This deserves another journal...My 190g Wild Discus build!

Cleanbio;5071515; said:

Usually I don't like people's in tank decor, but I love your decor! Stellar job.

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ThankS!

aclockworkorange;5071615; said:

Can we start a poll? What crazy thing should jcardona do next to his 190?

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I don't know what else I could even do to this tank. Only thing left to do is go full blown reef tank

DaveB;5074090; said:

I won't be satisfied until it talks.

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Well I have been talking to Aaron about an LCD display that's connected to the Arduino microcontroller. Not sure on that one yet, though.

Ok Dave, TDS meter arrived today! Very neat little unit, works like a charm. I tested the GH and TDS as follows:
In summary, I was surprised that RO waste water was actually higher in TDS and GH than tap water. I guess you were right, in that a higher concentration of solids is in the waste water. Also of note, is that my 30g QT tank has the most ideal water. I've done 3-4 10g water changes on this tank using pure RO/DI water. This would be the ideal readings I'd like to have on the 190g. It will be a couple weeks before I can get this low on the 190g.

BUT, the 190g has come down in GH a lot!! Before I started using RO/DI water, my GH was at 220ppm / 12.3 dH. Huge difference!!! I wish I could have gotten an initial TDS reading before I started adding pure water.

Hope that helps!

DaveB;5079885; said:

Very interesting. I wonder if it's a straight % translation over to my parameters. Won't know til I try.

What do you suppose accounts for the difference between the higher numbers you have inside the tank and the 80ppm you have out of your tap right now? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me unless your substrate is one hell of a buffer.

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Yeah man I'm not really sure. All I have in there is plain sand with the driftwood. Although, now that I think about it, I did add salt the day I first set up the tank, enough to treat 190 gallons of water. So that would account for the big difference in TDS, while GH is close to the same, as salt does not affect general hardness. I'm sure it will be a matter of time until I get all those solids out of the whole system.

On another note, not sure what happened but over the weekend my water pressure to the RO unit dropped dramatically. I'm now sitting at less than 20-25psi while the unit is running, and it's taking a very long time to refill my barrel. I'll definitely need to get that booster pump sooner rather than later.

Lambrakopoulos;5079907; said:

The lighting is amazing, and just wondering if you ever need to catch any of the fish with out messing with the set up, good luck cause it's going to be hard lol

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Thanks! Yeah I've thought about that as well. It will be a nightmare trying to catch any fish out of there, especially the smaller guys that are super fast. Whatever goes in that tank is staying in there! I'm just worried about trying to catch a sick fish to be able to QT them...

My tank, featured at The Aquatic Gazette

http://theaquaticgazette.com/2011/04/28/jcardona1s-wild-discus-biotope-1/

JamesF;5087595;5087595 said:

Way to go Jose!
You're right up there with Amano now.

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Thanks! But I don't know about all that

Just a small update on my LED light fixture. I was having a few issues with the first driver board and they weren't dimming and turning off correctly. I think I may have fried the drivers when I first hooked them up to the power supply, since the voltage was turned up. Anyway, Aaron was kind enough to send me a new driver board. This one was even better than the first. The layout is identical, but this one is mounted to a nice little heatsink and fan to keep things cool

While I was changing things out, I switched everything to a bigger project box because the PCB would not fit due to the heatsink/fan. So, I also decided to mount the project box underneath my stand; it was sitting on top of the light fixture before. This will make it easier to work on, and also easier to hook up to my laptop when I want to change the lighting program.

The only hard part was routing the wires back up to the light fixture. I only had to run the 4 negative wires from each driver, since this is what controls the PWM signal, and one positive wire to power all the strings. The LEDs are controlled independently by the CAT4101s, so there's no issues with using one positive cable to power them all up.

I actually did all this a few weeks ago, but just now got around to taking pictures. Nothing beats sitting on the couch and watching the simulated sunrise and sunset from the LEDs