dave w

How many do you have to cut?

I think you have a great idea, and would agree with DaveS to go with wood frame instead of cinderblock/concrete. Wood is much faster.

Tricia, First, sorry to hear that you're leaving the DC area. To whom will I ever be able to give a free Nats ticket to on short notice? I also don't know the size and organization of the marine aquarium society of Norfolk but I think it will be much smaller than WAMAS. They will appreciate your input. I'd be happy to house your corals, but will give them all back to you when you are ready to take them back. If by then the sun has grown too big for your tank you can take cuttings. I'm sure you will get more volunteers for your corals.

The good news is that as long as you have light and decent water flow, almost any setup will house an algae filter if you put in a screen. Even without a drawing, your description seems like it will do fine. Just try to get as much light on the screen as possible, and as much flow as possible. Nature will do the rest.

I have some large plastic tubs at 150-200 gallons you can borrow. I'm in Fairfax Station so you'd need to drive a bit to get here. You'd also need a pickup or trailer to carry the tank.

Beautiful rockwork. It makes for a very clean look.

I can think of at least two ways to use it. Although it looks like it comes with an inverter, it probably puts off 12 volt DC power and I'd guess that inverters lose something like 10-15% of the energy during the conversion process. If I were you, I'd hook the 12VDC directly up to some LED lights or a DC water pump. But just use this as a supplemental system, not your mainstay. Many days we only get 4 hours of sun and you don't want your tank to rely on such a variable source of power. But another 40 watts of water pumping or lighting would be great when the sun is shining.

I think all the posts are hitting the point. I started keeping saltwater tanks in 1984 and quit for a few years every time I had a tank meltdown. But today it is different, anyone can go to the internet and get high quality advice from helpful experts (and lots of low quality advice as well). So I think short timers today are more for reasons of lifestyle whereas short timers 20-30 years ago were caused by lack of information. Also, as good aquarium knowledge has become widespread, the numbers of species and diversity of reef setups have also gone wild. I see this as a good thing, even though it might take 10 years of killing a certain specie before we learn the best husbandry practices. But during my first 10-15 years of saltwater, I saw all the same difficult stuff imported even though 99% of it was going to die. At least today a much higher percentage of the difficult stuff can survive because the larger reef community has learned how to care for it. I see the purpose of forums like this one to guide newcomers out of purchasing eye candy that they can't keep alive until they have a few years experience behind them and a lot of expert help to rely on.

I'm not going to trash ORA because I want to support them and anyone else who grows tank bred fish. But I picked up some ORA fish at MACNA and the bag that had three fish also had an aiptasia floating in it. If they had aiptasia in their MACNA display that could get into a fish bag, can you imagine what else is in their system? Again, I like ORA. But good management practices wax and wane with every company. I vote that you should QT.

Paul, I hadn't checked up on this thread for a couple of weeks but wanted to make a comment. Not only is this a cool light, but I think it could be very useful if applied to an algae reactor type of system. Lighting a reactor or a reef from under the water would be a real step forward for the hobby, and dissipating LED heat without condensation could have some really great applications. So keep up your creativity, it is very inspirational. And it looks like lots of fun. And let us know when your book is ready for the public.

The photos don't download for me. Is it just me or something else?

Welcome. You'll find some very friendly reefers very close to you soon enough. I think there is some kind of a location map somewhere in WAMAS, but people will volunteer if they know they are near you.

Paul, that's a beautiful light fixture. Its easy to see why you want to clear coat it, it will look more like art. We hope you recover quickly from surgery.

Thanks DaveS. I have put off acrylic work long enough and agree that it's time I started building things like this. A fish trap would be a good way to begin because of your point that leaks won't matter. Do people think that feeding fish from the fish trap is still a good idea?

Do you think 40 gallon QT is big enough? I guess it depends on how they want to stock it.

Just to give an entirely different (and very cheap) perspective, consider getting a couple of 12 volt batteries that fit in your two cars. Keep them on a trickle charger. If all you need to do is keep some air stones or pumps running, two 12v batteries should last you a long time. If one of your car batteries goes out you have replacements handy.

Your colors really pop, especially the blues and purples!

OK, so I just googled a few and see some commercially made ones. They look a little small for what I need, and I can't find where they are also used as permanent food dispensers. Has anyone else tried that?

Now that the big tank is getting full of rock and ready for fish, I'm wondering how I would ever catch a fish out of there with so many hiding places. So I'm thinking of feeding the fish from a couple of permanent boxes made of screen or acrylic, with trap doors at each end. When the target fish goes in to eat I pull a fishing line from 10' away and the doors slide down. Has anyone ever seen or made one of these?

Thanks to Zygote Rob for suggesting that I build a greenhouse for my fish because my wife wouldn't be happy with any smell inside the house. And thanks again to Rob for honestly answering about a thousand of my dumb questions over the years and always offering encouragement.

AlanM, yes that looks like the system that Seth described. And Rob, I'm glad you and Justin were smart enough to think several years ahead of the curve. Someone was a genius to use the output of a calcium reactor to supply CO2 to an algae reactor. I'm just trying to think of a way to use Paul's genius use of copper tubing as a heat sink for LEDs in an algae scrubber application rather than a coral lighting application. I think Paul's copper tubes dovetail with LEDs. Both need the same environment: low humidity, no condensation, saltwater protection. I agree with Rob about cooling fans but I worry about humidity. My greenhouse environment is worst than most people's homes but in either case humid air would shorten the life of LEDs. I don't mean to hijack Paul's thread and turn it into an algae scrubber thread, so I hope he doesn't mind a different angle. It's just like his coral lighting application but with twice the lights and submerged. So how do you build it cheap? I'm thinking of a glass flower vase inside a white (for reflection) 5 gallon bucket. Maybe pipe cool air to the bottom of the vase so it warms and rises out the top but at least connect a series of Paul's copper U tubes from one vase/bucket to the next in modules. I thinking this can be done in the $30-$40 range for anyone handy. Now to get radical, why not put a long glass tube deep into the aquarium to light corals? It would need to be removeable to clean algae off the tube. Does anyone see a WAMAS build party here? We'd have to fly Paul down from New York for a day. That's $100 for a plane ticket and $50 for beer.

Paul, Seth Solomon was telling me the other day about a really neat chaetomorpha reactor that used LEDs and high CO2 water from a calcium reactor to grow the macro algae with mineral oil as the LED coolant. After your water is warmed up by the LED heat, are you going to send it somewhere to cool it? And if you run it through a heat exchanger in a closed loop, do you think mineral oil would be as effective a coolant as water? The reason I ask is that I'm thinking of installing LEDs in a vertical glass tube which runs down through an algae cylinder like the one Seth was describing. I was thinking of installing a squirrel cage fan at the bottom of the tube to help the draw of the "chimney effect". But I can see high humidity air interfering with the electrical connections. So I admire your idea of using thermal adhesive to mount the LEDs directly to the cooling copper tubing, and running warm water through the tubing to prevent condensation. This would probably work better than my idea of fan cooling with high humidity air. If I make an algae reactor I'll need a lot more LEDs, do you think your system would support closer LED spacing without heat buildup?

That's a nice harem of anthias. Are your firefish still kicking?

You found the right place if you need any more friends who also love marine ecosystems.

I agree with you. Their advantages are that the southwest has twice the sunlight as us (given their lack of cloud cover) and their state governments subsidize the purchase of solar panels. By comparison, Virginia receives only half the sunlight, our state government provides squadoosh in solar subsidies, and even if they did, a solar panel needs to pass the SERI approval out in Colorado to qualify. A DIY system like mine built by a non-approved installer doesn't have much of a chance. So I think going off grid can only be a dream for me. Being a Virginian isn't without our own traditional benefits, I hear the Old Dominion still bestows free cartons of cigarettes to every kid upon their 8th birthday. OK, so that got a little mean. I sure wish I could get a tax break for solar but I can't. I really admire how advanced southwest architecture is. My father was an architect and he said that all new design started in California, took 10 years to reach Denver, then another 10 years to make it to the east coast.