Calcium Reactor online

The Coralife Calcium reactor I won at the CTARS conference is now online and .. um .. reacting?

There were a few wrinkles to iron out while setting it up. First, there was a leak in one of the fittings. For the life of me I could not figure out how it came apart, so I had to use some super glue to try to seal the leak. It seems to have held for the past 24 hours.

And when I put my regulator on the CO2 bottle, it was reading 0 pounds of pressure. But when I connected it all up and got the pH controller setpoints working correctly, the CO2 started flowing normally and I've been able to maintain the proper amount flowing for over 24 hours now. I either have to get my regulator gauge looked at or I really have very little pressure in the bottle. I'm not sure.

I checked the chemistry today after it's been running for 24 hours and everything still seems fine. The one thing I don't like is now I don't have a pH probe in my tank so I don't know what the pH in the tank is. Perhaps its time to look for a computerized controller for the whole system.

CTARS conference

My reef club, CTARS had a reef conference one week ago in Cromwell CT and I gotta say it was a blast. Lots of great speakers, a great raffle, great vendors, sold out attendance, a good lunch. What more could you ask for.

In the raffle I won a $50 gift certificate to Reef Doctor Micromussa, a $25 gift certificate to DFS, a Coralife Calcium Reactor, and a nice coral shown in the picture to the right.

Pictures of the event are posted here.

I'll try to append this post with more impressions about the conference soon.

Cabinet Modifications

I recently added another 120mm fan to my canopy to keep the lights cool in there. When I only had one fan, the lights tended to heat up. Now that I have two fans blowing in there, things seemed to have cooled down alot. I am, however, getting a lot more evaporation which is causing the temperature to run a bit low. This will probably be a good thing in the summer though as it did get into the low 80s last summer.

The photo is one of my favorites from the January photo session, highly cropped.

Photoshop Express

I signed up for a PhotoShop Express account, check out some pictures here.