astroboy

Mine read zeros, but only when I have zero phosphates. I've had good luck with the BRS GFO reactor. I suppose you could take a *tiny* bit of plant fertilizer and mix it into a gallon of water and see what reading you get. Plant fertilizers always have some amount of phosphate. Not sure if NoVA tap water has phosphate or not. Might be worth a try. But perhaps I misunderstood your post. I get all zeros when my phosphates are good, so it's possible you have less than measurable phosphates. When you say you don't get any reading, do you mean all zeros, or nothin'? Anyway, I've been quite pleased with my Hannas, both for phosphate and KH.

I'll probably end up doing that. Although, just to see what happens I'll probably hook them up in series first. The pumps aren't identical of course, but I imagine the impeller rotation rates are the same, or multiples of 60Hz, so things might work. It will be an interesting way to spend a Saturday evening.

Thanks, but this is going to be a one time thing. If hooking the pumps up in series doesn't work I'll just make the kids tote buckets up the stairs. That's why I had them, to support my hobby

I need to do a massive water change on a 90 gallon freshwater tank. The RO/DI water is in the basement and the top of the aquarium is maybe 15 feet higher. I have an Eheim 1260, which is listed as having a max head of 12 feet, so I doubt it will pump water from the basement into the aquarium. I also have an Ocean Runner 2500. I was thinking about hooking those up in series, with the output from the first being connected to the input of the second. I'm thinking that if the pressure from the first pump is X, and the second pump is Y, then putting them in series should give a net pressure of something like X+Y. Has anyone ever done something like this? Seems like it should work but I thought I'd ask rather than destroy the impellers or some other unforeseen consequence. Thanks! Mark

Alot of people have posted that elevating Mg to 1500-1600 works well against bryopsis, which is my experience. I've had it at that level for two years with no ill effects on corals or fish. I think I go that way rather than take a chance with biopellets. My problem with bio-pellets is that if water flow stops within a day or two you have a really toxic soup in the reactor: the pellets are great food for bacteria. I nearly lost my entire tank when I left my reactor off for two days and started it up without thinking. In my opinion bio pellets are a disaster waiting to happen, even though they apparently do alot of good for some systems.

If your pellets aren't tumbling, it might not be a trivial problem. I used BRS bio-pellets for a while. They seemed to work OK, but I'm not sure they were any improvement over an occasional vodka dosing (which can be dangerous, of course). For a reason I don't recall I turned off the pump to the reactor and forgot about it for three days, at which time I turned it on again. Within a few minutes all the fish in my tank were on the bottom, gasping. All the corals were closed up. Fortunately, I had enough water on hand for a 90% water change, and I was on had to see the problems as soon they happened. Everything but a couple of the fish pulled through. What had happened was that the reactor had basically fermented for those three days, and what went into the tank contained hydrogen sulfide (to judge from the smell) or some other toxin. If you do a search, you'll see I'm not the only WAMAS member who's had this happen. If the flow in your reactor is so low, or so impeded that the pellets aren't tumbling, my guess is that you're on the edge of a situation where the flow could easily stop. If it starts again, you could be looking at the bullet I dodged. My advice, frankly, is to get rid of the biopellets. The good they do doesn't outweigh the possible harm.

Well, I tried removing the aragonite with a 10:1 dilution of muriatic acid: Good news: it removed the aragonite grains very quickly. Bad news: it also eroded the Eheim Substrat Pro filter media. Apparently whatever holds the substrate balls together is also dissolved by strong acid. If I have left the balls in the acid mix overnight I'm sure they would have disintegrated completely.

A while ago I had Eheim Substrat (balls made of sintered glass) at the top of a remote deep sand bed. After a discussion on WAMAS where the consensus was that the balls, or any sort of bio ball, would tend to act as a nitrate trap I removed them. Now, I'm setting up a freshwater planted tank for which the substrat balls would be very good to have for filtering. However, all the little crevices have tiny particles of sand in them, than no matter how much I rinse or scrub, still wind up on the bottom of the filter. This is bad, since I need soft water and dissolving aragonite will be a disaster. I was thinking about putting the balls in a muriatic acid bath for a bit. Does anyone know if that would be sufficient to dissolve the aragonite grains? Thanks!

I'm currently using a new deep cycle marine battery (12 volts) for a backup power source. I was recently given a used car battery (also 12 volts) which is at least three years old and turned over the car's starter motor easilyso I figure it's probably in OK but not great shape. I was thinking of hooking them up in parallel since that would give me more power storage, so to speak. However, I'm wondering if this is a good idea. The internal resistances of the batteries are likely quite different, and I'm wondering if that would result in the battery with the higher internal resistance being run down. In practice, if both batteries had exactly the same potential (12 volts) then I don't believe there would be any current flow between them, but of course there is likely a small difference. What I don't want to do is wreck the good battery by hooking it up to the old battery, which might act as a short of sorts, which would run down the good battery, thereby shortening its life and probably not giving me any more capacity. Any advice would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, Mark

Sounds much more coherent than some humans at some parties when I was in college. /Just what I've heard. //I myself never went to such venues of debauchery, of course.

I've had good luck with the BRS reactor with the high density GFO. Phosphates unmeasurable with it. .06-.09 without it.

One thing I've used that works well is two Tsunami AT-1 hooked up in series. I glued the sensors together so that one was about one half inch above the other. The effect was that both sensors had to be out of the water, and both sensors had to be functioning, for the top off pump to turn on. If both sensors were working, the pump would top off until the lower sensor got wet. If the lower sensor was stuck in the "on" position somehow, the pump would turn off as soon as it got wet. For the system to fail, both sensors had to be malfunctioning and that never happened. That would hold true for just about any top off system. One could use a Tsunami as a cheap redundancy..... I think the Tsunamis operate on changes in air pressure within a cylinder. Might be a bit more reliable, less moving parts than a float.

Thanks, but I need at least four of the plugs, six if I decided to repair another fixture. Can you tell me where you got them, or at least good words to google on? Thanks very much! Mark

I have a four bulb 48-inch power compact light fixture, straight four pin bulbs. Over time the plastic plugs that the bulbs plug into have gone bad. Basically, what needs to be done is to cut off the old plug and connect the wires to the new plug. Does anyone know where I could buy such plugs, or a place in NoVa that does (cheap) repairs on aquarium light fixtures? Thanks, Mark

Hello! A couple hours ago my sump was making strange sounds. The water level was a good deal higher than it should have been. What I think happened was that the automatic top off got stuck, perhaps because I had it turned off for a few days which allowed the float to stick. I guess the moral of the story is to never turn something off and assume it will function properly when you turn it on again. Fortunately, the shut off switch worked fine. Anyway, the salinity (specific gravity) has been at 1.021/28 ppt for a few hours. Corals and fish seem fine, despite what must have been a rather rapid change in salinity downward from 1.026/35. I suppose since the automatic top off sends water into the sump perhaps the change was a bit slower than it might have been. I'm going to raise the salinity back up by adding salt water to replace evaporation losses over the next few days. But it occurred to me, generally speaking, what is the lowest salinity corals will tolerate? I'd be interested in hearing first hand accounts. Most of what I found on the web was second hand or otherwise questionable....

I have my 29 gallon tank hooked up to a UPS connected to a car battery (WAMAS DIY). Only the powerheads are connected to the UPS. During the big winter ice storm, (18 months ago?) we lost power for about 48 hours and everything came through fine. This time I lost my powder blue and a gramma due to lack of oxygen, I think, after less than 12 hours. The clowns were panting, but perked up within half an hour after I connected the sump pump to the UPS and moved the powerheads so that the surface was really agitated. All the corals came thru like champs, but I felt bad about losing the fish. Even for a fish, that can't be a pleasant way to go, but perhaps they just black out before things get really bad. I'm wondering if the temperature wasn't the difference. During the winter the tank temperature went from 80 to 62, this time it climbed up to just under 90. What I'd really like to have is some sort of switch that I can plug into the UPS that will only turn on when the power goes out, to run an air stone or vertically aimed powerhead, which are things I'd normally not wish to run. Does anyone know of such a device?

I've run chaeto and GFO for the past nine months, no problem. I suppose it's possible that GFO could lower phosphates to the point where the cheato can't live... It couldn't do much harm to turn the GFO off for a couple of weeks and see what happens. Every tank is different...

Of course nutrients are the main thing, but at the risk of sounding like a fanatic, my experience indicates low Mg (below say 1100-1000) is the source of many many problems and is usually far down on the list of things to check. I should add, most salt mixes only give you about 1000 ppm Mg, Tropic Marin might be about 1150. I used a mix of Dead Sea Salts (Home Depot, Merrifield Nursey) and epson salts from any drug store to get the right balance of MgSO4 and MgCL. Cheap, cheap, cheap. Bulk Reef Supply or Reef Calculator (?) give directions on what proportions to use.

One thing to be aware of if you're using bio-pellets: The pump circulating water thru my bio-pellets reactor shut down for a few days. As I recall something got caught in the pump. So I started the pump again, and all the fermentation products (ie, hydrogen sulfide) that had resulted from the reactor bacteria sitting there for three days 'cooking' when into my tank. I lost one or two corals, all my fish where lying on the bottom apparently dead. I had enough salt water on hand to do a 100% water change which saved the fish and the rest of the corals. I now just add a couple drops of vodka every couple of days, if I remember, which seems to work just as well as the biopellets. As far as I'm concerned bio-pellets are Russian roulette. If I hadn't been there the instant the pump started up again I'm sure everything in the tank would have died within minutes. The pump was still plugged in, there was no reason whatever was jamming the impeller couldn't have worked loose at any minute, and good bye aquarium! Having said that, I didn't see any improvement with bio-pellets, although that was likely just because of the parameters in my particular tank; I was running GFO so likely the lack of phosphates was a choke point that prevented the carbon from the bio-pellets doing much good. The tank was pretty decent anyway. In the end, I added chaeto to the fuge/remote deep sand bed, and I think that did more to clean the tank up that anything else. You do get better water clarity with vodka (although you have to run carbon to prevent eventual yellowing), which I didn't see with bio-pellets.

I've found that if you get nitrates, phosphates and DOC pretty low, bubble algae goes away in a reasonable amount of time. My impression is that it needs alot of those things to reproduce, and if they fall below certain levels the existing bubbles eventually die off. When NO3, PO4 and DOC in my tank were low, I was able to puncture the bubbles which killed them without new ones showing up. If those aren't low, then of course puncturing is a great way to have bubble algae take over your tank. In my experience, raising Mg to 1500-1600 certainly kills off (most species of ) bryopsis and hair algae, and seems to inhibit algae growth in general except for the cheto in my fuge. It at least does no harm to corals or fish....

Like counting sheep. Only real.....

I enjoyed your talk alot, and hope you've given many more since WAMAS. As I recall, you told me it was only the second time you'd given it. I use your feeder bulb alot, happy happy! I've had some real problems with allelopathy in my 29 with a large leather coral (easily solved by selling) and a vast number of garden variety mushrooms (requiring 'extreme prejudice'). Just this morning I was wondering why someone hadn't invented a wand with an ultrasonic tip or something to kill shrooms with. I'll certainly buy one of your instruments of destruction.

Update.... A month ago I sold my sarcophyton and killed off most of my mushrooms. (The only thing that really worked was Aiptaisa-X, neither vinegar nor Tropic Marin Elim-Aiptas worked very well, even when I injected the shrooms with a hypodermic needle). All the other corals have opened up again quite nicely, to the point where I had to move alot of them so they wouldn't sting each other to death. So, the problem was certainly some sort of allelopathy since I made no other changes. I'd imagine the sarcophyton was the main problem but since I killed off the mushrooms at the same time I can't say for sure. I think the sarcophyton was just too big for my 29 gallon, even with water changes and carbon. I did some reading on wetwebmedia, and was surprised to see that it was taken as common knowledge that mushrooms cause major allelopathy problems. I'd never heard of that before and it doesn't seem to be mainstream thought in WAMAS. Bob Fenner is one of the main gurus on wwm, so I'm hoping we can get him to talk about allelopathy a bit at the next meeting.