astroboy

Thanks! I'm just wonder if someone could say "I've had 100 cherubs and never had any problems". I've had a few dwarf angels that are supposed to be 50-50 but they've all been good citizens. Anyway, if I do get a cherub I'll keep it in QT for a month with some expendables and see if they end up as lunch.

Thanks. I moved it a few days ago, hopefully that will work.

I've got two fox corals I've had for six or eight months. Recently, a hammer coral has grown enough that it's sometimes in contact with one of them which is looking pretty bad: the whole coral is dying off, not just the side near the hammer. The other, which is out of range of anything is, is more or less OK. I've had problems with alkalinity which I'm fixing which perhaps contributes. Anyway, does anyone know anything about hammer vs. fox allelopathy? Thanx! Mark

I'm thinking about getting a cherub angel (again) had one 15 years ago, stunning fish, and it never picked at corals (LPS) at all. I'm wondering if anyone in the club has any first hand experience about it *really* being reef safe or not... I'm not sure I trust everything I read on the internet but I've always gotten good information from WAMAS members! Just in passing, around that time my house lost power for four days during winter and aquarium temps got down to 49 degrees for 24 hours. I was able to move all the corals to a warm house when the tank started to cool but I couldn't snag the cherub. But it lived for at least six months afterwards with no ill effects that I could tell until a brittle star had half of it for lunch (unpleasant surprise). So, apparently at least some tropical marine fish will tolerate those temps for a short time, FWIW. Thanks to WAMAS I've since built a back up power system which has worked great. Thanks, Mark

Thanks. I hadn't seen anything online one way or the other....

Anyone have experience with this? I have a 90 gallon, the present lemon peel is quite peaceable and has no taste for corals. I'd like to add another...

This is excellent information, thanks!

I'm wondering if chloramine might be causing problems I've had over the past 2-3 years and am wondering if anyone has any insights. On the Vienna town website it says they, and Fairfax county, normally use chloramine in their water as opposed to chlorine. Not sure when this happened but I found out about it only a few weeks ago, prior to that I assumed they used chlorine. As we all know you can evaporate chlorine out easily the reading I've done says that the only ways to deal with chloramine are RO/DI or tap water conditioners that will take it out specifically. It seems unlikely to me that chloramine would last more than a week or two in circulated water but I can't find any reliable information. Does anyone know? I keep daphnia for food, which are extremely sensitive to chemicals. The one time I used tap water conditioner (and let it sit for two days) the entire colony died within hours. Just to avoid hassle I'd prefer to use water exposed to air and circulated for a few days, but my daphnia colonies have never done well and other than possible overfeeding I wonder if remaining chloramines are a problem. I often use used aquarium water which seems OK, but the colonies still don't seem to do that great. I have a 90 gallon freshwater tank planted mainly with amazon swords. Despite root tabs and CO2 and good lighting they decline over time. I do frequent water changes. Chloramines? I also can't keep angelfish alive although everything else does fine. I have good filtration, sump and all that. As regards saltwater, two years ago I slowly lost alot of corals I'd had for years. I think the MH lighting I had had become defective and things did do a bit better with the the LED replacement but some corals have still done badly. Water parameters are OK. I had elegance corals for five years (they were part of the die-off, but did great before that) and the newest one I got, tank raised, after two months is now showing strain. Long story short, I put in new 1 mm carbon blocks, 5 mm sediment filter, RO/DI media, made few hundred gallons of RODI, and my in line TDS meter shows 2 ppm now. Input TDS is about 175. Seems like things should last alot longer than that. Sediment filter looks almost brand new.I have been using just well-packed cat ion resin which I now understand is less than optimal and perhaps explains the bad TDS even though only a tiny amount has changed color. Could it be that chloramines are getting thru? This weekend I'll be switching to cation-anion-mixed bed deionization resin which is supposed to be superior. Anyone have any experience with it?

I'd like to buy a few handfuls of cheato, is anyone going to bring any to the meeting?

Hi Dave, I'd like to sell a skimmer and a sump. Are there any steps to take before hand, or do I just show up with price tag, so to speak?

Well, I soaked the whole thing in CLR for 16 hours after which it worked just fine. I'm sort of surprised since it looked clean before the first soak (1 hour) and even cleaner, if that was possible afterwards. Very strange. There must have been some buildup of something that was hard to see with the naked eye.

I've had it for seven months worked fine until this evening. The impeller and interior of the pump are clean, impeller turns nicely, this still happened after a soak in bleach and then CLR. Same thing happens when the float switch is turned off, or when it's turned on and the float is in the "keep pumping" position. I hooked it up to a different Octo controller and the same thing happens. This second controller came with a VarioS-2S skimmer pump. Does anyone know if the different VarioS pumps use the same controller? They look the same but on the back they have a number: C 066404 for the VarioS 6, and C069200 for the VarioS-2S. Not sure if this is a model number or just some sort of serial number.... I also switched out all the cables from the two controllers/pumps. No difference, a few turnovers and that's it. One thing. It turns over (and then stops) when I plug the power cable into the controller. If I turn on the on/off button nothing happens regardless of the cables & controllers I'm using. I do see a spark when I plug the power cable into the controller and offhand I would think that was a problem but the pump still fails with the second controller, with no spark. Perhaps the jack on the first isn't working so well. All this seems to indicate the pump itself is at fault but I can't think of what kind of hardware (solenoid & rotor?) would turn over a few times and then stop, when everything is clean. Sometimes it turns over a few times more than others but for never more than a second or two. Any ideas of what the problem could be? I'm really puzzled here.

I got a backup power supply used for computers and replaced the battery it came with with two 12V marine batteries in series so that 24V is being fed to the power source. I expect some power sources run on 12V but I think that's rather rare. Car batteries work OK also but marine batteries are supposed to be less liable to a shortened life span if you run them all the way down. Power supplies cost next to nothing on craiglist, or on eBay if one is listed close enough to pick up. I calculate that my powerheads and return pump for my 90 will run for about 3.5 days on such a backup. There are instructions on how to do this on the WAMAS site and youtube, easy to do. I paid about $275 for the entire setup, batteries are not cheap, but cheaper than replacing fish and corals. FWIW, in 2007 power went out for four days in Bowie, temps were about freezing the whole time. Didn't have a backup at the time, temps got down to 50 degrees in the tank for two days. Everything survived (LPS and a few fish), surprisingly. I'd prefer not to repeat that experiment again, though.

I've had a mirror up for a couple of days. In fact, put one at the other end of the tank two days ago. The second one seems to have encouraged or prodded the brown to come out of its nook. Seems to be working quite well so far.