Chad

I made a little, hardly noteworthy, progress over the weekend... the tank is filled and lights are hanging, though I found a flaw in my plan.... The massive box that Tunze puts on their pumps doesn't go around the 1.5" PVC 90s I plumbed through the wall for the emergency drain and neither does the MH plug!! (I planned on dual purposing the emergency dry drain as a conduit for stuff that needed to go from the living room to the garage). GRRR... My solution will be to leave the tunzes on the 7096 controller I had for sale rather than plugging them into the APEX and putting an EB8 in my stand. Oh well, the timing is good on a controller group buy, huh? LOL. Also, I had a conversation over the weekend that reminded me that I wanted to touch on my overall philosophy when setting everything up and that's: Failures happen, plan for them to prevent occurence, mitigate the effect, or make the failure obvious so you can quickly do something about it. For a lot of things, I just implement this sort of stuff and don't think about it very much, it was a converstation with am excited new reefer at my home that prompted this. So if you have a question about why I did something a certain way, ask! I'll do my best to answer For example let's take my RO top off system. Here's a sketch of how it's set up. Taking the principle that everything fails, I have two separate ways to stop the RODI water into my holding container and preventing an overflow. First, there is a mechanical method using a standard float valve and an auto-shut off valve with the RO system. Second uses a pressure switch that detects level and disconnects power to the booster pump on the RODI and also shuts a pressure rated solenoid valve. We've all heard stories where float valves fail and such, so by hitting it with this two pronged approach a single failure is not likely to cause an overflow. However, if an overflow occured, none of this is tied directly to my ato system. Even in the event of an overflow, salinity will remain unaffected. I'm a little neurotic when it comes down to it, but hey, that's what I do.

Sorry for the loaded question, Tom! That wasn't my intent, but thanks for the great answer! Mostly, I wanted to raise awareness a bit of all the "other" cool stuff that WAMAS supports (i.e., grants, travel, research, etc.). But I am also curious if the effort of the largely "behind the scenes" membership that puts in genuine and needed good work to support that stuff is large enough.

With WAMAS increasing in size, is the current size of the executive committee and active members properly supporting the educational charters of the community? Can we have an update of the activities of this community?

Iwaki are good pumps and at one time were the pump to have. These days there are many choices that pump more water and use less energy. If I were going to buy a pump today for the purposes you state, I'd run a water blaster pump.

You guys have fun today!!! I wish I could make it!

Nice growth in <6 months time!!

Don't get me wrong, it's pretty... but that beauty comes at a pretty significant cost when a viable alternative can be constructed for <$10 out of two liter bottles. Aquamedic has manufactured that reactor (and the similar one that has an incorporated light) for a long time now.

I'll say this: I miss my DC area LFSs. Down here there are a few good ones, but not nearly the quality and availability of the DC area ones.

Huh, newspaper. I didn't know that, cool. Thanks, y'all!

I don't use one now, but I did and it was my skimmer of choice from ~2000-2008. I used a Mag 18, which if I remember right was the recommended skimmer at the time. If you haven't swapped out the nozzle to a 1" (from 3/4"), you should. Also if I remember right, it's more of a pressure issue with that skimmer than a flow rate issue since it works on the "thumb over garden hose" principle. There's probably more up to date information on it, the customer service was always pretty good, I'd call and ask.

When I ran a calcium reactor, I preferred to run the effluent through a second chamber with media. Using an air pump adds more equipment that takes a plug (always a liability in my mind with salt tanks... minimize equipment as much as possible) and putting enriched effluent through your skimmer means some of the content may precipitate out of the effluent and onto skimmer surfaces, which will cause additional maintenance to clean up. That's why I made the choice I did.

Cool... they were always my favorite place to order from in their prime. I'm happy to see it.

^agree!! I've heard stories of this mythical work tank of Doug's... but this is the first I've seen of it!

You can use the "divide by 10 option" in the apex to time to the fidelity you need.

Rob, my engineer answer says it's impossible to 100% insulate.

You are looking for a "gaming adapter" that you can find at best buy or similar... Basically you plug it into a USB on your computer to teach it your wireless router settings, then plug it into your controller, tv, camera system, whatever... and voila whatever you plug it into connects to your local network. (connecting to the internet is harder and requires changing some settings on your router... but this is the first step). No idea on the radion question.

Thanks for the sale, Dan, it was a lot of fun!

lol... 2 freaking points!!!!

Yea, Hawaii is awesome... Collect (certain species) as a local with a fishing license and loose rock / rubble without hard coral. Really cool... Granted, hard corals are illegal, but I think I'd get over that! Jim, seriously, man, learn to dive!!!

^lol!!! Funny how the momentum changed with that one!!

I have the same size tank and love the footprint! Nice start, I can't wait to see it!

Trigger = pulled!

Sweet!