reefing on the cheap, lucky sob(s) edition

[psykokid]

So a couple of weeks ago i was on reef central and saw a thread where a guy posted up his entire 125 gallon setup for FREE.. the whole kit and caboodle. First person to PM him got it. I see one of those pop every now and then, usually hours after the fact. This one i just happened to be goofing off on REEFNAZI at the right time and the post was only 2 min before. I said wth and sent him a pm. About an hour and a half later he sent me a PM and said i was first in line and what was my phone number so we could work out the details.

He is in the middle of a move to Redondo Beach to Santa Clarita and didnt have time until this weekend to make it happen. I just set up a new 60 gallon and got everything sorted when i scored this. I didnt have room for the tank and other stuff but there were a few bits that i wanted such as a kalkwasser reactor, RO-DI unit, Chiller, ATO unit, refractometer, etc. I called up Lanny and asked him if he wanted a 125 gallon acrylic tank with all the fixins, he said of course.. He also has a truck so we could pick it all up which worked equally well.

The guy had sent some pictures with photos of the janky plumbing. Not happy with the way it was set up we went about figuring out ahead of time how to make it work right and be less rigged up. We went down today and took it all apart, loaded it into Lanny's truck and made it back to his place in one trip. Not too shabby. In order to do it right it was one of things where the plumbing and other bits would need to be thought out alot better so we got the stand and tank cleaned out and into his house and the 2 35 gal brutes half full of rocks back into salt water so it doesnt have too much die off. There's alot on his end to work out but yeah, not too shabby for the grand price of FREE..

[psykokid]

just a note: The guy said the chiller wasnt reading the temp correctly and needed a new controller board. He also would shut the chiller down and let it sit at the end of the season as well without backflushing and taking the chiller off line. Hrmm.. When we were picking things up i asked him if he had ever tried to calibrate it. He said no, the chiller had went from reading one temp one day to reading about 15 degrees higher the next. double hrmm..

I come home tonite, hook the chiller up to a bucket of vinegar water and reverse the in and out ports. Let the chiller run for an hour and back flush. Came back out after that hour, drained off the vinegar water and filled the bucket with fresh water. Let that circulate for another 30 min and went back out to the garage. Swapped the hoses round and measured the water temp in the bucket which read 65.8. Chiller control panel reads seventy something or other ridiculous. I calibrate the temp and then do a functional test, which involves turning off the circulation pump and setting the chiller temp for 60.  The chiller should turn on and steadily lower the temp to 60 degrees. All good there. So i bump the temp back up to normal and turn the chiller circulation pump back on and re-measure the water temp. Temp was 64.3, i re-calibratedd it to 64.4 since the calibration would only go up by twos. Let run for 5 min and eveything was good, calibration held just fine.

[Bergy]

flushing the chiller is important..

but, switching or reversing flows is not all that important...

the heat exchanger is kinda wide open inside there... just a very small coil of titanium... a very strong flow will do much better then simply reversing the flow...

if you can hook up a hose and turn it on full blast, it wlll shoot out all the sediment that the vinegar didnt dissolve.

the cleaning process with a hose will take a whole 30 secondes once yoyu get the hose hooked up...

after that, i would suggest filling up the heat exchanger with vinegar and water and letting it soak to dissolve any calcification or other gunk that might be coating the coils,, but  getting rid of the sediment is way more important


and good job on the calibration attempt... there is another hundred bucks saved

[psykokid]

yeah, the guy was definitely of the just replace it instead of trying to fix it mentality.  He said that his ro unit was getting old so he just bought an entire new unit and chucked the old one about a month ago.. I cringed a little when he said that..

other little goodies that i picked up as well included an algae free hammer head magnetic algae scraper, kent long and short handled scraper, misc test kits and last but not least, a real refractometer. I zeroed it out last night with distilled water and then read my tank water.. sg 1.027. He also had one of those coralife deep six hydrometers like i already had. Hydrometers read my tank water as 1.022 and 1.023 respectively.. just a bit of difference there..

[KYLE.801]

Dang that is a pretty sweet find.  Hope the chiller works out for you.  I cant believe he just threw out an ro unit thats crazy. 

[Bergy]

a good ro membrane can cost around 60-90 bucks... although you can find some on sale for less, (MAX show had some for sale at $35)

a set of prefilters can run about $5-10 each, so it can be around $30-40 for prefilters...

some resin will cost another $15-25...

and you can buy a new ro filter for about $120


it is almost like computer printers....

it is almost worth it to buy a new printer rather then a complete set of cartridges...

I think i recall a story/as about a kodak printer that was made that didnt have 'replacable' cartridges and you just sent the entire printer back and got a new printer sent to you...

not sure if that worked or caught on or is economically sustainable......

[RandyFolds]

Even with the repair cost equal to the replacement cost, they are still valuable pieces for a real DIY hobbyist. Hello free media reactors...particularly kalk.

Thanks again Jake, for the awesome find. I am sitting here looking at it wondering what the hell I am going to do. My wrist is ultra messed up from that drunk prick hitting me, and I have a hell of a lot of sawing, gluing, lifting, pulling and screwing in to do. 125 gallons is a lot of reef to build.

Right now, I am hunting for a 40 gallon long that I can use as a sump. I was thinking of throwing a 50 under there, but it is too tall. I might set things up with a smaller 30g sump for the time being, but that is a lot of skimmer to fit in a small space.

I also need to re-plumb the returns through the overflows to conceal the plumbing, re-plumb the overflow bulkheads, and re-wire the canopy to 8x54w overdriven T5, rather than the 6x110w VHOs that are currently on there. I can use the same balast and overdrive the T5s, which is awesome.

If I had like $500 laying around, it would be done tomorrow, but I am poor and so it will take some weeks.

[psykokid]

at least those odd nems on the rock will hopefully be dead..

[RandyFolds]

I have been hunting pretty hard, and my best guess from the little we saw of them is that they are a tiny species of majano.

Either that or mini-rock anemones, in which case we should culture and trade them. I still haven't seen one all the way open, and I threw airstones in the brutes so I can't really see anything anymore.

How often should I do stuff to these buckets?

[psykokid]

just keep an eye on evaporation, did you check the salinity of the water you put in? one and a half were just ro water..

[Bergy]

make sure you go thru my garage o parts and take everything you need... i dont want the stuff and will end up throwing it away in a few months...

[psykokid]

too bad you threw out that beat up acrylic tank you had in there.. we could have modded that and made it work for lannys sump..

[Just_Greg]

too bad you threw out that beat up acrylic tank you had in there.. we could have modded that and made it work for lannys sump..

LOL...if that's the tank i think you mean, that thing has been passed around like the last beer at a frat party.  it was given to me, i gave it to my dad, he gave it back to me, i gave it to Bill, and i guess Bill passed it on.

[Bergy]

I am not sure which tank you are talking about but i think i gave that tank to someone...

but if i recall that tank was a bit longer then what would fit... but then again, im not sure or cant remember much nowaday...

too bad you threw out that beat up acrylic tank you had in there.. we could have modded that and made it work for lannys sump..

[Just_Greg]

yeah, i think you said it was too big for the shop's setup.