Downsized to a BC29 - Cranks Mods and Build Log

So as it turns out I've been pretty quiet on the forums over the past few months. Between work and buying a new house, I've had little time to take care of my 55 gallon tank. Between general neglect, a heatwave and faulty doser - my tank took a very hard toll.

My original Bubble Magus doser had a huge freak out a couple weeks ago. It dumped the remaining 2/3 of a gallon of alkalinity in my tank overnight without stopping. After pulling the plug and plugging it back in the first doser head would run non stop continuously. Not worth risking it happening again so it's in the trash.

Shortly thereafter we had a heat wave with the AC off. My controller did what it was supposed to do which was notify me and turn off some equipment. It was in vein. The temp rose to 89 degrees and stayed there for a couple days while we were away.

I quickly started losing my SPS. My clean up crew has been long gone and my sand turned rock hard. I was fighting cyano and other unidentified algaes. I grew depressed and hated looking at or thinking about my tank. My girlfriend convinced me to downgrade, start over and have another shot at it since she's grown quite fond of the fish.

This was the state of my 55 when I broke it down. A depressing sight indeed.



I ended up selling the majority of my live rock, 55 gallon tank and stand, my SunPower fixture and MP40w ES. With the money I bought a heavily discounted brand new BioCube 29 from another reefer who never got it setup. I also picked up a used MP10ES for $170. Sweet. First thing I did was build a stand for it with some spare 2x4's. I picked up some additional materials from Lowe's including some ebony colored stain. All together I think my stand cost me $20. Not bad. It's about 5" taller than the stock one which I like.





First mod to the BioCube was cutting the tab between chambers 1 & 2 for better flow. I never used the stock pump and instead used a spare MJ1200.



Next I bought the In-Tank media chamber package. Fuge area - media holder - Fish Save - Water Director. I'm not using the fish saver currently. It cuts off a lot of air to the main display tank from the vents in the back of the hood. I found some $3 polyfill at the fabric store and also got some Purigen and Chemipure Elite since that's what In-Tank recommends. I've never tried them but we'll see what happens. I also picked up the submersible led light from them and plan on getting some chaeto for the fuge area.





Next step was to figure out how I was going to dose the tank. I wanted to keep everything clean looking and very functional. Another trip to Lowe's and I found my solution. I had some spare Drew's Dosers laying around. Brand new actually. Decided to put them to good use with my controller. I drilled a couple holes in the back of the hood and siliconed in some 1/4" elbows. Bent some tubing down and I've got my drip feed dosing solution.








This drips Cal and Alk into chamber 3 (Return Chamber) hourly. The doses are separated by 5 minutes and each one runs for 70 seconds putting in roughly 1.3mL of supplements. I'm still messing with dose amounts and testing.. Works really well and easy to disconnect the hoses when I need to take the hood off. Quick disconnect for easy hood removal is really important to the build.

This was the state of the tank a couple days ago:


Then out of nowhere the Actinic ballast craps out leaving me with only the daylight PC bulb (10K I think?). No good.


I planned on retrofitting LED's anyway. This just gave me more motivation to get it done sooner. I had some spare Cree Royal Blue's and the ELN-60-48P driver that I was using on my old SunPower for supplemental blue. This is what the SunPower strips looked like:



I salvaged 10 of the Cree's and received this in the mail the other day:


Decided to go with StevesLeds.com heatsink and try out the Luxeon diodes since I was there. I was surprised to see the price so low on these things. I picked up (6)4000K, (6)5000K, (9) Royal Blue. One of the 4k's was DOA. I ended up using only [STRIKE](3)[/STRIKE] (4)4000k and [STRIKE](3)[/STRIKE] (4)5000K on my build. The rest a mix of the Luxeon Royal Blues and my older Cree's. I really like the open tube aluminum heatsink they use. It's a lot lighter than the block/fin setup and should be more effective at cooling. The pressurizing cooling fan they provide is very quiet and puts out some serious air through the open tubes.

I thought I ordered some adhesive thermal compound for the build. I didn't. I really wanted to avoid drilling a ton of holes but with what I had on hand, couldn't avoid it. I ended up riveting in all my led's. Not ideal but it works. Unfortunately I only have 2 drivers. Since I'm only using [STRIKE]6[/STRIKE] 8 white bulbs - I had to share the string with some royal blues as well. Also not ideal but it works. Here is everything riveted in:



Wired Up:



I did a poor job of pre-planning the diode layout. Not the sequence of white/blues but rather the direction of the terminals. A couple places I had to route wires in a funky way, making the job a bit more difficult than it had to be but everything turned out really well. I riveted in the fan and mounted the regulator jammy onto the heatsink as well.

Here's the progression of the inside of my hood:


Gutted










As you can see I decided to keep the stock moonlights. They work well enough, the wiring is already there and I don't have to think how to mount different ones. Plus they're paid for already - Even better.

It's hard to tell in the picture but I ended up wiring both LED string and the heatsink fan into the original lighting power cord built into the hood. This is ideal because outside of the hood, the power cord can easily be disconnected from its mating half. The second cord wasn't needed so it was pulled out.

I then put together the second half of the cord. I cut the connector piece off from the blown out ballast and wired in the 12V Wall-Wart adapter for the heatsink fan and both drivers for the LED's. I kept everything together with some wire braid. The cord can be disconnected and moved around in one piece really easily:







The site wants you to cut a 2x2 square piece of the hood out for the heatsink fan. I opted to just extend the stock air grooves in the hood to feed the fan with fresh air:



The LED build took way longer than I anticipated. Lots of soldering - lots of riveting. The end result was worth it I think. I'm surprised at how blue daylight string of leds is. Considering there's [STRIKE]6[/STRIKE] 8 very low kelvin whites and [STRIKE]6[/STRIKE] 4 blue's I expected the white to overpower. Not really the case though. It's more of a 14k look with just that string lit. The Actinic string pushes it closer to 20k I think.. There's a hint of purple coming through somewhere. I'm still playing with dim% on both strings to see what I like. I tuned both drivers to 875 mAh and running both strings at 40% for now to help acclimate. There still seems to be plenty of light in the tank even dimmed so low. I'm also really happy with color I got. It looks very "clean". I don't know how to explain it but I'm super satisfied: Also that LED shimmer I like it much better than my previous T5 setup.












Next up is installing the (2) 80mm Vantec Stealth fans into the hood to help keep the tank cool. I'm quickly learning these little all in one tanks heat up pretty quick. I'm not sure if I want to install them in the front of the hood on the feed door blowing down directly into the display tank. Or instead install them in the rear of the hood blowing down in the chamber areas. My first thought was up front. Any thoughts?

Also I need to construct the acrylic mounts for the Reef Angel float switches and figure out how I'm going to mount the feed tube for the ATO.

Finally I want to get the PWM Parabola dimming working with the Reef Angel. I've been out of the game for awhile so there's a lot to catch up on with the controller.

I'm thinking about going more softy in this tank. Lots of zoas/palys/rics. Possibly some mushrooms. I might do an SPS or two if I find something at a deal that I really like. Plus I want to see what these LED's can do.

More to come...

 

Great work, sorry to hear about the 55. You have a great lady don't let her get away.

Glad you are back.

 

Looks fantastic!!!!

The LED's made a huge difference.

Excellent job on the mods.

That Derasa is HUGE, looks good in there.

 

Awesome! That purple tint really comes through in the pics.

 

I was wondering if that was a clam.

 

Thanks - Yeah, she's a keeper for sure!

Yeah's he's a big guy. I've had him for 2 years now and he's grown quite a bit since. As he's grown he definitely became my favorite inhabitant. He seems okay now, but watching everything else die so quickly I hope he makes it the next couple of months. Here's some pics when I first got it:




I haven't yet figured out how to take good pics of stuff in the tank. The overall water color is accurate but the clams and remaining corals get very blown out for some reason..

I'm glad about that. I was kicking around picking up the (4) UV LED kit from Rapid. I'm thinking I won't need it now.

 

Made a concerning discovery lastnight while watching to make sure the lights were doing what they were supposed to be doing. Shortly after 9pm when the daylights were supposed to go out I noticed the tank was not as blue as I thought it should be with 12 royals running. Took a look and sure enough something like 17 of the 24 LED's were still on - including 4 or 5 of the daylights. Also some of the blue string that should have been lit wasn't. 1/2 of each string was illuminated and the light output was pretty dim with only 1 driver running.

I tested each string individually before I closed everything up and put it on the tank. Meaning the blue dim lead plugged in and blue power plugged in. Worked fine. Same with the whites. Problems occurred when both dimmer cables were plugged in but only one driver had power. LED's that should have been off were on and vice-versa. Something was obviously making contact with something else that shouldn't have been.

Lesson learned - metal fasteners (rivets in this case), an all metal heatsink, and some larger blobs of solder significantly increase the chance of creating electrical contact where one shouldn't be. I don't know where exactly it was happening but a few grinded down rivet heads, re-soldered leads and a boat load of resistance testing I got it worked out. On my last supplemental LED build I used nylon washers to help reduce this exact scenario. I didn't feel like taking the 40 minutes it would take driving to pick some more up this time around and instead thought I would just be super careful. That decision cost me 4 or 5 hours worth of headache today :-[

Final working result - My white string now gives me a much brighter 10kish look as I originally expected. My blue string is giving me only blue like it should. Also both strings dimmed down to 20% gives me roughly the same output as 40% yesterday but pulls out some of the blue that shouldn't have been there.

Also, I'm using (4)4000k and (4)5000k on my white string. Not (3) and (3) like I mentioned in my original post.


Just received a few parts in the mail today so on deck for Install:

New bearings for the MP10 dry side. It makes a louder whirring sound than I would like. I'm a bit nervous about undertaking this project:


New float switches for ATO. I broke one of my originals:


The Vantec Stealh 80mm fans. I just received the guards in the mail. Still not 100% sure where I want to mount these. On the front feed door or the rear access door:

 

Looking good man! Keep it up

 

Great new build crank. Sorry to hear about your doser. As you know, I bought that doser based on your detailed review. Any follow ups as to why it did that?

 

Thanks. I've got to say, your build is quite nice as well - I really like what you've done with your cube. Something to aspire to that's for sure

Hey Matt, while typing up my original post I was thinking of you. I do remember that you had bought the same doser. I have no idea why it decided to spazz out on me. In retrospect there were a couple warning signs, though. It worked great for the first year, I'd say. Kept everything spot on. Slowly I noticed that for some reason my supplements would drain back down into the holding containers. I guess the rollers weren't making good contact with the tube anymore in certain positions since it wouldn't happen every time it dosed. Just occasionally. Subsequently, I was beginning to lose some doses since the doser would have to re-prime the up-tube.

About 6 months ago my girlfriend wakes me up saying the doser won't shut off. It was pumping calcium for 3 or so minutes on the first head. Normally it would only run for about few seconds. Since I was missing doses anyway I figured I should be caught up now : I unplugged and plugged back in. It ran "fine" again for another 5 months until the alkalinity episode on head 2. Everytime I plugged it back in, head 2 would run indefinitely. Since I set it up it hadn't been touched. Never got wet or damaged in any way. One day it ran fine - the next it wouldn't stop running. I don't know.

How has yours been running lately? I know you've had it for awhile now. Any issues?