26 oz Pico #2

[brandon4291]

Hi guys, I do have to add calcium and others regularly to prevent depletion. I use a mini jet 404 powerhead tucked away in there to provide current.

I like the snails and bristleworms. Their nitrogenous waste helps things in a system where you've restricted the bioload. I noticed my macro lagging behind a bit until I put in two new bumblebee conchs and began feeding a food pellet or two each week. The resulting bioload seems to help the refugium. There are many pods and stronger growth on the caulerpa..

 

[dpetruescu]

Very cool :lol:

How does the water circulate between the sump and the display? What am I missing?

How often do you do water changes? And how much of the water do you change ?

I may want to try this as I think it would look good in my office Please let us know how it goes.

Thanks

 

[AbelaJohnB]

I was hunting down something today for work and came across this: http://ecosaqua.com/EcoCosm%20Works.htm thought it might be of interrest to some

 

[brandon4291]

Yes those are amazing. Since I first saw one similar in 1996 there have been many offshoots of the closed ecosystem...even once on a site I saw some made in these lab flasks that had the same ingredients. They are neat in that they run for so long completely sealed, without a break in the seal, but they are still not very biodiverse... now if you could get xenia to do well in that I would have to be severely impressed! However, that system is much simpler because you dont have to dose and change out water--theres many trade offs. At least that one was affordable, have seen them as much as 400$....that one was fifty. I dont think you could design one with that kind of longevity housing live coral, they are too delicate and have too many nutrient requirements, however you never know. what if we could design a time release delivery system where little balls of supplement disslove over time...hmmm

its awesome though

B

 

[brandon4291]

the xenia side

 

[Dumb Guy]

hey brandon, can we please get some more details, like whats in there. do you have a web page for this thing? i saw that pic next to the minute maid can, and i was like damn thats cool. seems like it would be hard to maintain? it's awesome though.

 

[brandon4291]

I would love to trade locations with you for a weekend. I know exactly what I would do if I were in california and near some water. What wold you do if you were in the texas panhandle surrounded by rocks and flatness? flying model airplanes during the day and reefing at night works I guess...



Thanks man -- it is a very fun reef to keep but was a pain to build. The canopy is tricky but will enhance the cooling once its finished. Sealing the system the right way has taken two different attempts to get right... it turns out the best approach is to cut the wire to the powerhead and run it through the lid, around a tight fitting grommet, then solder it correctly back into place so you just have a wire running through the rear part of the lid. this model has a recess dremeled out in the rear, and is sealed (somewhat) around the exit hole. The water level still cant be full so that needs to be fixed also... that can be patched and redone easily with some work.

The ecosystem is very stable or very dead, quickly. Its like riding a unicycle, it either balances or it falls! As long as the lid is kept on, and the room temp does not get above 78 or so it will run indefinately. When i say that sometimes it sounds like I mean untouched--I do dose it regularly and change the water once every three weeks or so. -indefinately- in terms of continual coral growth and harvest...

Ill get new pics on soon, Ive added to the corals above a small blastomusa bud (size of a pencil eraser, from the reefbowl) some yellow montipora (not fake) and some brown montipora. and a small red mushroom, very red and a neat find in a LFS frag tank for a dollar.

b429

 

[brandon4291]

This is an angle Ive never posted before, showing exactly how the water flows between the two systems. If you have ever owned or seen a Lee's Dual Betta hex, you can recall the plastic divider that separates the two sides. If a powerhead is inserted into a grommet hidden behind the rock wall along one side, the curve of the other side will make a circular current that quickly exchanges water between the two sides.

The other wire is a lead wire for a radioslack temperature sensor. an alarm goes off if it hits 85df, very handy. With a small desk fan running continually and an ambient room temp of 72-76, the tiny reef ecosystem will run somewhere around 79-83 df. I need to find a tiny heater, something in a package no longer than three inches. Keep your eyes open for me guys, if you seen any heaters (I already have the six-inch ones) that are around 3-4 inches, thermostat controlled, shoot me a mail!

 

[brandon4291]

I know it seems like a tiny marine system would require daily attention (ones with unstable heating do), however I have seen evidence to the contrary. Sealing a marine system and stocking with animals that are low nitrogenous waste producers scale down the nitrate buildup and the waste accumulation in a pico reef, making an ecosystem that is slow to build up wastes which conserves water quality for roughly two weeks. Even at that time nitrates aren't the reason I change water--its to import new minerals and nutrients that may thin over time. Strong current helps, and is vital to prevent stagnation.


Notice the cable entry into this pico reef--its from a groove cut in the rear, a recession under the lid. -not a good idea-, salt creep hassle.

Now when you get a look at page 5 of the Mini75 thread, you'll see the improvement in the sealing design and cable entry approach. The shortcut was to cut the wires and run them through rubber grommets in the plastic lid--this allowed for tight sealing around the cables. I do not get any salt creep on these cables, a good mark for a tight-fitting rubber grommet.
This is how each reef builds upon one another, each borrows ideas from the other as I note the pros and cons to each design over the course of a few months. The first borrowed design comes from the reefbowl, it is the illustration that dense coral stocking does not necessarily mean heavy bioload. This means you can put more than one or two frags in a tiny reef--in fact they can be stocked as densely as any 180 gallon reef--relative to size of course.

The picos are much much simpler as they are all biology and no technology, to expound upon that popular saying!

 

[brandon4291]

Found these older pictures on the hard drive among the many files...

The lid is removed here so I can reglue a montipora frag and remove some detritus with my pico-tools.


I was spot-testing the SG and using the hemostats to pick out a quater-inch montipora frag the bumblebee snail knocked over.

 

[Christyf5]

Hi!
First off I'd like to say that what you have going on in that tiny reef is incredible! I can't believe you have so much stuff crammed in there.

I just wanted to ask if you ever found your tiny heater?? I just bought one of those AZOO setups and never even thought about a heater. For now I'm just going to put water in it and see what kind of temperature swings it has but if they are too great I won't bother setting it up.

Thanks
Christy
_________________
Mercedes Benz W123

 

[usafresq1]

this is just a thought for you all, have you ever thought about a heating pad(like the ones for lizards/snakes)? Look at the technology behind it and see how controllable the heat actually is and then account for the sand bed and rock and all and see if you can DIY your own heating pad that produces the amount of heat your needs desire. This is by far ALOT cooler and cheaper than I remember things. I might try this challenge myself.
Keep goin strong!
~usafresq

 

[brandon4291]

Hey there Christyf5, unfortunately I havent found a tiny thermostat controlled heater yet, at least nothing under six inches. I tell you though if anyone is going to build one it will be azoo, they have some of the BEST products for small aquaria (fw and sw) I have ever seen, including a new tiny chiller that you can use to cool a 5-7 gallon nano! Very handy that is...


Usafresq1,

that pad idea is a good one and probably what will have to be done. Check out these possibilities from www.aquaticeco.com (order their manual for free) and they will have all kinds of remote thermostats and heating pads. Im too broke to do it now, but wait until tax returns come in baby. My army of clone pico reefs will begin to take shape !

thanks tons guys
\
B

 

[shalegac]

I'm still waiting to see when they can become afordable for you to make and sell them.

 

[brandon4291]

hey bro I tell you what I had been kicking around, instead of selling a completed tank I would make a very very detailed video of exactly how to set one up and sell that for maybe twenty dollars. I think it would be easier for someone to negotiate their own prices for items at their LFS than me having to pay retail for the whole setup. These tiny tiny picos are a heating/cooling pain-in-the-neck and require a -very- stable ambient room temp to live, such as in a house or nice office building with good thermostat controls... so really the only lucrative tanks to setup up are reefbowls (the easiest to maintain) and Mini75's (harder to build, as easy to maintain)



Anytime you want to start one Shalegac Id be glad to help out anytime, just shoot me a few posts or a PM. Please include a digital photo of Pam Andersen anytime you send a PM, as it will speed up response time.




B

 

[shalegac]

Cool man thanks. I've thinking of making something very simple. I want to put LR, LS and maybe a small hermit or shrimp in a completely contained system. I want to seal the top and thats it. What do you think?

 

[brandon4291]

Yes I think that would work, especially if you would dose a little calcium and alkalinity support every once in a while. That kind of stocking will not require a whole lot of oxygen, and there is a species of tiny red shrimp like what they use in those eco-globes that can live for years without being directly fed.

I tell you that amazes me more than anything, about those totally sealed and non-maintained systems... they aren't stocked very diversely but they are able to support shrimp life with absolutely no water changes or direct feedings. I can't even shrimp to live when I baby them with regular iodine additions and high quality feedings, things you'd think would work. For some reason they just dont like the pico setups.
Once someone on reefcentral told me then name of those little shrimp and where to get them and ive forgotten...I want one or more though if you can find where to buy them, they are extremely hardy.
Another interesting dynamic in those little eco-globes is the way oxygen is maintained, there is no green (photosynthetic) life that you can see and I always wondered where the snails and shrimp got their O. it comes from microscopic algae, not the corny gorgonian they put in there. its already dead and just a skeleton, but there is usually small bits of filamentous algae and even smaller colonial algae that cant be seen, these make enough oxygen to keep the system alive. Apparently there is a surplus or else the animals could not live through one single night phase.
These algae will develop in any aged system where there is light and nitrogen food source, so I think if you stock lightly you should be able to create a much better sealed environment than the ones that are common nowadays.

 

[Broadwave1]

The whole concept is really cool.

My only concern in a "sealed" pico is what about gas exchange?

 

[brandon4291]

Gas exchange with the ambient air is a very critical component of most aquariums for sure. Or, you can stock lightly with organisms that don't produce much undesirable gas (CO2), and don't require any more oxygen than what the water willingly holds in solution at an average room temp. In the case of those totally sealed and non-maintained globe ecosystems, its mainly the microalgae producing the oxygen the small shrimp and snails require. The organisms tolerate the nightly CO2 buildup, and it would be reused each day during the light period when the algae do their work. True gaseous balance I guess.

The fact that still stuns me about them is the globes are not fed, and the red shrimp live for years...they really do have quite an ecosystem. Heavily lacking in biodiversity I might add... :twisted:

Using a small refugium, anything that is tucked away and houses some sort of photosynthetic material, will create an enhanced ability to process gaseous waste internally. Corals dont require an abnormal amount of oxygen, good circulation will meet their needs at an average water temp in an average size tank. Fish can change the equation when we are talking about reef aquariums less than ten gallons.