inkto

Ponapae Torch

Brain

First day in the tank... Left to right: Striped brain (door prize), A. navini, Ponape torch, Purple Monti, Sky Blue Mille

I bought into it! ...And pretty much regret every dime... I could have picked up a great deal more at Upscales any day of the week for what I spent. Lesson learned. Sorry for the large pics but here is where mine stand. I lost two, including my favorite, to an algae bloom of some kind. I think it may have been bacterial in nature from overdosing vinegar with my kalk at the time; The A. navini and so-called "Sky Blue" Mille are toast. I really miss the navini though... it had really colored up nicely.DOH! My old tank wasn't providing the best conditions for the first 9-12 months but these have started to change for the better in the last 6 months or so. Ben

It looks like it may have replaced the little green light "online" indicator... it's inserted between the lpp and rep icons...

56% ... I think I did better last year. Was last years thread lost on the old board?

There has to be a little adventure in any DIY or it wouldn't be DIY, right? The funny thing about the extruded vs. cast debate is that both my Korallin reactor and my AquaC skimmer are made with extruded and I don't recall any major issues with product reliability over the years. Cast is undoubtedly a better material in many regards and a mass-produced product favoring the cheaper of the two offers no surprise... but I say if you can work the cheaper material (even with a little crying ) why not use it in low pressure situations like this?

You are basically describing the Tsunami that they were/are working on... there's a video here: http://www.oceansmotions.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=38 http://www.oceansmotions.com/tsunami.wmv There's no way to control the OMs precisely enough to create a wave in the tank as the timing will need to be calibrated for the exact tank length...you would need a custom controller to pull it off.

hard to find info on that one but there are a few details here: http://www.zeovit.com/forums/showthread.php?t=43&page=4

Thanks for the great prices... you gotta love it when a local store matches online+shipping prices...

Colder temps will slow their bodily functions and keep them alive longer... Travis recommends it as well though he mentioned some people keep them at room temp.

You can't overlook the convenience and safety of a peristaltic pump in this kind of setup... I spent $275 on my LMIII and so far it's the best money I've spent on the tank... My needs were different also as I'm drawing water from a 55 gallon drum 10 feet below the tank but I can't imagine life without it now. Well worth the money in my book.

Following some tips from Travis I'm keeping mine in the garage in about a gallon of water and I just removed about 5% of what you see in the pics that were dead tonight. Most are still moving about slowly so it looks like they will stay alive a week or so without much intentional effort to maintain them.

I grabbed my fish some live brine shrimp for an early xmas present yesterday and they all went nuts for it... even my Mural Goby was mid-tank scooping them up. I hope they don't find out how cheap their present was. Here are a couple pics of what I haven't fed yet... about 1/2 the $3 portion:

Tanks of that size have been around for quite awhile (ST:TNG, anyone? ) and I've seen them at several custom acrylic shops but don't forget about the consequences of such a shape... such as surface area for gas exchange, access for cleaning/coral placement/etc. I would think that the top openings are quite small so the water line can be fairly high.(?)

fwiw I had one of my old glass tanks drilled at a small glass shop in hillsboro for $15 a hole... To test whether it was tempered or not he scratched the glass with a glass cutter. The non-tempered glass scratched easily... is "softer" in a sense since the surface is not under tension. ben

I agree with the Maxtor sentiment... I won't touch them. People use to look at me funny when I said that but I know too many people that have had problems with them. I've been a WD user for a very long time and never had a problem. First PC compatible drive was a 170MB Conner - Dead. Then a 428MB Seagate - Dead. Western Digital ever since and not a single dead drive. That said I shop newegg for nearly all purchases... If you're really looking for a deal sometimes places like CompUSA can be competitive with their mail-in rebates when you factor in shipping, etc. I miss the the old egghead and newegg days when 2 day FedEx was practically free on everything.

I can't quite tell if the overflow is homemade or purchased... has it been used successfully on another setup? There are only a few places to improve performance that I see and you've already tested some of them from the sounds of it. 1) Water entering the teeth of the overflow... lowering/removing the box inside the tank eliminates that possibility. 2) Water traveling through the U-tubes... ensure a full siphon and no air pockets and clearance at the end of the suction side. 3) Water draining down the riser pipes in the outer box... As long as the pipes are not taller than the overflow wier in the outer box that shouldn't pose a performance hit. If the water is higher than the overflow wier than you are losing siphon potential by giving up the differential in height between the inside water level and outside water level. This is an area where performance could be improved. If you could shorten the overflow in the outer box to lower the water level there you could siphon a larger volume of water. The closer the two water levels the slower the siphon. It looks like the u-tubes are not long enough to change that much since they have to stay submerged to maintian the siphon when the pump stops. It certainly looks like it could siphon way more water than the pump you're using though. 4) The distance the drain is submerged in the sump is adding some back pressure to the drain lines but that's not effecting the problem from the sounds of it... A lot of that is redundant but that's how I see it. I had a similar sump on my first tank and I really regretted making the pump zone as small as I did because evaporation had a very fast effect on the water level there... you'll probably see that too with that setup. It kept me on my toes with the top-off, however. good luck...

http://www.beavertonoregon.gov/departments/gis/publicservices_maps.aspx#waterservice

Less than a quarter of Beaverton's poplulation is supplied by the TVWD... you'd have to find the water district maps to see where you fall. I can't seem to find my link anywhere. The water quality reports they send out every so often usually has the map in it.

I always seem to end up with something when I buy rock... I've had at least 3 different species sprout out of nothing after light was introduced to the rock. The last batch of rock I purchased was in a rubbermaid with only ambient light for two months before going into the tank and now has some polyps taking off (looks zoanthidish). The rock I picked up for my first tank had many "dead" skeletal areas from some encrusting small polyped corals that showed no signs of life for several months when under PCs only. After I made the move to MHs two different species quickly came to life. Here is a really old pic of one of them:

It doesn't really matter IMO... it's going to be flooded in any case so there are no serious issues of restricting the flow... Here is my dart plumbing for reference.. whoops, that was actually rev 1 I ended up doing a straight T from the drains to the pump...

Crap... i just dropped $60 tonight and was told it was over... I always miss the good stuff!

I was more concerned with finding the color I wanted... I didn't limit myself to any specialty paint; I think it's over-rated. The paint I used was a Rust-Oleum spray paint product that claimed interior and exterior durability. I would recommend scuffing the plastic trim a bit with some steel wool or 320 grit sand paper though. Ben