Seneye Reef device

For my birthday last Friday I got a Seneye Reef device from my parents. I’ve been looking at it for some time since it seemed like a nice handy device to me, and now I finally have one.

When I wanted to try it I got disappointed by the fact that the card need to soak in water for 48 hours, this also limits you to one aquarium with one device.  At least so it seems for now…

I installed the software on my pc and put the card in my aquarium to soak.

The Seneye device has couple of ways to work, one is directly on a pc that is turned on. This way it will constantly update the server and track your water values.

Another way is through a USB->Power plug. The Seneye device keeps track of all settings but will not sync them with the pc or your website until you attach it to your pc.

Third and my preferred way for the future is on a Wifi device. Downside is that you still need your pc to sync the values with your pc and site, but it saves power. This is something that needs some thinking and planning on how I will make this work.

After having the card soaked for more than 48 hours and the device charged for more than 1 hour I put the card in the device and put it in my aquarium. It didn’t take long till I had my first values, Ammonia being 0.001, PH 8.35 (little bit high) and temperature 24.8.

Unfortunately it seems the website doesn’t play nice with IE8, so I needed to download and install Firefox to get it to show.

Once you get on the website (your personal site) you get all sorts of graphs. First is the NH3 value, this seems to be a constant 0,001 on my crab tank.

Next is PH, this was rather fun to see, in the morning the values are around 8,13 but towards the end of the morning values go up to 8,60 even. It also gives you an idea on what to expect for the coming time.

Same goes for the temperature, you can see the graph go up and down during day and night.

The PAR and LUX values I’m not sure on how to read these, maybe someone has an idea on this how to read these? It looks very nice though :p

The above values are available for your reef overview, here you can also see these values for any other devices you own. When you click the device name itself you get some more values.

First is the O2 value, for my aquarium this was around 7.9 to 8.2. Never measured this before so no idea if this is good or not.

Next is NH4, also an ammonia value. No idea what is good with this as well, it differs greatly, from 5.21 up to 14.18.

Last is the Kelvin value, also a value to do with light, this doesn’t seem to work very well yet on my device. But for the values to do with the lighting, I will dive into this more later.

So far my experience is good with this little thing. More information will follow.

Shopping

Last weekend been shopping again. I ordered some Reef Rack from a store in The Hague and ended up with much more than just a reef rack.
They had these awesome looking buttons for sale, since most of the buttons in the Red Sea Max got lost I decided to buy them, also with the new tank planning I could find a nice spot for them. So now it is still located in the frag tank until I figure out how I’m going to use it.

I also got 2 peppermint shrimps to help me clear out the aiptasia in the frag/crab tank. It is really getting out of hand and I tried so many things at this point. Started with what helped in the RSM, injecting them with boiling water. When I couldn’t get all of them I bought some Joes Juice and used that on them, but this seemed to make things worse rather than better. I had several big ones and now I have a lot of small ones. Time for some shrimps to bring it to an end…if they survive. Because for some reason I never seem to have luck with peppermint shrimps.

Then I got 4 Bumble Bee snails, just because they are small and useful. 2 of them are in the tank itself and 2 in the sump.  See how they do their work.

And my last addition are 2 Electric Blue Hermit Crabs. One of them moved to the Red Sea Max and the other is in the Crab tank. My wife liked them as well, so it was a good move.

Saturday I also cleaned both tanks and rebuilt my sump to function as a fragtank together with the actual tank. I already bought an external skimmer for the new tank, and placed it now on the sump. I also received a filter pump (external) and LED lights so I placed those on the sump as well. Don’t know yet if the LED is sufficient, so currently the corals in the sump are for testing purposes. Hopefully I can built everything I want in the new tank up in there, it would save me work.

Sleeper Gold Head Goby died :(

Yesterday our Sleeper Gold Head Goby died. My wife tried to save him by catching him when he was stuck against the overflow and put it in the crab tank. But when she told me in the evening and I took a look I saw him lying lifeless on the bottom.

I don’t know what did it for him, my wife said his fins seemed damaged so maybe another fish took him on, however he seemed very skinny to me, so maybe he couldn’t find food and starved to death. We will probably wait with another replacement until the dottyback is caught.

Someone was very happy however with the fact that the goby died, this was my Lophozozymus edwardsi. I figured since the poor fish died anyway he might as well serve as food, but where he was located the crabs couldn’t reach. So here is a movie of how the crab enjoyed my goby.

Now before people start saying that crabs eat fish…yeah they do, by they (mine at least) don’t bother with them until they are dead or very weak. They basically eat anything you smack in their face :p

Long silence, but I didn't stop

Been a long time since my last post, reason for this is new job that takes a lot of time and some issues with the aquarium. The first part is now under control, only the issues still remain.
The RSM has lost many mushrooms and buttons due to the Planaria. We are now at the point of "restarting" the whole plan since we now are back on track with cleaning etc.
The fragtank will be replaced, work has started on a new and bigger tank which will be focused on the crabs more than on the frags.

Expect new updates soon again!