Holy cow it's been almost 4 years since my last update on this thread.
Personal update:
I haven't been around much. After having our second son my wife was diagnosed with uterine cancer. :/ Much of my time has been spent taking care of the family + work and less free time for here. After 9 months of chemo my wife was doing OK, completely drained but OK. We had a new house built and had to obviously move & re-setup the turtle habitat in January of 2016. Middle of 2016 her cancer came back. She's currently fighting it and making good progress. I sit here in the hospital today next to her while she's getting a round of chemo posting this. I had some major tank updates to share....
Turtle Habitat Update:
When we moved to the new house, I had to leave behind the in-wall tank seen earlier in this thread. The realtor advertised it as a "feature". What I did was swap my 75G regular tank that WAS being used for the turtle for the 75G reef ready tank and left behind a regular 75G tank in the wall. I took the sump and all of the equipment with to the new house and am using it for
Yes that's right me the "don't use a sump on a turtle tank" guy is using a sump on his turtle tank. Everything previously said still holds true. The sump is capable of keeping the water cycled, clean, clear and no-smell. However because a sump requires an overflow, the detritus and turtle waste are not skimmed off the water column and remain in the bottom of the display tank. I have added an Eheim vacuum to my collection of crap to periodically remove the gunk from the bottom of the tank.
- eheim_vac.jpg (12.16 KiB) Viewed 9255 times
Occasionally the Eheim vac will not suck the gunk up so I'll pull out the Python hose and use that. More of a headache having to attach it to a sink etc.
So for the past year+ the turtle setup was in the kids' playroom filtered by a sump to which we had to manually top off every couple of days. In full disclosure when my wife got sick again middle of 2016, Moe wasn't receiving the best care or attention. I tasked the boys with filling a pail of water to put in the sump for top off when water got low. That worked for about 2 weeks.
This past fall we had a bit of a tank mishap. The water in the sump ran low so the return pump was water starved and making a lot of noise. I was running late for a call and to kill the noise I shut the system off from the controller. Poof power off, noise gone, take a phone call, fix the tank later. I got distracted and ended up leaving the tank off for a couple of days. Upon returning home one night there was this awful burning smell in the house. [!!!]?
I discovered the source of the smell was Moe's tank. I apparently put the system in "standby" instead of shutting it down. In standby the outlet that controls the return pump was shut off. The heater was not. The temperature probe that controls the heater is in the overflow. As temperature dropped in the tank, the controller turned the heater on. The heater boiled the little bit of water that was left in the third section of the sump and then the 500W heater burned up itself and was smoking. Thankfully I caught it in time before it caused a fire. I think we were really close.
After much cussing I filled the sump back up and Amazon brought me a new heater. I ordered the exact same Finnex titanium heater. It's a FANTASTIC heater... the previous failure was 100% my fault and my neglect. To my surprise the the heater now comes with a heater guard.