Hi Everyone, I just thought I'd write a quick piece to document the setting up of my Orca TL 450 and mention a few things I've discovered along the way.
First off as many of you might know already, the Instructions that come with the Orca are utter rubbish. I used mine to line the cat litter tray!
The set up i went for on the Orca are as follows- From left to right- Left chamber is LR rubble and heater, next to that is just a chamber full of LR rubble, To the right of that is the skimmer and finally on the far right is the pump and foam filter. In the Tank itself i've got 8KG of LR and a Hydor Korilia (?) power head for extra flow.
So about 10KG LR all together.
The biggest problem I've had so far is the back chambers over flowing. To solve this I re-drilled the spray bar to 5mm holes which has worked a treat. You can then adjust the flow to whatever level you want. Other than that it's worked out OK, except you might find as i have that the air hose to the skimmer is trapped on some thing under the filter. I just gave mine a yank and it seemed to work.
My tank has been running for a week now. I put a lot of uncured LR in there to get things going and because of that the skimmer kicked in a couple of days later. A few micro bubbles to start with but it's settled down nicely now.
Parameters as of yesterday were- Ph- 7.9, Nitrite 0.2, Nitrate <10, Phos 0.25, Ammonia 1.2. So still quite a way to go before adding any live stock.
I'm Going to have a go at swapping the pumps over tonight because there a little bit feeble to say the least. I've got a couple of maxijet 1200 which I'm going to try out. Probably end up with a wet carpet though, might be a bit fierce for this tank.
These are a couple of pics of the tank and the back chambers. I'll add more pics and info as the tank progresses.
