Randy's Redsea Reefer 250 and the rest of the Coral Farm

[RandyC]

I still have power!

Amazon Prime did deliver the goods FTW. A generator I ordered on Monday morning showed up today around noon. Delivery people that delivered mine said they delivered 8 generators today. Fired it up and got it running on propane. Little louder than I expected, but this is my first generator, so my expectations may not have been aligned to reality.

Also, the wind that PG&E was so scared of hasn’t materialized so far, so my 12 o’clock shutdown time was pushed back to 8pm, to who knows when or if power will go out. For the record, I’m not complaining!

Power went down night 11:36pm. Started the generator around midnight. Have all the tanks up and running as well as the kitchen fridge and garage freezer. I did transfer some of the load to the solar when the lights came on to balance it out so I can save some fuel and don't have the potential to overload the generator. Also, I lowered the tanks heaters by 2F so they don't come on as often at night.

Interesting though, the Apex wouldn't power up on the Reefer 250 and just kept flickering on and off. Other Apex units powered up fine. I tried a unplugging and plugging it in and after a few times, it started working. KInd of odd.

Another issue I ran into is some of the radion lights didn't turn on. They're definitely getting power, but it was a no go when they should have been on. Some of them did turn on eventually, so it almost seems like the schedule is off somehow. No internet, so EcoSmart live and reeflink don't work and it's too much effort to plug in USB for each light to figure out the problem. I'll do that tomorrow if it happens again.

Power still hasn't been restored as of 5:30pm, so I'm at the the 18 hour mark of no power. So far things have been okay for me. I have been very impressed with the Champion inverter generator and my SMA SunnyBoy solar inverter. They have been working like champs.

Couple of really good things about the Champion:
- It's pretty quiet for a generator (one neighbor didn't wake up when I started it and slept through the night, the other didn't even know I had a generator going.
- a 20lb tank of propane lasted me 14 hours (granted I did transfer some load to solar)

 

[Wrangy]

Really glad to hear things are going reasonably smoothly mate! I have my fingers and toes crossed that the power comes back to you soon!!

 

[RandyC]

Really glad to hear things are going reasonably smoothly mate! I have my fingers and toes crossed that the power comes back to you soon!!

Thanks buddy!

WOOT! My 19.5 hour reef crisis is over for now! Hopefully power is here to stay!

 

[Mickeyt1reef]

AWESOME! Feel for you guys and the power deal!

 

[RandyC]

AWESOME! Feel for you guys and the power deal!

Thanks! It was a good exercise for me because it forced me to get everything I needed to survive an outage. I had been meaning to do this for months

 

[Dal-Reef]

Great post and love following. Also glad you got the power situation figured out. Just get a Reefer 250 up and running and is currently only in the 11th week so a very young tank. I am running 2 Kissel 360x mounted in a T5 Hybrid. Skimmer is dialed in water chemistry is good starting to get stable. Got a few softies and LPS that are doing well. Also started getting a lot of corraline algae spots showing up around the rock and tank. So my question for you is when did you really see your tank really take off. 12-14 months?

 

[RandyC]

Great post and love following. Also glad you got the power situation figured out. Just get a Reefer 250 up and running and is currently only in the 11th week so a very young tank. I am running 2 Kissel 360x mounted in a T5 Hybrid. Skimmer is dialed in water chemistry is good starting to get stable. Got a few softies and LPS that are doing well. Also started getting a lot of corraline algae spots showing up around the rock and tank. So my question for you is when did you really see your tank really take off. 12-14 months?

The Reefer 250 was my first big tank, so my timetable was further out than I normally expect a tank nowadays to “take off” because of the new reefer learning curve. I probably saw great growth after a bout with too low of nutrients and then a GHA battle, so it really wasn’t until probably a year and a half until things grew noticeably without having hiccups here or there.

Nowadays, like the frag/growout tank, I expect to start seeing good growth 2-3 months after rock being cycled (normally 30-40 days cycle time). Good husbandry and keeping on top of your testing (alk being most important for an SPS tank) and making sure things stay stable and you should get good consistent growth.

 

[Dal-Reef]

The Reefer 250 was my first big tank, so my timetable was further out than I normally expect a tank nowadays to “take off” because of the new reefer learning curve. I probably saw great growth after a bout with too low of nutrients and then a GHA battle, so it really wasn’t until probably a year and a half until things grew noticeably without having hiccups here or there.

Nowadays, like the frag/growout tank, I expect to start seeing good growth 2-3 months after rock being cycled (normally 30-40 days cycle time). Good husbandry and keeping on top of your testing (alk being most important for an SPS tank) and making sure things stay stable and you should get good consistent growth.

Thanks for the quick reply.. A beautiful tanks takes time and patience. As they say take it slow.. I will continue to follow. I will look at putting a build thread for mine. Got tons of pics along the way

 

[RandyC]

Growout/Frag tank has been wet now for a little over 8 months now (exactly 234 days when this was filmed yesterday). This was filmed on an iPhone 7 with an orange filter.



Definitely better if you watch in HD (720p or 1080p)

 

[Wrangy]

So nice mate! So much room for activities too! The colours too! Oh my!

 

[MuffinMonster]

- Red Sea return connector part #42221 (remove barb before gluing - also be carful to not over do it on the cement, you don't want to glue the black screw nut since it's a tight fit)

- Spears 32mm to 1" sched 80 transition union
- Spears 1" schedule 80 gate valve
- 1" blue PVC pipe

How is this holding up for you still? I Just ordered a reefer 250 and want to get it all converted and plumbed to standard with a spears valve before i even get the tank wet. This is definitely looking better than the 30 wraps of teflon tape to thread a standard connection into a metric one like some other people do. They dont have issues from what i have seen either, still seems sketchy to me. Would rathe glue like you did! Thats clean!

 

[RandyC]

How is this holding up for you still? I Just ordered a reefer 250 and want to get it all converted and plumbed to standard with a spears valve before i even get the tank wet. This is definitely looking better than the 30 wraps of teflon tape to thread a standard connection into a metric one like some other people do. They dont have issues from what i have seen either, still seems sketchy to me. Would rathe glue like you did! Thats clean!

Yeah, Teflon tape wasn’t for me. In my mind, that’s just a leak waiting to happen, especially if you did the on the return side (since it is pressurized). I couldn’t sleep at night with that solution. I haven’t had a single issue with the transition union I used and the two other Reefers that I converted in addition to mine haven’t had a problem either.

 

[MuffinMonster]

Yeah, Teflon tape wasn’t for me. In my mind, that’s just a leak waiting to happen, especially if you did the on the return side (since it is pressurized). I couldn’t sleep at night with that solution. I haven’t had a single issue with the transition union I used and the two other Reefers that I converted in addition to mine haven’t had a problem either.

Awesome! That'd definitely the route i am going to go then- my reefer comes in next week and then ill spend the next couple weeks getting it set, ill keep you posted on how it turns out with the plumbing! Thanks for sharing with us how you did it.

 

[Flameback Pair]

Another problem with the teflon method is that the adapter pipe fitting they put the tape on has a small diameter orifice which constricts water flow compared to the RandyC method. I already have my conversion unions ready to install in my reefer. @MuffinMonster can't wait to see your Reefer 250 I hope you do a build thread. Cheers!

 

[RandyC]

This little guy, TSA Haymaker, has been a pretty slow grower for me. At least it's doing something - albeit in super slow fashion. Polyps have developed that cool looking two tone color with a bright orange on the base of the polyp though.

Got the piece on July 17 and here's a picture from July 26

November 5 (102 days later)

 

[RandyC]

So I wanted to see for myself how much faster "micro-fragging" helps the growth rate of a new piece grow into a mini-colony. So I chopped up a frag I recently got.

I picked up this RR Ultimate Orange Passion on Sept 14 (pic under blues from a day later 9/15).

I let the original piece encrust a little before I chopped it into 3 pieces on Sept 30. Here's a picture of it from today (Oct 4). I'll update where it's at in a few weeks.

Picture update on the micro-fragging of the RRC Ultimate Orange Passion

Oct 4

Nov 8 (35 days later) - Looks like a couple of the encrustation from two of the pieces are about to merge

 

[carrico]

So nice mate! The growth of the corals is amazing!
Could you share your light settings? Thanks.

 

[RandyC]

Here's couple of newer frags that I got growing in the growout/frag tank.

RR Event Horizon - Oldie, but goodie

Coralicious Snickerfritz

CRT (Hung;s) Rainbow Explosion - Excited to see how this one develops.

 

[RandyC]

So nice mate! The growth of the corals is amazing!
Could you share your light settings? Thanks.

I run a modified SPS AB+ on Radion XR15w G4 Pros on all my tanks. Peak is the same as SPS AB+ (18,500K spectrum for 7 hours), but the ramp up/down times are pushed out a little.

On the 6x3x1' growout/frag tank I have eight XR15w (~12.5" from water line) with this profile:

On the Reefer 250 I have three XR15w (~8" from water line) with this profile:

 

[carrico]

Randy, thank you so much for all these details. Your topic is inspiration to me!