 State of the Tank: (cont.) |
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So, pumped by this latest acquisition as something that could help me out of my overall tank-funk (“Yeah! Some “LPS” on the bottom. That oughta make everything better”), I went out and got this  and this .
Both Acanthastrea, the first came from an LPS while the second I found online. And while I never divulge prices here, I WILL say that if you know where to go, or who to go to, you’d be surprised at how inexpensively you can pick up this stuff. Nonetheless, I still consider myself quite the idiot for doing this NOW. Fortunately, I did keep my wits about me well enough not to add any ‘SPS’ corals, fish, or sea manatees to the tank before the big project. But all told, this was much more work than I normally do or would advise any of you do if you had some big job ahead of you…especially if you were then leaving for vacation in another two weeks. Here, by the way, is how the tank looked after all the changes .
Okay, onto the big Sump & Skimmer Swap:
I actually posted a huge photo essay on most of the bulletin boards chronicling this job but it didn’t seem to garner a great deal of interest. If you’re still here, I’ll take it to mean that you ARE fairly interested so I’ll give you a much better tour along with the images.
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But first, for any newcomers here, it has long been a complaint of mine that my sump has become not only inadequate, but because of the tank’s evolution from ‘LPS/Softie’ dominant to ‘SPS’ dominant over the years, and the ever increasing addition of auxiliary equipment, it has also become just a little cluttered . Another problem is water capacity, which, as you can see is pretty darn pathetic . Then there’s the micron sock problem. You see, with about 6000g an hour pouring through that thing, it doesn’t take long to ‘fill up’, approximately 2 days to be exact. Then when it does, the overflow is forced back into the sump, causing microbubbles in the tank so thick the water nearly becomes opaque. THAT, of course, will then cause many of the corals to slime, which coats the sock, which overflows back into the sump, which…well, you get the picture.
I’m not exactly sure what the final straw was but it just may have been my ‘running out of water’ while trying to frag and bag half a dozen corals. Or maybe it was one of the mornings that I found the sock had blown off completely, making it look like every coral, fish, and piece of live rock had spawned simultaneously. But by last fall, I had had it; something HAD to be done.
The first thing I did was contact Brent Barr at Barr Aquatic systems In doing quite a bit of research across the boards on the subject of custom sumps, this was an outfit the many of the
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