SeanF

I saw a really interesting program on PBS about the earths magnetic poles and how we are on the verge of a swap of magnetic north. So South will be North and North will be South. I believe that some of the things that are being blamed on pollution such as the hole in the ozone layer at the poles may be more likely related to the weakening of the earths magnetic field. Not many people carry compasses anymore but my truck has one built in and on the move out here I think I experienced a switch in the magnetic field. For some reason my compass was reading all wrong(no I wasn't lost). For some reason for a couple of hundred of miles of road that I know runs east/west I was going west but the compass was reading east. It has never happened again so I doubt it was a electrical problem. The program had shown that by going deeper into older layers of rock they can tell that the magnetic poles have changed lots of times in the earths history. It was really amazing to me as I had never heard anything about that sort of thing before. And just to relate it back to the topic of corals it is very similar in that there far more things that we don't know about corals or the earth than we know about them. I heard Eric Bornemann speak out in Oklahoma and he freely admitted that hobbyists are one of the greatest sources of discovery about corals. Coral research in the wild is really in its very early stages since Scuba gear was invented in the 1970's and hobbyists pay very close attention to their tanks for hours and hours at a time. It is hard to stay under water in the Ocean for as long as is need to get a great deal of information about corals but in the aquarium you can observe corals pretty much all the time. Then he told a story about a long day of diving out in the South Pacific and how he got back up to the boat exhausted and was laying on the deck of the boat and the thought occured to him that his job was to go diving in the South Pacific something that most people pay lots of money to go do and he was getting paid for it. He told it a lot better but that was the jist of the whole thing.

Let's see you have to fill out and mail in a warranty card to get them to allow you to mail them a pump and then have them determine whether or not they decide that your pump is covered under warranty. Sounds like a great deal to me. If I have a problem with a piece of equipment that I buy from other suppliers they just take care of the problem. I tell them it is broken and they replace it. It is called standing behind their product. Sure there are going to be some people out there that abuse the system but you don't get a good reputation by accusing the person that is using the pump of doing something to break it. I know that you and the PCI people are tight and I don't expect that you would agree with me but I have not had a positive experience with them. Half the time I recieved items from them they had parts missing. I tried several of their products but they have not held up. The last thing I bought from them was a couple of overflow boxes and they weren't even wide enough to fit over the trim of an all glass 75 gallon tank. They manufactured salt that when you picked the bags up by the handle the bag came apart. I have heard good things about their chillers and external pumps. I have not used either but all of the products that I have tried I have had poor experiences with. Their pricing has been very inconsistent. I will be honest the last straw for me was when I was quoted a price of $189 of an RPS 3000 when I was in their facility and then when I call up to order one they quote me $330 and then try to make up some poor excuse about the difference in pricing. I buy from people that stand behind their products and treat me like I deserve to be treated. I refuse to deal with people that don't. I spend over $3000 every week with suppliers and I pick and choose who gets it based on who is willing to give me the pricing that I need and the service I deserve. As a matter of fact that is why a lot of people buy stuff online. Price is a great driving factor in peoples decisions to buy stuff and they will go where they will get it. Unfortunately that often times means sacrificing service but that is not always the case.

The reviews you have heard are probably for their external pumps which are not bad. I have never used many of their products because I work with an aquarium maintainence company down here that was trying a lot of their products when they came out and every time I would go up to Portland I would be bringing boxes of their Heaters and Lighting back to them. The reason Premium probably didn't want to help you was because they knew what the answer would be from PCI. I personally recommend Rio pumps. I know you hear some bad things about the Rios also but you have to take into account how many of their pumps are on the market. The other reason is that I sell over 50 rio seios every month and I have only had 2 problems in the last 6 months with them and it was instantly taken care of.

That can be expected from PCI. Crappy products and even worse service. That is why we no longer deal with them. I have had the exact same experience with their products. I had one of their pumps running on my invert system and it quit just like you described they sent me a new impeller when I threatened to pull their products and then I put it in and the stupid thing still wouldn't run so I just chucked it and went with a more reliable pump from a company that stands behind their products. I personally have not dealt with them for a long time but in a little over a month I bought overflow boxes from them three times and got charged three different amounts. They just pull numbers out of their head. Well don't get me started but needless to say you won't catch any of their products in my store any more. They sell cheap stuff and you get cheap stuff.