125 gallon build log - Page 9 - Aquarium Advice

**neilanh** · 03-10-2008, 12:49 PM

Red Cherry Shrimp

pitt420dude · 03-10-2008, 12:58 PM

Ohhhh. How about that. Well now I know and knowing is half the battle. I wonder what is the other half?

I like learning!

**neilanh** · 03-10-2008, 02:14 PM

The other half is doing...

**neilanh** · 03-15-2008, 09:42 PM

I've yet to start dosing, so I am getting a little hair algae and dust on the glass. Not much, definately not as much as I expected, so I can't complain.

Even without dosing, I'm seeing growth on nearly everything. It's slow, but a few inches over the past week I'd say.

The cloudy water has cleared up, finally. Lasted about a week, and was driving me nuts.

Here's a quick shot I just took. It's not great, still playing with camera settings to figure out how to take a good FTS:

So, my project for today was to make an automatic dosing system. Yeah, you can buy them, but they're not cheap. Thanks again to the folks over at GWAPA, I did something very similiar to this autodoser from GWAPA

I didn't snap pics along the way, not really too much to it. I found some tall 3.2L canisters at bed bath and beyond, drilled a 1/4" hole in them for the tubing to run through.

For pumps I'm using a mini-jet 606 I got from my shipment this week from F&S (yes, lately this has been a weekly thing, sometimes twice a week - lol). I used a piece of 1/2" tubing I had laying around and a medication dosing syringe (that the pharmicist at Target gave me for free) to convert to 3/16" standard airline.

So, using a hamilton dual outlet digital timer that has settings for 1 min durations, I did some testing with water and calculated that I pump about 100ml of fluid per minute with this configuration and my head height.

I decided to give the PPS-Pro solution a whirl and see how it does. I modified their standard mixture, increasing the K by about 20% and scaling everything up for my 100ml dosages.

Here's the installed pics (left is macros, right is micros):

And the oulet above the tank - taking special care to make sure they cannot get in the tank and create a backflush onto my floor:

Thoughts?

**Purrbox** · 03-15-2008, 10:50 PM

Very neat. I think that should work well for you and will make vacations a lot easier, since you won't have to ask someone to dose for you just make sure the canisters are full and go.

pitt420dude · 03-16-2008, 04:15 AM

Very cool neil. Would you suggest using the PPS-Pro Solution over the EI dosing method? Do you run your CO2 at night?

**neilanh** · 03-16-2008, 02:43 PM

This will be my first run at PPS-Pro, so I'll let ya know. I definately like the concept better than EI, but whether or not it works will take me some time to see for myself.

I do not run my CO2 at night. You can, nothing wrong with it, but running it at night would cut my tank time in half between refills.

FiveSix · 03-16-2008, 03:21 PM

That tank looks really classy man. Good luck with the algae.

**neilanh** · 03-16-2008, 07:30 PM

Thanks. I'm sure I'll get the algae under control, always expect some whenever setting up a new tank. Takes time to get it all balanced out.

So, I've been putting in RCS as testers for the tank. I have quite a few, and they're doing well.

We spoke earlier of the zebra otos I had been searching for. Few weeks ago I found some and got a dozen, all destined for the 125. They're currently being housed in a year old 46g upstairs that has plenty for them to eat.

Tonight I opted to catch 3 and put them in the 125 to see how they do. They just went in, and within seconds we're going nuts on the tank.

This is one of the younger/smaller ones that doesn't appear to be camera shy.