Here are the videos and a little history....
John and I got hooked on the hobby and set up a 55g reef tank with the following equipment....
1. We had a custom built acrylic wet/dry with bio-balls. This was a big deal because this was the newest version of the wet/dry available. It was also the beginning of Bigger is Better era! Before this wet/dry everyone used smaller versions that had drip plates instead of spray bars and the units came with drawers that were stacked on top of each other. The media used at the time was Calcite or marble chips. Bio-balls were brand new and so was all the talk of available surface area for bacteria on these new bio-balls!
2. John was the first customer for Champion Lighting to get a Ice Cap Ballast 430 model. We were one of the only people in Chicago that used VHO lighting!!!! No matter who we talked to...they would say "What is VHO?" The lights were amazing!
3. John was the first guy around our area to buy the expensive Oceanic Protein Skimmer. It was also a new technology using a Venturi port for the bubbles instead of airstones like most skimmers available then! We had a large 4 airstone counter current skimmer that we thought did a great job...until 2 days after the Oceanic skimmers was installed! That skimmer pulled skimmate like we never saw!
4. John was one of the first guys back then to use the temp controller probes and a chiller. Because of the costs most people never would even consider a chiller! High temps and higher nitrates crashed many a system back then! John also used the new ORP meter to track redox with the wet/dry!
Also note in this video that we opted for a modified Berlin System
with no subsrtate, large powerful skimmer(for the day), and we added the wet/dry. It worked very well!!! Nitrates were tracked and exported via water changes.
We also found that using Caulerpa helped with phosphates. We used large doses of activated carbon and Seachem's PhosGaurd, too. John also bought an RO unit with a DI cartridge. We were high tech in 1989!!!!
So here is the video....
1989 55g
198 55g part II
110g reef ready upgrade
110g RR upgrade part II
John and I got hooked on the hobby and set up a 55g reef tank with the following equipment....
1. We had a custom built acrylic wet/dry with bio-balls. This was a big deal because this was the newest version of the wet/dry available. It was also the beginning of Bigger is Better era! Before this wet/dry everyone used smaller versions that had drip plates instead of spray bars and the units came with drawers that were stacked on top of each other. The media used at the time was Calcite or marble chips. Bio-balls were brand new and so was all the talk of available surface area for bacteria on these new bio-balls!
2. John was the first customer for Champion Lighting to get a Ice Cap Ballast 430 model. We were one of the only people in Chicago that used VHO lighting!!!! No matter who we talked to...they would say "What is VHO?" The lights were amazing!
3. John was the first guy around our area to buy the expensive Oceanic Protein Skimmer. It was also a new technology using a Venturi port for the bubbles instead of airstones like most skimmers available then! We had a large 4 airstone counter current skimmer that we thought did a great job...until 2 days after the Oceanic skimmers was installed! That skimmer pulled skimmate like we never saw!
4. John was one of the first guys back then to use the temp controller probes and a chiller. Because of the costs most people never would even consider a chiller! High temps and higher nitrates crashed many a system back then! John also used the new ORP meter to track redox with the wet/dry!
Also note in this video that we opted for a modified Berlin System
with no subsrtate, large powerful skimmer(for the day), and we added the wet/dry. It worked very well!!! Nitrates were tracked and exported via water changes.
We also found that using Caulerpa helped with phosphates. We used large doses of activated carbon and Seachem's PhosGaurd, too. John also bought an RO unit with a DI cartridge. We were high tech in 1989!!!!
So here is the video....
1989 55g
198 55g part II
110g reef ready upgrade
110g RR upgrade part II
