steveweast

The dual 250 watt ballast is sold.

I have a Sunlight Bluewave 7 dual HQI 250 watt ballast for sale....................$100. I also have a few Sunlight Bluewave 7 dual HQI 400 watt ballasts for sale.......$150 ea

For sale....new in box.....Octopus 3000 controller with temperature probe. This controller was never used....but; it came with a cut cord on the temperature probe as shown. Replacement probes are available anywhere online....or....just splice the two wires back together. $150

Exactly....if I want a guarantee, I can buy that $140 hippo tang or $70 4-line wrasse from liveaquaria (on their site now)....or I can go get a $40 hippo tang from Upscales...or a $28 4-line wrasse from Rose City and take the risk myself. It should be my choice. Now, if a local customer wants a guarantee, he should pay for that insurance....which is exactly what everyone who purchases from liveaquaria is doing.....guarantees are not free.

I DO NOT feel that a guarantee should be mandatory.....I would rather see the market place rule and offer choices to the customer. Perhaps a price with no guarantee and in the bag.....and a higher price for a week's guarantee....and a still higher price for a two week's guarantee. Live Aquaria's livestock prices are WAY higher than our LFS prices. They have the insurance price for a two week's guarantee built right in on everything anyway.

NH4Cl.....ammonia chloride powder

What have you heard that makes it tough ? I've found it's about as forgiving as a goldfish bowl....other than temp, it's about as easy as it gets.

Thanks all....I'm glad that you liked it. I recently finished the write-up and pics to add to my website. Piero is adding them to my site now. TRT has been asking to feature my cold system for awhile now....so, it was no extra effort on my part to just send them the file. I'm not quite sure why they wanted it though...although it is different and interesting to some, it doesn't have mass appeal.....and is really only applicable to a few reefers. I doubt it will garner much attention....but, we'll see.

I thought that was odd too. Afterall, I'm sure that you could pack a hundred in a single box. The last time Tyree was in town, he moved around 120 corals at our summer BBQ. I don't know how many he brought this time....but....he should have brought at least that many this time....OR MAYBE.....we just need to get there before Randy.

The CFM has always been Tyree's baby....and has mostly been an SPS event no matter where it is held.....I think the vendor list makes this pretty obvioius. When this event is held in the bay area or SoCal, there are more vendors....including some lps and softy vendors like Atlantis or JenDub.....but, these vendors tend to cater to the high end too. Exotic, rare frags of zoas and micros ($100 frags +/-) are the norm. This event has always been a rare and exotic coral frag event....not a generic frag trade show (that's not Tyree's niche). I hope they come next year too...but, I'll be surprised......the SPS market just isn't that deep here. I like seeing the different stuff....even if I'm not a buyer.....I can see ordinary frags any day of the week at any of our LFS. As for the LFS' having a booth......I think that is a personal business decsion. In some cases (like Upscales)....having a booth would be a very poor business decsion. All the locals go to Upscales anyway during regular operating hours....and all the out of towners would be foolish not to stop by since they're in the neighborhood. Why pack up all your stock, carry and set up tanks, and stress livestock by moving them across town....when you have a perfectly good store sitting there with ALL your stock ? I know that the group of Seattlites that I was with were very happy to go there and see Upscales' SPS display and purchase stock......afterall, Upscales features SPS.....and that's why they came down here in the first place. I do not feel that Upscales was competing with the CFM.....I doubt that anyone didn't go to the CFM because of Upscales' not being there. I can understand a store like Advanced being there....no one is going to drive all the way to Salem (especially those from Seattle). But for a store like Fantaseas....who is really a fish dominated store.....it makes no sense. Is he going to go through the expense and effort to set up fish tanks when his store is just a few blocks away ?

A sunset monti....orange with green polyps.

The event was exactly what I was expecting.....a mostly small sps frag event. I attended to possibly pick up a few frags of sps that don't usually find their way into this market.....and not have to deal with shipping. The CFM events are usually dominated by small....although somewhat rare sps or micromussa frags. I only bought one frag....but, the event was exactly what I was expecting. I can see, though, that if someone was coming.. hoping for softies, zoos, large sps colonies, or lps....that they would be disappointed. I came with a few sps folk from Seattle....and although they thought the event was OK.....they spent far more money and had a beter time at Upscales. Travis was smart to bring in several boxes of sps on Friday. The event seemed to be well attended though....that kind of pleasantly surprised me. I was there at noon and Tyree was just about sold out of his stuff.

As someone who buys corals online frequently, I have a few thoughts.... 1) the shipping cost is ALWAYS a buyers' sunk cost regardless of any dispute. It's the nature of this business. 2) A buyer has no right to apply his own live arrival guarantee. 3) Any dispute should have been documented and photographed.....then posted on the RC feedback forum. 4) If I were the buyer, I would have probably just posted my dissatisfaction and left it at that.....which is exactly what I did on an outstanding $500 soli a few years ago that was a DOA. It's just not worth getting into a pissing match over. My satisfaction came in forever trashing that seller and never buying from him again. I guarantee that I may have lost some cash....but, he lost more in the long run in lost business alone. 5) In the absence of a live arrival guarantee, the risk on shipping corals rests solely with the buyer. A seller has no control of acclimation, when the package is picked up, or water quality. Any DOA should be photographically documented immediately.....it's only fair to do so. In addition....the whole creating a new screen name and "I'm new here" stuff....in of itself doesn't have any bearing on the case; but, it sure looks bad.

Rico....that weekend looks like it might be free for me and I'm considering coming to Richland for the event. My decision will be last minute though. I would drive up that Fri morning for the Fri evening event....can I buy tickets at the door ?

To me, the reason that land locked aquariums like Chicago's Shedd Aquarium deserve a little more respect is that they have to run a closed system....there's no flowing in pure ocean water like at Monterey or OCA......they have to run their systems just like we have to.

True to a point.....but, it really is system dependant. If your system has few heat imputs....well then...yes....but, if you have alot of heat imputs like halides, pumps, powerheads, UV, etc.....then no. I'm curious as to how you are keeping your cold water tank in the 50's on these hot days without a chiller..... with just evaporatiion ?

Well....you got it. Place the chiller either in the crawlspace or, better yet, outside....and run the plumbing to it. For my cold water system, the chiller is in the crawl......and for my main tank, the chillers are located outside (with plumbing well over 25 ft). Some folks (who have equipment rooms and don't care about aesthetics) place ducting at the chiller's exhaust and vent the heat to the outside. The bottom line is....chillers remove heat.....alot of it.....and need to put it somewhere. The trick is creating a place for it to vent so it doesn't heat up the room that the tank is located in. Some folks also employ their house AC to move the heat to the outside.....which works if your AC is large enough....it's just not efficient since you're double handling the heat. Remember....chillers don't provide cold....they remove heat.

That's why chillers need to be remoted or vented to the outside. Water holds an enormous amount of heat....and the chiller has to dump that heat somewhere. Remember too...that as your chiller heats up your room, the the room heats up the tank....which the chiller has to remove. The goal is to dump the heat outside via ducting or remoting the chiller outside. Having a house AC unit handle the heat is wasteful......you're just double handling the heat.

I've been keeping cold water for about 3 years now. I have two small tanks....one about 120 gals and one about 50 gals joined with a common sump. I keep them in some extra space that I have in my equipment room that services my warm water reef. These are not really display tanks....but rather, tanks that test the viability of keeping cold water critters. Some day, I'll set up a real cold display....but for now, these are just two small cold water play tanks.

A few more.... My ornate box.... An out of focus end view..... A center view.... Another center view.... My seahorse using a basket star as a hitching post...

Nope....don't have one.....but, from what I've been told.....small ones are illegal to collect. I haven't been able to confirm that yet (sometimes the rules are very vague and are geared more for fishermen); but, I've only seen large ones so far. I see quite a few in the Strait.....but, never in the Sound.

Well, since my warm tank leaves much to be desired these days....and since I did a little diving and collecting last weekend....I thought I would post a few updated pics of my cold water reef. I picked up a few gorgonians and some natural substrate.