astroboy

FWIW, I was able to get rid of bryopsis by raising the Mg in my tank to about 1600. Seemed to lessen the growth of other algae to some degree also although perhaps that was just my imagination. No apparent ill effects on fish or corals.

Hi Tom, It's a brand new battery. It should be 13.2 but I was thinking perhaps the probes on my voltmeter were a bit corroded. I was thinking the battery might be acting as a short, so to speak, but I put it on a trickle charger for an hour and it showed it to be completely charged up, so a short sort of thing shouldn't be a problem. Of course, batteries have an internal resistance, who knows how you'd measure that or even look it up, so that might be causing the upc to freak out. I'll hook it up again, now that it's fully charged. It's a bit frustrating, five years ago I bought a UPS on amazon completely out of the blue and it worked like a champ through a dozen power outages. Now, after I've done the math for the amount of power the necessary pumps will draw I can't get things to work. I bought a UPS online after the old one failed (bad battery) and ozone came out of it immediately. Since it was 'as is' I suspect it was fried beforehand. But this UPS is from a reputable computer geek shop in Falls Church, they claim it's good and I expect they're correct. I'm thinking of Kirchoff's Law from first year physics: internal resistance of the UPS charger and battery. It could be that the current is going in the wrong direction, so to speak. Too bad there aren't any electrical engineers in the club with an instant answer.

Hello, I'm at my wit's end. After five years the UPS I had hooked up to a marine battery for power failures died; I believe the battery went bad since I had it hooked up to a trickle charger. What I have now is an APC Back-UPS RS 1500 computer backup power supply, connected to Deka Marine Master 12V battery. Item 599947 Model 24M7 at Loews, 12 V, 1000 Amp. I removed the old battery and hooked up the wires to the marine battery. I have a 100W light bulb plugged into the power supply. The APC is plugged into a wall outlet. Here's what happens: -I turn on the ON button. On Line light button comes on and the 100W light comes on. A beeper beeps. -After a few seconds the 100W bulb goes off, so does the online light. Beeping stops. -A few seconds later, the 100W and beep come back on. The online light comes back on. The "onBattery", "Overload", and "Replace Battery" light all flash. This goes on for at least 10 minutes, when I turn the APC off. With the APC unplugged: -I turn on the on button. It beeps, one beep about every five seconds. That's it. After about a minute the beep stops. The battery shows 12.8V, of course, it could be nearly discharged for all I know. Does anyone have an idea of what the problem is? Could it be that the battery is completely flat and I need to charge it up with a trickle charger? Or, is the APC simply incompatible with the marine battery? Worst case: does anyone know of an electrician or computer shop near Vienna who could hook this thing up for me if I brought it into the shop? Thanks, Mark

$500 is about my upper limit, although I'm certainly not adverse to buying something used if someone knows of something really excellent for more than that. I'm kind of looking for a fixture that can set on top of my tank, as opposed to being suspended: landlord won't appreciate holes drilled in the ceiling.... Thanks.

I'm considering putting my 48" MH setup out to pasture. I'd like to get an LED setup. However, money is an issue. Does anyone have any advice on a good, relatively inexpensive fixture where its possible to change the color intensities ? Thanks, Mark

I have a backup power system that failed this morning when I turned off the power to do some work on my tank and I need some advice as to what failed. The system is a marine battery hooked up to a Black & Decker trickle charger and connected to a UPS. I've removed the original battery in the UPS and have soldered wires from the battery terminals to the leads inside the UPS. The system has worked fine for a few years. This morning I turned off the power to the tank and in a few seconds the UPS started beeping and I smelled ozone and the pumps hooked up to the UPS weren't turning over. The voltage on the battery, when everything was disconnected, was 12.9V as opposed to the 13.2 which I believe it should be. The water in one cell was a bit low, otherwise it looked OK. I've had it for about seven years so it certainly isn't new anymore. The trickle charger was outputting about .4V DC so I'm guessing that's a paperweight now. The ozone smell was coming from the UPS, so that's history. Evidently something failed and fried the UPS and trickle charger. My questions are: 1) Could that have been the battery? I suppose it's not impossible that the charge was run down to nothing and it acted as a short in some fashion which caused the UPS and trickle charger to fail. 2) Is 12.9V an indication it's time for the battery to go? If I don't have to replace the battery I'd just as soon save the money... 3) Any advice on a good UPS, something with a bad battery I can get for cheap on ebay? Thanks, Mark

Thanks very much, I appreciate the info!!! FWIW, the two discus I moved to the QT with the meds have much better color, although I'm not sure if they're eating yet. Hopefully things will turn out well.

I've thought about hexamita..... However, none of the dead fish or the thin ones showed any signs of 'holes', they just looked starved. I didn't see any feces at all, I expect because they hadn't been eating for some time before I realized there was something wrong. They were pretty well hidden in the weeds..... Do you know how to get metronidazole? Seems like you need a prescription from a vet. I used to live in Bowie and needed an antibiotic for an elegance coral and the vets, or at least their receptionists, treated me like I was a lunatic. Apparently none of them had reef tanks, otherwise they'd have known dropping a few bills on fish or coral medication is (hopefully) money well spent.

Hello, I believe a few people in WAMAS keep discus... I have a 90 gallon heavily planted tank, lots of light and CO2, mostly Amazon swords. A few small corys, three medium sized angles, four pearl gouramis. Temp is 82, pH is around 7, TDS about 125. I do a 90% water change once a month, use RO/DI with a supplement the name of which I forget now so that it's not pure RO/DI. Everyone plays well together, everything is doing great except some of the discus. I got six 2.5 inch discus about four months ago and for three months things were great. At that time two discus occupied the front of the tank and the other four stayed back in the plants. I never saw any fighting but I guess somehow the pecking order was established. A couple weeks ago one discus died, and a few days ago another one died. Both emaciated. The remaining two are looking rather dark and thin so I moved them to QT tank today and am dosing them with sulfa and furan. Since the two dominant discus look absolutely healthy I'm guessing that it's not water quality or environment per se that is affecting the others. I've read that for a 90 gallon you want at least eight discus so that the pecking order isn't so rigid. Any thoughts? As with a lot of aquarium stuff, I've read a lot of conflicting opinions online.... Thanks, Mark

Excellent meeting. Thanks to our WAMAS officers who go to such trouble to make this such a great club. And to our sponsors for their generosity and their great knowledge and advice. One nice thing about the WAMAS sponsors, when I go into their stores I know I'm going to get good information even if it loses them a sale (although in the long run, at least in my case, it evens out) . I appreciate that. Really great, really interesting to hear about the science project. Amazing stuff.

Yeah, the pumps started pumping on their own while I was fooling with things in and behind the tank. I didn't realize they were off. Lost a powder blue tang I'd had for three years. Interestingly, the corals came through it like champs. That's one reason I keep enough salt water on hand for a 100% change. Not a good thing to do, I'm sure, but better than doing nothing when things blow up.

Thanks very much for the info, but the bulbs are just a few months old and are LEDs, so I don't think 'decay' is a factor. Although, I had been using compact fluorescents up until 4-5 months ago. I would have thought the change in lighting would have had a more immediate effect... Just from eyeballing, I'd say the brightness is pretty close and it worked well in the past. The gravel was in the tank for three years, very low fish population, I rinsed it all out when I moved six months ago, which I'm sure killed a lot of good bacteria, but for the first couple of months I had a very low fish population with that in mind. This diatom thing is rather low grade but it happened only within the last few weeks, more or less literally overnight. I'm pretty sure none of my kids dumped a handful of fish food in the tank..... I'm wondering if the substrat balls aren't the problem. Five or six years ago I had them in my saltwater tank but after reading alot of WAMAS posts I decided that likely they were just nitrate sinks, at least in a saltwater tank. To clean them off I put them in CLR and they dissolved like sugar in water, almost..... Big surprise. I would have though they were inert, being glass, as I understand it. That didn't stop me from buying a new batch for the freshwater tank. My big question: I wonder if at some point once enough organic matter accumulates in/on glass balls they don't start to slowly dissolve, something like tooth decay. Bacteria forming an acid film on the surface, something like that .

Based on my experience, a 2" sand bed is the worst of all possible worlds. Deep enough so that organics will accumulate, but not deep enough for an anoxic zone to form. Except, if you stir it up you always get a hydrogen sulfide smell so something anaerobic is happening. Sort of. Just enough to be marginally toxic to fish. A couple of years ago I was at a Capital Area Cichlids meeting where the speaker (Frank Cowherd, I think) talked about a reactor he designed to knock nitrates down to zero. The freshwater folk didn't care, but there were a half dozen saltwater people who demanded much more detail after the talk. A "We haf vaves of making you talk" sort of thing, almost. Copps: he gave a very good talk at the CAC, I think WAMAS would like to hear it if you're looking for a speaker sometime. The basic idea was from a PhD dissertation from a Dutch student from a decade or two ago which led to a big rethink on sewage treatment in Europe (I'll post a link to the document if I can find it, it's online somewhere). Basically, rather than using sand, what you want in a 'DSB' is rock wool instead. You can get it at Home Depot or any building supply store, its the stuff that insulation is made up these days. The idea is that the rock wool has a vast amount of inert surface area for bacteria to grow on and if water flow is low enough an anaerobic zone will easily form. The rule of thumb is that the turnover time has to be no more than 6-8 hours. Frank Cowherd breeds freshwater angelfish a bit south of Baltimore and to get them to spawn you need close to zero nitrates. He uses well water, I think, that has 10 ppm nitrates and it goes down to 2 ppm after running it through his reactor. Since he has other reactors hooked up to his breeding tanks themselves he has pretty close to 0 ppm. For me, turnover was the problem. I had five gallon reactor and never was able to get a 1/2 gph flow consistently. Even when I did, that equated to my 90 gallon tank going thru the reactor only once 180 hours. Of course, 'unreacted' water got mixed in with 'reacted' water so to turnover the entire tank would have taken several times that. I made some calculations, say, that my tank would reach 30 ppm of nitrates in a month if nothing removed the nitrates, and I figured my 5 gallon reactor would have basically no effect. And so it happened. However, I'm pretty sure a 30 gallon reactor would have worked like a champ. Anyway, the notion of using rock wool as opposed to sand seems to work with sewage treatment for Europeans so it ought to work OK in a saltwater tank.

I ran biopellets for a couple of years and always had some trouble with cyano. One reason, I suspect, I had a pretty deep sanded that I think simply accumulated a lot of organics that water changes and filtering couldn't reach, so to speak. Perhaps you're having a similar problem. The main reason I gave up biopellets and went to vodka dosing was that on two occasions the circulation through the biopellet reactor stopped for about 24 hours. (Plug to pump got knocked from the outlet, other time something got lodged in the pump itself, I think, anyway. In any case I know the circulation was off only about 24 hours). Both times the reactor did a great job of growing something that gave off a hideous rotten egg/sulfide smell when the pump started up again. The corals did OK but I lost a couple fish, they immediately were on the bottom, barely breathing. Massive water changes saved most of them. But, unless you're 100% sure your pump is never going to fail, I think biopellets are playing Russian roulette. I suppose some sort of wet/dry drip would work very well, though.

Hello, I have a 90 gallon freshwater tank, running CO2, lots of lighting, packed with Amazon swords and a few vals. Been set up for six months now. I've had very little algae at all. For a freshwater tank, the fish population is at most moderate. In the last couple of weeks I've had a fair amount of diatoms (brown algae) and the plants aren't looking so good, I think because the diatoms on the leaves are blocking just enough light to do harm. In my wet/dry filter I have a layer of Eheim Ehfisubstat biosphere: sintered quartz. I'm wondering if 1) it's possible that the balls are leaching silica into the tank, which diatoms love, or 2) there's something else favoring diatoms or perhaps some kind of genuine brown algae since I haven't rinsed off the balls since I set up the tank. Any thoughts, especially on No. 1? Thanks, Mark

So, the next question, Tom, is, if I have a bunch of precipitate on the bottom of my top off reservoir, when I add RO/DI water to it, will the precipitate dissolve into the water so I don't have to add any more kalk mixture? Or is the precipitate not soluble enough, or doesn't contain what we want to dissolve into kalkwasser? I've never been clear on this.... Thanks, Mark

Thanks Jim, It turned out one of the batteries was showing only 9.5 volts, no doubt a cell was bad. Since it was hooked in parallel to a good battery at 13.2 V I'm not sure how much voltage was being delivered to the APC, I'll have to dust off my Kirchoff's laws, but I expect that is what fried the original APC I had. I got a new APC at Microcenter today on sale, rated for 300 W, I'd used 230 max, seems to be working great. I dosed my tank on Saturday with chemiclean to get rid of some black cyan that I just couldn't get rid of and was damaging a nice coral (I hate to do that) and of course, with no working APC, we lost power 1AM Monday. Of course, with chemiclean you need to keep everything aerated to the max, so perhaps it was the fates punishing me. Monday AM I bought an el cheapo battery operated air pump and ran that with an air stone to break up the surface tension, power came back on at 1PM Monday, no harm done at all. I dodged that bullet.

I have a backup power supply, the usual thing where a power source (inverter) has the battery taken out and is hooked up to a car battery. The APC died so I bought a new one that emits a continuous beep when the power is out. Obviously, that was a bad thing and I managed to fry it trying to identify and remove the beeper. I was wondering, does anyone know of an APC that doesn't beep, or makes a minimal amount of racket when it's running off the battery, that I might be able to find on ebay or some such place? Also, I had the old APC hooked up to two car batteries in parallel. One of them I think I got from my father in law which was probably sitting in his garage for a decade or two, and when I hooked up the new APC today I saw the water was pretty low, it was probably that way for months. Could a somewhat squirrely battery damage an APC? It seems possible.... Thanks! Mark

Hello, I lost power for half an hour a little while ago. I noticed a major ozone smell (or at least some sort of burning smell) coming from the back of my tank. I have a backup power supply, which is two car batteries hooked into a UPS: I removed the UPS battery and soldered wires from the car batteries to the UPS leads. The batteries are hooked up in parallel, not series. The whole set up is behind the aquarium and a real pain to get at.... The setup has worked in the past power outages that lasted a day or two at a time, no problems. The UPS itself felt a little warm now just, but not what I'd call hot. The trickle charger is charging the batteries right now, which is not a surprise since they had been drained for half an hour. Any opinions, does this sound like a UPS going bad, or could it be a battery problem? When I turn it on it runs for a few seconds and then starts beeping constantly. I'm not sure if this means a short, dead batteries, or what. The batteries are both five or six years old but have been (in theory, at least) fully charged except when the power goes off, so I would think they were OK... If anyone has any experience or insights I'd appreciate the advice. Thanks, Mark

Thanks for the very good advice about the Carbon Doser. Seems to be far and away the best option out there by a long shot, I'll be buying one in a few days. Next question: any recommendations for a CO2 diffuser or reactor? I've never been happy with the glass diffusers I've had, partly bubbles, partly because I could never clean them enough to get them to work the way when they were brand new. I've considered combining a shaded glass diffuser (to avoid algae growth) that would sort of feed into a small powerhead, but I'm wondering if there isn't a better solution. Thanks in advance, Mark

You'll be in our prayers, Tom. I knew someone who had pretty much the same surgery a few years back, he made a full recovery in a few weeks and was feeling better than he had for years.

Hello, I have a few scratches, am thinking about buying a new tank (90 gallons). Does anyone know who sells them at a reasonable price? I bought the original tank from House of Tropicals outside Baltimore but I'd rather not drive all that way. Thanks, Mark

Hello, I'm setting up a 29 gallon tank and I'd like to use LED lighting on it, preferably a fixture that can be mounted on top of the tank, as opposed to having it suspected above the tank. Any suggestions would be very welcome. Thanks, Mark

Hello, a bit off topic but given the depth of knowledge in this club I'm sure someone has some good advice. Besides my reef tanks I have a 90 gallon freshwater tank which I plan to keep discus in. I've had a lot of plants in it for 18 months, mainly swords, but but they just don't grow well without CO2. With it, they grow great (360 Watts compact fluorescents, probably more than I need...). I've used a Milwaukee MA 957 pressure regulator, one worked OK some years back, the one I got 18 months ago failed within a few months, pure junk. In both cases, when the CO2 tank was near empty there was a CO2 dump which killed the (cheap) fish I had at the time. I'd rather not repeat the experience with some pricey fish. I was careful about checking the pressure and weight of the tank but I got caught twice, although the second time was because the Milwaukee reg failed, I'm sure. As I understand it, there are two stage pressure regulators, something like a scuba reg, which deal well with the end of tank dump. Does anyone have any recommendations on what to buy, or where to get some good information on this (hardware that deals with end of tank dump?) Thanks, Mark

I was scrapping algae off the side of my 90 gallon and lost the single-sided razor blade. Can't find it anywhere. Does anyone know, am I OK just leaving it in there to rust, or do the blades contain some sort of heavy metal or copper that would cause problems? Thanks, Mark