ToxicPoison

So I figured I'd share my wish list with all of you and see what you think...if you're not too shy to share your opinion of course

I'm listing them in my expected order of introduction.

School of Blue-Green Reef Chromis (6ish)

Bangai Cardnial (2 - This is at the request of my wife. Gotta keep her happy!)

Kole Tang

Green Mandarin

I'm also considering a Kleins Butterflyfish to help with my Aiptasia problem.

Would that be overstocked? (Tank specs are in my signature)

The chromis will likely come from liveaquaria.com since I have a gift certificate there, but I'd like to get the remaining fish locally if possible...tips?

Any other comments will (probably) be appreciated! (whistle)

I kinda looks like a de nitrator to me. Isnt that how the DIY de nitrators are made? But not clear?

This is what I'm thinking too..especially if that big black box is a chiller? Doesn't make sense to have a heat exchanger and a chiller.

I'd toss it regardless..

Theres a few ways you can do this actually.

1) Go around your house, write down the power draw of every single device, and do the math noted above to figure out your consumption (Not easy, nor recommended)

2) If you are willing to wait until you move in to determine your power draw, you can install a device like this, which will record your total power consumption:

http://www.theenergydetective.com/store/

You can also get a rough idea with a cheaper device like this:

http://www.amazon.com/P3-International-P4400-Electricity-Monitor/dp/B00009MDBU

This would probably be better if you wanted to have a certain subset of your house powered by wind/solar (ie Just your aquarium stuff)

I'm not a professional electrician, so this is not professional advice

I've been out of town so I missed this but...Congrats Eric! He's adorable =)

Good luck Eric!

Guess you won't have much time for fragging next week (laugh)

Ordered a heater and emptied the water out of the tank. Filled it with sand lastnight. Have about 1.5" to 2" throughout. Also threw in the extra dry base rock I have. I think I might actually have too much rock for the display once I add my live rock from current tanks, so I move half of the dry rock to the sump for now.

 

Anyone have ideas for aquascaping? My current idea is to do a U shape wall along the back and right sides and have an island in the front left corner.

EVERYONE will have an opinion on how to aquascape and ultimately, you won't wind up doing exactly what they suggest anyways.

You (and maybe your family) are the one who's going to be looking at this everyday... set it up the way YOU like it.

well right now we have a 20 tall tank with a metal halide over it 250 watts' date=' and we were thinking about changing it over to HID they say the produce more per watt, also they say they dont need a fan. well this one doesnt. I also has one cord, built in ballast, and for t5 light bulbs. in that tank we have an arrangement of polyps, mushrooms and zoas, as well has a brain coral and frog spawn. hammer head and two torch corals. as well as two maroon clowns and a shrimp. so I guess we have a bit of everything...[/quote']

 

I'm confused...Metal Halide IS HID lighting. HID is a generic term that means High Intensity Discharge. Metal Halide is a specific type of HID lighting.

 

Do you possibly mean HQI (Hydrargyrum quartz iodide), which is another type of HID lighting that is popular with marine aquariums.

 

A link to the lights you're thinking about would probably help clear this up...

Anyone know if there is much silicates in Portland water?

Portland drinking water report can be seen here:

http://www.portlandonline.com/water/index.cfm?c=29551

It does not appear to have silicates in the water...

Most major cities post their drinking water reports online. It's a nifty way to see what exactly is in your water without doing a bazillion tests.

 

Does someone make a decent inexpensive titanium heater I can use with a controller? So if you plug it in, its on. Or unplug it to turn it off? Think I need a 800w one.

Here is an 800w without a controller...not sure what you consider "cheap"

http://www.aquacave.com/800w-titanium-heating-brelement-by-jalli-1627.html

I prefer Won Brothers myself, but they don't seem to sell an 800w without a controller. Maybe you could get 2 400W? Might be better for redundancy purposes..

Good luck, tank seems to be coming along nicely!

You need to parse that xml into a formatted page.

Or you can use a rss plugin for some content management software, like wordpress.

Problem is that Rss does not require authentication, while the apex does.

You can try to avoid it with an auth string like: http://username:password@myapex.domainname.net

Yeah, that's what I was figuring. The whole username/password thing in the URL kind of defeats the purpose of a "guest" account since I'd imagine someone with a small amount of smarts could just use that to log into my apex directly. Don't really want to take the chance of someone being all "Hrm..I wonder what this does" and turning off my pumps

Seems silly that theres no view-only account.

Guess I'll talk to Neptune shortly.

Thanks for confirming my suspicions.

For a tank that size, you might want to look into a Brute garbage can or something for water storage. Just mix it in there, then use a small pump to get it into the tank. It'll most likely save you a lot of time in the future as well...

I have 2 40 gallon containers plumbed together, and basically only need to mix up salt water every 6 months or so. Theres pictures in my tank thread if you wanna check it out..

Lifting 5 gallon buckets gets old real fast...and dropping them when your arms get tired is no fun at all...not that I know anything about that... (whistle)

HId lighting Yay' date=' or nay[/quote']

 

You really need to elaborate

 

What will be in the tank? How big is the tank?

 

HID is obviously overkill for a 10g Nano, but I can't imagine not using HID on a 300g tank with corals. If it's a Fish-only tank, you can probably get by with just using T5/Flouro bulbs.

So I have a Neptune Systems Apex controller. For the most part, it rocks and I love it. My biggest issue however, is the fact you can only view the data by logging in. There appears to be an "XML" section, but it appears pre-formatted and I cannot for the life of me figure out how the RSS feed is supposed to work...

Theres nothing in the manual about using it as far as I can tell.

I don't mind logging into the controller to see what my current tank state is, but it would be much nicer if there was a "view-only" guest account or something.

I haven't contacted Neptune yet...figured I'd ask in here first. If no one knows, I'll get in touch with them.

Thanks!

So far after new filters and di resin I am getting 0 ppm outgoing' date=' in Gresham the water is between 16 to 20 ppm.[/quote']

 

Portland is obviously very similar..its about 15ppm from the tap for me.

 

I use a dual in-line tds meter. I generally change my resin when it starts changing color, but sometimes the TDS goes up to 1ppm before it looks like the resin is "used up". The meter definitely helps a lot in this situation.

 

Personally, I don't use RO. I just use a carbon filter to remove the chloramine, then a DI filter to remove everything else. I consistently have 0 TDS after the DI filter. I don't think you can get away with this if your TDS from the tap is in the 100's though...

So I headed over to Eric's place to get just 1 zoa frag... I wound up with 2 zoas, a Xenia and an Acro. The best part however, is Eric's tank made my wife much more interested in reefing! She actually mentioned setting up a second, smaller tank...AWESOME!

So, many thanks to CA2OR Corals...I couldn't ask for a better first experience with dealing with a PNWMAS vendor.

Has anyone here programed their reef angel yet? How hard is it. Mine showed up the other day' date=' but havent gotten to play with it yet.[/quote']

 

I had no idea Reef Angel was the name of a controller. I thought you were refering to a type of Angel fish as if you could be "Go Forth Angelfish! And do my bidding!" (nutty)

 

Sorry for the thread hijack...

ASAP for me so when ever is good for you

 

Sent from my Droid using Tapatalk

OK, sent you a PM

Depends on how urgently you want it looked at

If you want, I can grab it when I get the zoas for the growout competition. If you want it looked at sooner, just let me know what your schedule is like and we can figure something out. I'm not that far from you I think.

Snowpunk funny about the ice cube trays. I had the same ordeal. Daughter finally found it!!!

A much better solution that I've found is to use the eggcrate diffusers for florescent lighting in offices

( http://www.collins-consulting.org/orchids/eggCrate.jpg )

Just cut the egg crate to the size of a cookiesheet, place it on the sheet, then fill each square with the mashed up food. Let it freeze and you can pop out little cubes of food. It seems to be a much better size than the ice cube trays, plus you can make a LOT more at once.

Hope someone finds that helpful =)

tap water has tons of chloramines, metals, chemicals, even things like fluoride have been ore are in public tap water. These things make up what is called TDS or total disolved solids. our water here in vancouver has a rating of 140-160 TDS in the water. thats not good. i've heard portland is in the 14-20 range but i can't confirm that. You will have algae problems if you stick water in your tank with high levels of TDS. plus you don't know what other kinds of things your feeding your corals. copper maybe?

 

anyways this is how i understand it. feel free to correct.

I can confirm that Portland has approx 15 TDS straight from the tap (rock2)

I have been told that a lot of car wash places will give away their 55 gal barrels (similar to the blue one) for cheap (<$10) or free. The soap they use comes in those barrels. Haven't tried it around PDX, tho.

 

If you do get one from a car wash, you'll want to give it a really thorough rinsing. Many detergents have high phosphate content.

In my experience, while the blue barrels are great for storage, they're a pain in the *** to plumb. You cannot get your hand in there to attach a bulkhead, and finding a pump small enough to fit in the opening, yet powerful enough to overcome the head-loss is also near-impossible. I prefer Brute containers since they're much easier to work with.

I do still have my 2 25gallon barrels for emergencies though. I just find them too annoying to use daily.

Just one guy's opinion...

Let me know if you're still looking for help on that LED panel...

Small electrics are part of my job.

I wonder if I could convince my wife to do something like this...

She does seem to have a passing interest in my tank, perhaps this will put her over the top!

This should be fun to watch.

(popcorn)

Man, I love that stand and canopy! Also, the tank dimensions are ideal.

 

 

Not crazy about the aquascaping though...too wall-ish. Thats easy to fix though.

 

Who built the stand and canopy?

Thanks!

I completely agree about the aquascaping. However, due to the overflow and where the Vortech needs to be, theres no way to move the rock around without blocking the flow completely to half the tank, or having rocks fall over a lot. It's actually a lot more open then it looks. Here's a side shot that shows this a bit better. In retrospect, I should've gone with corner overflows instead of a long one along the back. Next time perhaps

The tank/stand was designed by myself. It was custom built by a company that now appears to be out of business. It's not that surprising since their company service seemed to consist of "I have your money, you have your tank, now leave me alone". The quality of work is very good though.

(Shameless plug: Anyone looking to get into the tank building business? Let me know! (whistle) )

Thanks to everyone for all the kind words. Apparently I need more Corals cuz Emerald is mad at me (scary)

So I'll get on that shortly.

Or if you can reach it with something' date=' some cotton soaked into some muriatic acid, if you can then rinse the area somehow[/quote']

 

Do you mean after I drain it? That might be possible. Rinsing may be tough. I'll have to think about that.

 

20 ppm phosphate!!! That is a lot of phosphate. Did you dump is fertilizer or something? I was battling algae when my phosphate was 0.04 ppm...

 

er...uhm...that should be .02ppm. I do that a lot. I often refer to my water salinity as 1.25 too. Thanks for pointing that out.

 

I was able to kill all the apt in some good rock by soaking it in fresh water (rodi) for a couple hours. After you drained the overflow, could you fill it with fresh water for a couple hours, then drain out of your system?

 

Thats not a bad idea either. I could probably just close the ball valves for the drain/return pipes and siphon out the fresh water. Is this more/less/the same effectiveness as muriatic acid? I think I'm more inclined to use the fresh water since it would do much less damage if it got into my system (I'm assuming).

 

As for the blowtorch suggestions...not an option