Theron

Right now it gets discarded into a container that I have marked so I can measure the rate of water change. Future plan would be to just discard into a drain nearby. One thing I need to add is a float switch to the salt water container that will shut off the pump if it empties. This incase I forget and let the container run dry.

No, I don't worry about it. right now I am taking water from the sump and returning water to the display so it should be good and mixed in. Sure some of the new water will get removed and will I guess make it less efficient as doing one large water change. We are just talking about drips of water at a time and I think the benifits for me outway the extra salt. I remember someone actually calculated the efficiency compared to large water change. I did not seem to be a big deal. I am planning on using this on a much larger system in the near future, 300+ gallons which I think makes this much more sense for me.

I will try to post some pics of the water change system. It is a temporary setup right now to see how well it works. Basically, I am using a lab motor that I can control the rpm from 0 to 600. It has two peristaltic pump heads attached that will pump the exact same rate. I have a large container of fresh mixed salt water. One pump, delivers fresh saltwater to the tank the other removes water from the tank. I hate doing water changes with buckets and hoses, and having to shut everything off when I drain the sump. All I have to do here is mix the salt and turn on the pump and don't have to keep the water heated. I can have it deliver the water over the course of a day or a week. So far I am pleased. I have only had it setup for a couple of weeks. It seems to be accurate and my salinity has not changed. Theron

Thanks for the sharing you study. I am surprised by your results from the oceanic salt. I did a similar test 1.5 years ago. I was using IO and was seeing high Alk and low Ca. Oceanic tested just the opposite, Alk was in the 6 range, Ca was in the 500s. I have been mixing them 50/50 ever since. I posted my results on TheReefTank forum and got schooled by Tom over there and realized that I needed to study my college chemistry book before I could continue the discussion. It was good information, but I just could not comprehend it. I think I might change to IO and then supplement the Ca, Alk, and Mg to the levels that I want. IO is cheap and easy to come by. I just set up a system that does my water changes 24/7 now using a metering pump. New water is added slowly so differences in levels will not affect the tank quickly. Just monitor the tank levels and adjust as necessary. What size samples are you mixing up? And what kind of error are you seeing between the differerent test kits? Theron

Are you sure that is true? I can't find anything that states they are breaking a contract. This article states that the contract ended in March. http://nottheoregonianunionnews.blogspot.com/2007/07/teamsters-strike-western-beverage.html "The company began holding contract talks with union representatives last December, and the contract expired at the end of March. Union employees continued working under the terms of the old contract until this week, when the company announced an impasse and stated its intention to implement its final offer beginning July 1. No further meetings are currently scheduled."

Not much is easy in this hobby. Well, I would still keep the chiller and have it as a backup to your frozen bottles and A/C. It is a nice piece of mind when you want to leave for the weekend. Theron

I would be careful with cooling with fans. I am much more worried about adding moisture to the house than heat. Elevated humidity levels can cause mold and bacteria problems. If it was me, and the tank was above a crawl space, I would place the chiller in the crawl. You will have a lot less noise that way too. Theron

There are two ways to connect it. If your receiver has a S/PDIF optical input you need the optical cable. With this you could even send 5.1 dolby digital. You can also use analog cable. It has the headphone jack, and you can use the headphone to rca cable for that. That is how I used it. For some reason the sound card in my laptops were very very poor and this thing sounded much better. You might try getting the headphone to rca cable and connecting it to you stereo and see if yours sounds any better than mine. If you don't like it, then try a usb sound card. Theron

I have used the cable from headphone jack to RCA to connect several laptops to my receiver. In my experience, with the laptops that I used, it sounded like crap. So I ended up going with this usb sound card from turtle beach. http://www.turtlebeach.com/products/micro/home.aspx It is small and works great for me. It can send analog or digital to the receiver. Theron

I think it is a good idea to get the process started with a lender. Get the credit report done and good faith estimates to avoid any suprises at the last minute before closing. You can change lenders later, but might loose some fees that you have already payed. Also, I think it is a good idea to have several lenders on hand. Our last house purchase (9 months ago) I had pre-approved with 3 lenders. I negociated with all of them to get the best rate. We locked in our rate, then a week before closing the rates lowered some. We were able to get the lender to adjust our locked rate to match one of the other lenders. Worked out well. Theron

Can you just stack two 3x glasses to get 6x? How far away was the lens to the subjects? Theron

I am thinking about getting one of the portable quiet honda generators. They are also great for tailgating at the game to power the big screen. Theron

Ok, here is mine... My new Envision tank. Still need to get water in this bad boy. Theron

I have had this happen a few times before. Couple of things that could cause this. You have a hole in the durso right? If so you might need to make it bigger. How deep does the drain plumbing in the sump? Having it too deep can cause too much back pressure. I just had mine about and inch below the water level. Theron

Nice, I just ordered 1000+ gallons of salt mix. That should last me for a while. I love free shipping on salt! Theron

This is the calibration fluid that I saw for testing. http://www.marinedepot.com/md_viewItem.asp?idproduct=AM1433 It should measure 400mV. Theron

That is funny, I just did the same thing. I purchased an red sea ozone plus with controller. Right now I am not running the ozone, just running the controller. Last I checked it was like 430 redox without running ozone. I don't think it is possible to have a redox that high without running ozone. This is my first time with redox/ozone so I could be wrong. From what I have read, it might be hard to measure redox, and the probes need to be cleaned quite often. When hey get dirty they read higher levels. I purchased the unit used and so was the probe. I am thinking of getting a new one and see if I see a difference. I know you can buy calibration solutions to check the accuracy. I have not tried them. Theron

I have several of these skimmers. PM Bullet 1, MRC 2, AquaC EV400, and a Deltec AP600 needlewheel. My first skimmer was the PM Bullet 1. Of all the skimmers above, this one I felt had the best workmanship. Build very well. I had some problems at first mainly because it was my first skimmer. I think I was overwhelmed by all the adjustments like pump size, air input, gate valve, water level, bubble size, wet vs dry skimming. The real problem ended up being that I had too large of a pump. Once I got a better sized pump, and followed the directions, it was pretty easy to run. I next bought an MRC 2 skimmer. This is similar in size to the Bullet 2. This skimmer worked really well. I am sure it was because I already learned to run the beckett skimmer. I liked the larger size. Seemed like the larger volume gave more room for the adjustments, also easier for me to get my hands in there to clean. I do like the beckett skimmers and I think they can perform very will. But, what I don't like is the amount of work I have to do to maintain them. I don't like all the thumb screws that I have to remove to clean the cup. Also the beckett injector and assembly needs to be cleaned periodically. I found it kind of a pain to remove and disassemble. When I bought the MRC, I purchased and extra beckett assembly so that I could just swap injectors while the other was being cleaned. I then switched to the AquaC EV400 with PCX-40 pump. I really liked this skimmer. I thought it was very similar to a beckett, just used a spray injector to create bubbles. I felt like it was very easy to adjust and it pulled out the same amount of crap as the others. What made me like this skimmer better was no more thumb screws and no more beckett assembly. The skimmer cup and lid are removed very easily by just rotating and lifting out of place. This really made it easy to clean the cup, and I found that I did it more often because of this. Also the spray injector just one very small piece that is also easy to remove and clean. And last I tried a Deltec needlewheel skimmer. This skimmer was very easy to operate and is a good choice for a beginner. You can place it in the sump, small powerhead to feed, small adjustment to the air input and that is it. Like the AquaC, the cup and lid are removed very easily. What I don't like about them is the price. It is not as solidly build as the becketts. I feel like it can break very easily and replacement parts are expensive. Probably paying for the German engineering on these things which I believe they are engineered well. Now the only reason I would NOT go with the beckett or spray injector skimmers is because of the large pressure pumps required and the noise that they produce. If the skimmer can be placed in a remote location, not in the viewing room, then I would go with the beckett otherwise I would go with a needlewheel because of the low noise level. Theron

Ya, was there a post by Steve that got deleted?

Ya, you want to do both. One thing about the plug-in GFCI, the one I have will trip when the power goes out. You have to reset it manually when power is restored. I don't like that, so I don't really use it. Might want to check to make sure the one you get does not do that. Theron

I am suprised your tank is at 82 degrees without the lights on. So it does not suprise me that your tank would overheat with them on. What other equipment do you have that could be adding heat to your tank? It could be the return pump, but I don't think that pump should normally add that much heat to your tank. Do you have powerheads in the tank? A few things I would do. First, make sure you are reading the temp correctly. I would get a second thermometer to make sure that first one is not off. You might not have a heat issue at all. Second, make sure you do not have a stuck heater. This seems to be a very common problem. For me, I alway have a good quality temp. controller on the system. I think keeping temperature is very important so I don't skimp there. For comparison, I had dual 400W in my 90 gallon. I had fans in the canopy that came on with the lights. I also had a large fan over the sump that was contected to a temp controller and turned on when the temp reached 81. This easily kept my tank at 79 - 80 during the winter. In then summer, when it got warmer, it was still able to keep the tank temp, but the increased evaporation. I noticed that my carpets in the basement were moist. I was lucky I noticed early, before it caused any damage. It was then, I purchased a chiller to keep evaporation down. So, be careful about evaporation. You might not have mold around the tank, but other parts of the house might. Theron

My clown hosts xenia also. I have an anemone and he never gets close to it. It turns out to be a pretty nice home. Lots of places to hide.

I have had an green bubble tip anemone for almost two years now. It has been very healthy. It was a bit difficult when I first got it. It kept moving around the tank. It ended up in my overflow, got stuck on the closed loop intake. Finally it found a permanent home in a hole in the rock and has stayed there ever since. I have not fed him in probably 6 months. Just provide him with plenty of light.

I am no longer local to the club. I moved out of town a few months ago, but now I am mostly involved on the website here. When I was in town and I first started attending meetings, this club was very laid back. Just a bunch of people meeting at someone's home. We got together and talked about our tanks, it was very social. I really liked to see different peoples tanks and seeing how they did certain things. We then started getting more organized and became a non profit. People payed dues and we got some officers and it was getting more structured. It seemed great, we had a forum on TRT and we had a lot of great threads going on there. For me the height of it all was the BBQ at Steve's house. I think the Tyree thing was perfect timing for him, a lot of us were ready to blow some money on some great corals from California. His topics were interesting, in fact I think we got to vote from a list of topics. My wife even had a great time meeting people and seeing Steve's tank. And at this time we did not have big banners and such, most of us learned about the site from word of mouth. It was just a great place to meet other people and learn from each other. For me it all started going down hill from there. A lot of people started getting out of the hobby and the club. Officers started dropping like flies. We had so many attitudes on TRT they had to add more mods to keep an eye on us. It was not as fun anymore. Meetings became all about door prizes and free stuff (it seemed like it). A huge emphasis was on getting new members. I think we should focus on making the club fun. If we build good club they will come. I say work on more local speakers. I think we have some pretty good resources for that in the club. I remember hearing all the praise about the photoshop lecture that Andy gave. Just recently we and a member that was a teacher and wanted to set up a cold water reef. He asked for help and ended up getting a sweet tank donated, and I think some other stuff. His classroom would be a great place for a meeting some day. I thought that was a great use of sponsor donations. It is actually going to get used. The problem with big raffle items is some people will not have the room or funds to set it up and it will just get sold. What about doing our own studies. Maybe we can team up with LFS to so something. They can provide some space and electricity and we donate some time to perform the study. Maybe we can do our own salt study. We could get some national publicity. I think we have a chemist in the group. What about setting up a cold water reef tank at one of the LFS. Maybe they would get some traffic into the store from people checking out the tank cool tank. We could put some information on the tank about the club to educate people about our club. Those are just a few ideas. Theron

Not only can the dry base rock be cheaper per pound, but you also get more rock per pound. You don't have to pay for the water weight, which can be a lot if it is good porous rock. And you will not need as much rock. You also need to be careful about live rock you purchase from someone. When I first started out, I purchased some live rock from someone who tore down their tank. They had the rock in trash cans with no light, just heater and powerhead, for months. I thought I paid too much for it since there was not any life on it, except bacteria. It worked out well, my tank did not cycle, and I had no algae problems. I then decided to purchase some more live rock from someone's tank. I did not know any better, but their tank had algae problems. Sure when I added their rock I got all kinds of life, but I had algae problems ever since. I think the rock had lots of nutrients in it. I also tried DIY rocks before I purchased live rock. The rock was way too dense. I tried different things but was just too dense for me. I could make it look pretty good, but it was no way close to porous rock you can buy and there is no way I could create anything close to the Marcorocks. I think you would need much more rock in the tank to make up for how dense it is to harbor bacteria. The more porous the rock is the less rock you will need for filtration and I like less rock. Theron