moore030

OK, I see the crack now... Feel free to use my pump until you get your new one hooked up... no hurry.

I've tried lots of pumps, and my eheim (1260) is way quieter than the others. (mag,rio,sedra,quiet one) Also the rio leaked electricity.

It looks like you might be able to cut the piece off the old pump and then glue it to the new pump with some thick glue (like epoxy) that can fill in the gaps...

I had worried about the possibility of glass breaking, and when I saw my 5 yr. old launch a hotwheel through the window of my living room I decided to go with acrylic for my 240. Another thing is, my tank is the basement where it is usually fairly cool, so the insulating properties of acrylic should help lower the heating cost of the tank. Brett

Do Coral Banded shrimp eat peppermint shrimp? I got two peppermint shrimps to munch on aiptasias (at scales), but they both seem to have disappeared, and none of the aiptasias were eaten either.

I also highly recommend the stealth heaters. I use five 200W for a 240g. They constantly get moved around since I'm always messing with my sump, and I'm sure if they were glass they would have broken by now. I have them plugged into an expansion oulet so all that current doesn't go through my controller (reefkeeper II).

I just tested out using a Rio 2100 and a Rio 2500 with a flow restrictor (small tube) to pump water at a slow rate, and it totally failed! The pumps really act erratic or just shut down if the flow is blocked too much.

Why can't you just use any regular pump you happen to already own, and cut the output flow down with a simple pvc valve that costs about $2 at home depot?

Well, it looks like there's not an obvious answer at any rate. A cool thing about recirc IMO is that "bubble making" is a separate system from "water moving." That gives a chance to take advantage of the natural flow of water from the main tank to sump. Although I'm not sure that would make alot of difference...

If each skimmer is making the same amount and size of bubbles then each would have the same contact time (is that right?), but the water inside the skimmer is cleaner (because it is recirculating) than the water coming in from the sump. So it still seems to me like the non-circ skimmer would be pulling out more stuff.

It seems to me that the main difference is that the recirc pump sucks water from inside the skimmer with a relatively small feed from the sump, but the regular skimmer sucks all its water from the sump. The water from the sump is dirtier than the water in the skimmer, so it looks like you would get the most cleaning power per watt by using the dirtier water. ? Brett

I like that possom picture! Very funny post

Thanks for the great info! I didn't know the blue range wasn't good for photosynthesis. I might add another pendant if I switch to 14 or 20k to make up for the lost PAR.

I have 2 10k HQI pendants and was thinking of augmenting with actinics, but there's really no good place to put them. Will replacing my 10k lampls with 14k or 20k lamps give a similar effect (ie. make my crocea clam look brighter blue)? thanks! Brett

A sound dampening enclosure! Great idea! My generator is embarassingly loud and we get lots of power outages where I live in Md. It seems like above-ground power is least reliable - that's what I have.