Nursery Tank - Finished

The Nursery Tank is finished. I went through a few redesigns as far as plumbing before I got it working properly. My father reinforced the wooden sand filter cover with some cross braces to make sure it could hold the tank.

So, the original design of having a 1" pipe with the the multiple bends didn't work. It either entirely filled up and became a long winding syphon and drained the tank too fast, or the water didn't flow over the syphon bulkhead fast enough so the water level in the tank got to high. Next I looked a commercial boxes made for this purpose and copied that design, which fetures an exterior box. This didn't go fast enough either. If you look back at the old post for this nursery tank I said that 1" would work because the nursery tank is 5" above the big tank. This is true but the syphon bulkhead is not 5" above, its 0" above. That's why it didn't flow fast enough. So I put in a second pipe to syphon the water out. I ended up with two 1" pipes syphoning the water out of the tank into the box and two 1" pipes draining the box. See the pic above.

The feed to the tank was fairly simple. Using my pond pump I got the connections to get it to PVC which went from the big tank to the nursery tank. In the nursery tank I ran the PVC horizontally along the water level and made ten 11/16" holes at various angles. Ten holes at 11/16" because that is what I calculated as the same cross sectional area as the PVC feed pipe. A few days later when I got the return working I put some sea plants in it and found that there was lots of movement in the water, just what I wanted.

I also did a back wash, the pressure of the sand filter is now down to around 12psi, it was around 22psi. I also set up the computer with a pan and tilt webcam and temperature sensors. The camera I put on a 2x4 in the back of the room. I put one temperature sensor in the tank and the other in the room. The room one is to monitor whether the air conditioner is working or not, its has to be restarted about weekly now. The computer was not connecting to the Internet which I need in order to remotely log in and get the camera. Bill took a good portion of his afternoon to help me fix the problem. It turned out that the switch was having a conflict with a wireless access point in regards to it's IP address, we ended up just putting the computer on a different switch. We also spent large amount of time looking for software for the temperature probes, which we found in Patty's lab.

This all took four days, day one cleaning and planning; day 2 was reinforcement, feed plumbing, and version one of return; day three was version 2 of return; and day four was version 3 of return and computer set up.

I also got some new fish in the tank, a bunch of silversides, a big hermit crab, some other stuff I can't identify, and this one.... in the picture.... does anyone know what this is?