anything. Please let me know and thanks in advance

I just saw this! Apologies for the late reply. Firstly, isolated the coral, dipped in coral rx and gave it a good swish. Put it back in the tank and watched for a while longer. I can't say I recommend this, but freshwater kills them quickly. Depending on the coral, you could dip them in freshwater for no more than 15 seconds.... but euphilia doesn't like this very much. I might have just got lucky and that solved it but for me, repeated dips of coral rx (and then the freshwater dip that I don't know if I would do again) worked for me.

 

[Macbalacano]

I just saw this! Apologies for the late reply. Firstly, isolated the coral, dipped in coral rx and gave it a good swish. Put it back in the tank and watched for a while longer. I can't say I recommend this, but freshwater kills them quickly. Depending on the coral, you could dip them in freshwater for no more than 15 seconds.... but euphilia doesn't like this very much. I might have just got lucky and that solved it but for me, repeated dips of coral rx (and then the freshwater dip that I don't know if I would do again) worked for me.

Thanks very much for this, its very helpful!

 

[McCarrick]

Thanks very much for this, its very helpful!

I can't recommend using freshwater dip on anything expensive... I just really want to stress that! My hammer wasn't all that expensive and it receeded pretty quickly but recovered (until dinos eventually killed it). Just a fair warning