Travis: What's up, guys? Welcome back to another video. In this one, we're going to be here in the fish room talking about dealing with humidity and my one-year maintenance. I'm taking two videos, putting in one. We're just going to talk about it. Not going to be any voice over or anything like that. Let's going to start off with the humidity. With the 300-gallon, the 125, the 30-gallon, which is super dirty, the 125-gallon frag system which is over here, and then the quarantine system, it definitely gets pretty humid. The first thing that I do to deal with this is use the dehumidifier. It is plumbed outside and it's set at 45%. It automatically kicks on. This is on 24 hours a day.
It does a pretty decent job for this half of the fish room. When we get over towards the big tank and stuff like that, it's definitely not at 45%, that's for sure. To fix this, I'm actually going to go pick up one of those bathroom vents, the ones you flip the switch and it sucks all the stuff out. I'm going to put it up here.
It's going to fit directly in between those two boards and then I'm going to run the duct all the way down through here. I hope I'm not making you guys dizzy. I'm going to come out. I already purchased a door, and because this is a Town Hall house and I can't punch holes through the wall. I'm actually just going to put a 4-inch hole here and then run some flex pipe down under here.
When I open the door, it's not a huge deal, but it's definitely going to force the air out. I'm not sure if I'm going to have that on a humidity sensor or I'm just going to have it running off the apex and turning on throughout the day. Haven't really decided exactly how I'm going to do that, but it's definitely in the works and that will help bring the humidity down even more. Yes, cat. We all hear you. The next thing I have here in the fish room is a air purifier which doesn't really do much for the humidity, but it does take the smell out of coral, the fish smell. It has a UV in there, helps make the air just a little cleaner. I have some upper respiratory stuff going on where I just don't feel well.
This has made a pretty big difference because I spent a lot of time down here. Got that, it wasn't cheap. I think it's $180 on Amazon. It's pretty ridiculous, but it's made for about 350 square feet so it does a pretty good job down here in the basement. The next thing to combat humidity, I showed you guys this in the other video. I'm using these polycarbonate tops for the frag tanks. They work great at keeping the humidity or the moisture in it. It definitely does really, really well. When it comes to lighting, it just blocks too much light. I feel like it's blocking too much light. The corals were starting getting a little bit darker, but then again, I am fiddling with the nutrients so it's hard to tell.
I do have the lights off for the sake of the video, by the way. What I do is I keep them off during the day and then I put them on at night before I go to bed and that definitely takes care of some of the evaporation. I do have one over here on the refugium which is on there 24 hours a day. This one doesn't really make a difference. The light penetrates pretty good. You can see it does a pretty good job. I really like having this on here. I am going to adjust to fit. There we go. I am going to make one here for the sump, but as you can see, there's a ton of crap down there. I got to figure out how I'm actually going to build that. A lot of cutting and fitting, but we'll see.
I might have to do multiple parts, but I'm going to put something over there just to help out. You might be worried about the gas exchange and stuff like that, but the skimmer is pulling in all that fresh air mixing it. I'm not overly worried about having any issues with that. The next thing I'm doing is adding one to the auto top off. I want to show you guys something. It's hard to see. Maybe you guys can see it. Yes, we all hear you. Yes. Say hi. Hola. Now, go awaya. I don't speak Spanish. You can see there's like this slime. This nasty, nasty, nasty slime. This has never been covered. It's always underneath this stand. I just top it off or when it needs to be topped off.
Usually on my one-year maintenance, I try to come in here and look at this type of stuff to see if it's getting dirty. I come in and clean out all the ATOs, even the 300 and stuff like that and the 30-gallon. I discovered that. Not really sure what it is. Probably shouldn't have touched it, but I'm going to go and clean this out, put this top on there, and you can see, there's a little hole for topping off, and then the power cables for the pump itself, and then that will hopefully take care of that. I'll come back in six months or so and see what's going on.
Over here, another thing with humidity, it's kind of humidity, but it's more or less to stop the salt creep and annoying bubbles, I've added a little piece of polycarbonate on top of the 300-gallon refugium. This was spraying up. This was completely covered in salt and it was just irritating, so I put that on there, it's helping out pretty good. Now you're not really going to see, but this coral here is the one I was talking about. It's STN and you can see a little bit right there. Now it's really slow STN. I've had STN before, but it's really, really slow. I'm going to give it another week.
If it does not stop, I'm going to pull out that whole colony, just take out a big chunk there, replace it, get it all off the rock, put another chunk on there. Hopefully, it will grow out this way. Away from that millepora. That's blue so I apologize about that. You guys were asking me in the comment section why do I have STN. When I added the frag tank, I caught a ton of coral from this thing, it's super blue. I sold a lot of it too, so it's pretty empty now. I caught a ton of that and they actually have light over them now. They're not up in the back corner getting subpar lighting, that they can actually grow. Between adding that and cutting the coral, I had a pretty significant drop in alkalinity in a short period of time.
On top of that, I've been testing out the phosphates to see how high I can get them. I got them pretty high. I think I got them to 0.33. Let me see if I just show you guys a little bit of cyano. That's the only place it can sit in this whole tank. I've got a little bit of cyano. Between the drop in alk and the elevated nutrients, that's what's causing the STN on that. It's the only one in the entire tank that's having that problem. It's not a huge deal, but it's definitely annoying. Consider that fact it's my favorite coral too, definitely not happy about that, but positive side, I'm going frag it, I'll make some money on some frags and I will hopefully grow it in a different direction. We got to look at the positives.
On top of that, I did a 50-gallon water change on this system. Cleaned out the sponges in between here. I got to get down here. I'm doing another 50-gallon in a couple days and we're cleaning out the bottom of the sump and all that poop in there or whatever. Fat chance getting in here and cleaning this sponges and two were and all sorts of stuff, but we're coming here to clean the return pump. Just general maintenance for the one year, getting it back to normal. I probably should clean this skimmer pump too. I haven't taken that off since I made the original video for this skimmer swobby. I love that damn thing.
What I like to do is going to throw vinegar in here and let it sit probably up to here in vinegar. Let it sit. What it does is it cleans this nasty tube. As you can see, it's literally full of shit. That will clean it out. That's pretty much all I do for taking care of that. Let's see here. Another thing I did is I went ahead and clean the mixing barrel, took it out, put vinegar on the bottom, scrubbed it out, let it sit for 24 hours, rinsed it, good to go. I double-check the TDS on the storage barrel just to make sure there wasn't any kind of leaching or anything like that from the barrel. Still at zero, so that's good to go. Really happy with that. I'm glad I spent the money. I think it's $175.
Really glad I spent the money on that barrel. I'm so glad I did that. If you haven't seen the video on why I switched to this barrel, it's in the fish room playlist. That's about all I can tell you. I'll try to find it if I remember during the editing process. Other than that, everything is good. There's one thing that I'm considering doing, and I want you guys' opinion on this, is I love this tank, but I am needing room for another workbench. Basically, I spent a lot of time on the floor cutting styrofoam for boxes like I cut this foam to put in the boxes for shipping and I spent a lot of time doing that on the floor. I have a really, really bad back, stuff that happened overseas.
I didn't really realized until I got home and I got a little bit older. I'm in a lot of pain for being 32 years old, that's for sure. I spent a lot of time working on the floor, cutting up the boxes, and just getting everything ready. It'd be nice to have a workbench here in place of this tank just to have that ability not to have to keep bending over to cut stuff. Obviously, there's not enough room on this workbench to actually do all that. Let me know what you think. I will sell the entire system as is if people want certain things, they can have it. I really love to fish, but I love my spine a lot more. That's all I can say.
With the increase in coral sales, you guys have really really taken off on coral sales and supplements and all sorts of stuff. There's a lot of orders going out. It just means more boxes need to be made. That's how it is and it sucks. Let me know what you think if I should get rid of this tank and replace it with a workbench. Yes, so that's about it for this video. I'm about getting at my 10-minute mark and my phone's going to shut off, so 10 seconds. Hope you guys enjoy the video. I will see you next week. Peace.
