Tomservo's UAS test

[tomservo]

Thanks, guys! I got another timer and set it to 6 hours/day. We'll see how that does. There's a boatload of light in that little box, ~18 watts (8 red x 2w + 1 blue @ 2.5-3w). I'm really happy with how the growth on the screen is coming along, and the tank in general. I still haven't decided for sure what fish to put in there, but I did order an emerald crab to take care of the bubble algea. I'm hoping the tank is small enough to actually catch him once his job is done.

I've been considering a goby/pistol combination.. I really like gobies and blennies. It's kind of regrettable that the tank isn't big enough for a lawnmower blenny, I love those guys and their dragon faces.

SM: Actually the end with the blue LED still has red LEDs, I just crammed a blue in between. Even with the LPLC18 power supply strapped to that bit of aluminum, it still stays reasonably cool.

BTW: LPLC18-700 (18w/700ma) drivers are only $9 at powergate.

[tomservo]

An update, at last!

It's been, well, however long now.. This is the first real scraping, I did pick off the chunky hair algae last time I took photos but this time as you can see there's a lot more. Screen's filled in more, but I suspect I could lower the photoperiod even more. Would 4 on 8 off x 2 per day work? It'd essentially be 2 12 hour days per 24hrs. Based on the 18/6 photoperiod, I'd think 8 hours between should be enough, and the 4 on may be short enough that the whole screen could fill in. Opinions? I may just try it either way.

edit: hey, photos! I forget which side was which, but I think the side with the chunky clump was the side away from the lights.

[SantaMonica]

I think diffusing the light is what's needed.

[tomservo]

Some tank shots, sorry for the lousy photography, I don't have a tall enough tripod to take shots of this tank. The back wall is just getting covered with those little hard spirally (and not) featherdusters. Tank's cloudy b/c I just scraped algae, it wasn't bad just a green haze, could still see through it OK, been scraping it about every 2 weeks or so. I think it helps a lot that I designed the light optics to cover the tank without flooding the glass with light. The top half of the glass gets almost no algae to speak of.

The sand/CC substrate has some green algae on it, this was mostly confined to the shell pieces in the substrate but it has slowly grown more. I'm not terribly worried at this point, it seems to be pretty well under control, and I will be getting some finer live sand to put over top of it from a fellow along with a couple more pieces of LR.





It may LOOK empty but there are 3 mushrooms in the tank! There are 2 in this shot, these ones were a dull red/brown when I got the rock but the one getting more light is developing a very nice cyan/blue color. They've doubled in size also, and seem to be moving down where they can get more light, albeit very slowly.



This little crab's shell has a really interesting teal color to it, is that just the shell I wonder?


edits: It took me a long time to notice that I never attached the extra photos.. doh!

[tomservo]

So, lots of changes this week... I got another piece of LR, this one has a maxi mini anemone on it, which seems to be doing well. It's only been in there 3 days now, but it's opening better every day. Also, two clowns, an "onyx" (ocellaris I believe) and a regular ocellaris. Everything seems to be doing very well.

I switched the scrubber to 4 on / 8 off / 4 on / 8 off on sunday and the growth seems to be much improved. Entirely anecdotal, I didn't take pictures of it. The dead spots that were there before are gone now, however.

Using the "sleeve" around the screen seems to have a nice side benefit in the case of my setup, the glass doesn't seem to grow algae much except at the very top where there's flow and air.

Obligatory pics:

FTS


Also spent some time making a bracket for the float switches that arrived today.. One sits about 1/8" above the other to act as a failsafe, the lower one determines the normal water level.

[kerry]

real nice clowns and the coralline is looking great.

[tomservo]

Thanks, Kerry, though that be a little belated.. Small update, just some shots of the clowns and nem. You can see the decorative hair algae next to the nem, that came with the rock. It certainly hasn't grown, and I expect it will get eaten by the emerald crab or one of the snails sooner or later. The nem is getting some color going, it's a maxi mini and when I first saw it, looked great.. The day before I picked it up the dude dosed his tank with 2x chemiclean so everything was very unhappy.

Also modded the scrubber setup a little, changed how the lights are attached to the tank.. Before they were just siliconed directly to the glass and I haven't been real happy with it.. So I put some white diffuser over the channel, and glued some clear diffuser "hooks" on and made some glass loops on the tank. It works very well. I'm trying to work out a way to make a better screen holder rig so the bubbles disperse better. As it it, they're kind of "clumpy".

[tomservo]

Pictorial update! I got some monti digi frags (more like a colony!) today and a couple pieces of orange monti cap.

Also did a scrape of the scrubber, the growth seems much better on the side with the blue LED. Maybe I'll rework that setup, move the LEDs to the middle of each strip and do a blue/red pair on each one. I MIGHT be able to get away with that many on one 18w driver.. A decent crop I think. I took some shots of the algae fibers, they look almost like chaeto.

The purple tip monti digi doesn't look quite that purple in person, but that's the best setting I've found for my white balance. I need to make a custom setup or something I guess. It was open the whole way home in the car, and was open like the pics less than 5 mins after it went in the tank. A bunch of bits broke off, it was in a low flow area of the tank and is rather fragile. One finger I stuck in the rock in front of the main colony and the others are chilling out on the bottom until I can get some rubble for frag mounts. The mother colony in the guy's tank where it came from was like 18" across! He had a tang that would pick up broken bits and move them around the tank, so he had colonies everywhere, and even a piece encrusted onto the glass.

The orange cap monti came from the same tank, and the colony when I saw it was about 12" around, and he said it was twice that big before he accidentally broke off some plates. My pieces he just snapped off the back plate.

[SantaMonica]

I've been looking at some purple digi's, but did not think they were purple enough.

[tomservo]

That pic is a little off maybe but the colorful sides are definitely more purple than brown. I expect it to color up more in my tank as well, in his tank the coral was only getting like 70-90 PAR at the top. They were under eshine 60w LED for the last 2 months and before that some T5 setup. They look a lot different under my lights than they did under his TBH, but mine uses a high CRI white emitter and has 420nm also. I didn't think there'd be much difference under my lights, but you can see a big difference in color between the side that was getting a lot of light in his tank (exposed side) and the back sides of the branches, which are pale brown.