L8 2 RISE

I'll be around this sunday/monday if you wantto make the treck to herndon. I have a herbie overflow. I also suggest going to an LFS to look there. They will have lots of different examples in one place. Reef eScape down the road In Fairfax has a showroom with several tanks plumbed individually.

Check with Pimped Out Aquariums. Jeff uses a bunch of colored pipes.

I'm trying to figure out what you're shooting for Alan, I think it would work, but how would you bring the 3/4 in out from the 2 in pipe in the overflow box? Or are you saying the space between the 3/4 inch pipe would be the emergency and the space between the 2 inch and the 3/4 inch would be the normal pipe? I can't really visualize how to bring the 3/4 inch pipe out from inside the 2 inch pipe? As long as the emergency drain can handle more water flow than the normal siphon drain, you will be fine!

I have... It works. A Herbie is very safe, even if it isn't as safe as a bean.

^^this. I messed up, forgot the bean is basically a modified herbie and not the same thing. I use a herbie, NOT a bean, sorry. though it's still very simple and fail safe. Bean is just a little less simple as far as I can tell.

Dang! They are mischievous! I was out of the country for my whole summer and now I'm back at school, so not much has changed. One thing that's especially not changing is the water.... I need to find a way to make water out a flip switch just like water in is. I have it in my head but haven't had a chance to do it. Rolling out the long hose and starting a siphon is not my moms favorite activity so WCs don't get done too often. Surprisingly, this hasn't caused any negative effects. Everything is growing pretty fast and is at the point where I have to trim stuff every time I'm home. We did lose the flowerpot monti while I was out of the country. I suspect due to alk swings as we don't test or dose. I've noticed monti caps become very sensitive to these swings as they get larger. Has anyone else noticed this? In May we also lost the Ruby Reds which was very disappointing. I think having two of them in this size tank, plus how active they were with mating, led them to deplete the pods pretty fast, so the male disappeared and the female about a week later. The female always looked great, but the male started getting skinny. It's possible that it was natural given that he had grown to by by far the biggest ruby red I've ever seen, but not sure. We also won TOTM for July if you guys haven't had a chance to check that out! http://wamas.org/totm_previous.php?prev=totm-2015-07

Cuttlefish set ups are ready, just waiting on eggs! From my perspective, with your 6 gallon (I've been following the thread, love it!), I'm not so sure there are enough hiding spots and open space away from fish and stinging anemones for the mysids to survive and breed. As far as beneficial... in that sense I think mysids are just like amphipods, they eat small stuff and they make great food for big stuff that can catch them. Curious to hear what others think, but couldn't hurt to give it a try!

I'm so excited to see this! Always loved Steve Weast's tank, here: http://reefbuilders.com/2011/02/06/cold-water-reef-tank/ and website here: http://oregonreef.com/sub_coldwater.htm Have you thought about a surge tank for wave action? I have a 3/4 hp chiller lying around in the hopes of setting up a cold water reef one day, but it doesn't seem like that will happen anytime soon. If you're looking for one shoot me a pm!

Just edited the post above, but are you sure the phosphates weren't from something else (over feeding, etc)? I've used about two tons of marco rocks in dozens of tanks, and never had a problem with phosphates leaching. My theory as to why people think they leach phosphates is that they actually absorb phosphates very well and then leach them back out once you have the problem under control. If you always keep your tank well maintained with no extra added phosphates, you will never have a problem. We had a client WAY overfeed their tank (1-2 packs of rods food a week) for 8-10 months before we convinced them that the fish really weren't that hungry and the hair algae and phosphates weren't going to go away until they cut back. After the feeding was under control we continued doing all the right things (water changes, gfo, etc etc etc), and testable phosphates went away (it took a long time, 3-4 months- due to the leaching). After this point, there was still hair algae all over the rocks that we would scrub and siphon ever visit, but it always came back. We changed about half the rock to find that the new marco rocks never grew hair algae, while the old ones continued growing it for another few months. This was because (again, my opinion/theory) the old rocks were continuing to leach trace amounts of phosphates directly the the hair algae growing all over them, while the new rocks never had the opportunity to absorb phosphates. Like I said above, would be interested to see results of your tests on fresh marco rocks, and this is my theory (so would be happy to be proven wrong), but I don't think you will find any phosphates. You just have to be careful to keep your tank healthy and not let phosphates come up for too long of a time.

This is what my screen top looks like on my rimless, old pics but just what I could find. I guess I'm partial, but I don't think it draws away from the reef at all. When you want to look down, it would be easy to just take the top off when you hit the button on your apex to turn the flow down. I've found that many of my fish that have jumped in the past, jumped at night when they were more easily spooked. You could just put it on at night to avoid that if you wanted. Love your idea and have always wanted to try a look down tank! But it really stinks to find your favorite fish on the floor.

Do you have some background on this? What type of rocks? Why do you think they have phosphates? Following EDIT: Woops, just saw they're marco rocks. If they're new, dry rocks, then they'll have next to no phosphates. You could do an experiment and test though, would be interested to see if you get anything different that.

I have only bought, and will be buying for raising cuttlefish, for 10 babies I'll buy around 500 a week. For a few weeks until they're on frozen. For seeding a tank, less than 50 will be more than enough, you could start with less than 10 and be fine. With copepods, mysids, and other fast reproducing animals that we like in our tanks though, replenishing the existing stock is always helpful in order to bring in more genes. This isnt true for all, but for many of the animals, populations will weeken and die out from interbreeding so much. I've read of some species of copepods where this can happen in not years, but months. Mysids would be a much longer time, but still something to consider.

Check out Sachs Aquaculture here: http://www.aquaculturestore.com/Salt-Water-Invertebrates/ (small point, generally the salt water ones are referred to as mysid shrimp as on the website, freshwater as mysis shrimp) They're good guys and have always sent good products. I'm getting ready to place a large order of mysids myself.

Yes, sorry, gate valve. You have to fine tune the rate of the siphon so that the rate of water out exactly equals the rate of water in (from your return pump). This is hard to do with a ball valve. Very simple with a gate valve. It would, unless you drill bigger holes. As long as the emergency is the same size or 1/4 inch larger, you'll be ok, but it never hurts to be extra safe. Another tip: make sure your emergency drain is set up so that it will be obvious if the siphon drain becomes clogged. i.e. put the emergency drain a few inches above the water in your sump, that way you hear splashing when there is a problem and can immediately remedy it. To the durso haters still using under gravel filters and metal halides , this overflow is hands down better. On a standard reef ready tank it's just as easy (easier?) to set up than a durso because there's no messing around with drilling holes in pipes and adding elbows. Just slap on a gate valve and you're good. With a durso, there will always be splashing and salt creep (even if you decide to take up valuable sump space with a good bubble trap) because it draws in air. A beananimal draws in no air, thus absolutely no splashing, no noise, no salt creep. Jokes aside, the downsides to this overflow are that it can be slightly harder to set up on hang on back/specialized types of overflows, and it has a much greater chance of becoming clogged due to the addition of a gate valve and increased suction. This risk is mitigated by installing a second emergency overflow with no valves on it and only used for emergencies. Also strongly suggest gutter guard around the overflow inlets.

BEST REEFING INVENTION SINCE SYNTHETIC SALT.... Maybe not, bit can you tell I love mine? Use a needle valve, not a ball valve, make sure you have a larger (maybe much larger) emergency drain that the siphon drain, run the overflow a little high so just a tiny trickle of water is always running down the emergency drain. Much easier to dial in like this than to try and dial it in so that you have a perfect siphon down just the siphon drain.

Not reef safe and they get huge. Unfortunate that they come in so often as adorable juvi's that people buy without knowing what they're getting into. Really cool fish though!

I got them from a guy on nano reef

Been using for a year. I got 4 or 5 different shades of orange/red mailed to me for about three bucks

You can plumb in a snall chiller between the main system and the seahorse system and run water slowly between the two. Would be a "cool" project!! Otherwise, macro display, garden eel display, mangrove display, dwarf octopus display, frogfish, mantis shrimp, harlequin shrimp.....

I like marco rocks a lot still. Real reef has them beat with the branch rock and flat pieces though.

Would like to hear your feedback on this along with comparisons to your own test kits. I like the idea of the idip, however the accuracy (or lack there of) was too much for my liking. Also the inability to measure nitrates at levels we would like in our tanks.

What size tank do you have them in? How small do you think they would be ok with? Seems like they don't need a lot of swimming space...?

Pics would help, as would more info about the fish and the tank- how ling have you had him? Other fish? Parameters? Etc etc

Are you sure you found the dead shrimp and not a shedding? They often shed after being introduced to a new environment. Typically 1-1.5 hrs is more than enough. Also, temp is most important for inverts, but it sounds like you had that covered by using the sump. .......Should have read Happyfeets post before typing this, but I agree with him.

Thanks! They are Lyretail Anthias. Added all three as females and one changed to male, pretty cool! The hog is ok. He isn't aggressive to the other fish, but ate my cleaner shrimps and stresses my pistol/goby pair out (the goby is now SUPER protective). He's pretty interesting though, fun to watch, and if we forget to feed for a couple of days or he gets bored he'll blow sand and move anything that isn't glued. We're actually going to try to remove him at some point. He's a fish that I have wanted for a long time, I've always liked the look of them, but he is the same color as the anthias and is a problem for the reasons above....