dave w

OK, I clicked on your link and realize that I have seen them before but I had forgotten their "earthship" label. I really like their stuff and have always liked the idea of going off grid. But in the more practical world in which my wife and I have been working and raising a family I've made a lot of compromises. At least there are still things like the solar water heater and geothermal cooling to make me feel like I'm living out some of the ideas that I've wanted to do ever since I was a kid delving into alternative energy and recycling ideas. Thanks for recommending their website.

Thanks David, I'll look them up tonight. I haven't heard of them before.

Rob, Several long, boring and technical responses to your points. If the furnace fan dies it would remove one of two methods to bleed off heat. As a second method I'm also putting 1,000 or 2,000 feet of pex tubing in a 150 gallon tank of salt water for a heat exchanger, maybe that is similar to the immersion heater you suggest. A high temp circulation pump pushes hot fresh water continuously through the pex tubing, releasing heat to the cool saltwater. The 150 gallon tank sits a couple inches below the skimmer outlet but a couple inches above the 4,000 gallon tank. The skimmer is powered by a Jebao DC 15,000 liter water pump so 4,000 gph leaving the skimmer will drop into the heat exchanger and then overflow again to the tank. But I'd be in big trouble if the skimmer pump died suddenly. Should I plumb a backup pump? Your point is a good one. If the circulator pump died, yet the pump supplying the solar panels continued, temperature would rise until something melts. All the materials involved (pex, EPDM, cpvc, the pumps) have upper temperature limits around 170F to 200F, and safety dictates that I bleed off heat by several methods in case one fails. The radiators in the house heating ducts are one method, the 150 gallon heat exchanger tank with pex is a second. If you can think of others please let me know. For a third method, maybe I can use a 150 gallon hot tub in my house as another heat sink. Would a standard controller like Reefkeeper Lite turn on a pump to the hot tub when a thermometer in the reservoir hits a certain limit like 140F? If I find that the 150 gallon heat exchanger is too small I could put a 1,000 foot coil of pex right in the big tank as an additional heat exchanger but that would be hard to do aesthetically. It could be hidden by rocks but seems like a lot of work. And my gut feeling is that 4,000 gph of skimmer water flowing around 1,000 feet of pex in the heat exchanging system is sufficient. If I'm wrong, a powerhead in there would help. I'd rather flow hot fresh water through the pex than salt water but maybe another backup system would be to pump tank water through a pex coil in the heat exchanger and back to the tank. I'm not crazy about this idea because it would need a cloggable inlet screen and organic matter could grow inside the 1/2" pex tubing. So I'd rather stick with fresh water inside the tube. Another safety feature would be to use a temperature switch to turn off the pump supplying the collector panels if the reservoirs get too hot. I hope a standard aquarium controller can handle that. But then that would cause a temperature spike in the solar panels. Without a cool water supply the panel temps go sky high. I'll drill an air hole in the bottom and top of each panel so hot air can exit, but it will still get very hot. Rob, I am thinking that the tank with 1,000-2,000 feet of pex is an immersion heater, please let me know if you're suggesting something else. I'm reluctant to use any other energy source for the immersion heater because that would kind of defeat the purpose of collecting all that heat from the sun for just $20 a month of pump electricity. You're right that I could use the solar water for my house water supply, but this solar collector is an open (non pressurized) system. To get it back up to 40 p.s.i. to supply my house I'd need to get it into a pressure tank, which involves some tricky plumbing. But there's still an easy way to heat my shower water. I can put another coil of pex in the hot water reservoir and run a line of house water through this before it feeds into the two house water heaters. I'm guessing that instead of supplying 55F inlet water to the water heaters, this pre-heater might supply them with 90F water. It would reduce the electric consumption of the water heaters by about 60%. I think I remember reading somewhere that a third of house energy use is hot water, so this would save me maybe $75-100 a month on the electric bill. It's also a failproof task to make two connections and hook a coil of water into my domestic hot water supply. And a final point. I am fortunate to be on a well and septic because I only pay $15 a month in well pump electricity and don't pay a municipality one cent per gallon for sewage treatment. In the summer I turn a couple of valves and push cold 55F well water through the heat exchangers to cool the tank and through the radiators to cool the house. After this cold water absorbs heat from the tank and house, it might rise to 70-75F, and then it goes outside to water the garden so more cold water can enter the system. I couldn't afford to use this much water if I lived in the city, but on a well it is no problem and it should cut my A/C bill by quite a bit. It's not like I'd be wasting water because the garden water just percolates down through the ground to my well again.

That will be a beautiful tank when the zoas have had some time to fill in the spaces.

CoralHind and DuffyGeos, thanks for asking about updates. So much has happened in the past year. And what a shot of adrenaline it was to see my first MACNA show in D.C. this fall with all of my WAMAS friends. Wow, where do I start? After the glass installation party I decided to expand the size of the greenhouse (as if it wasn't big enough already) which has taken a whole 'nother year. Now the big tank is cycled and has a lot of nice rocks in it thanks to Justin of Avast. Does anyone have any frags to trade so I can start growing the reef? If so, skip to the last paragraph. I saw Avast's production facility near Front Royal and am amazed at what a high end manufacturing facility they run. I dug a geothermal cooling system last summer but then decided to put the smaller tanks on a shelf lined with rubber sheet and use freshwater for cooling instead. It worked well in trials this summer but I have yet to do it for the whole greenhouse. Now that cold weather is upon us I have decided to build a long overdue rooftop solar water collector, which is what this post is about, mostly. The largest part of my roof faces due south and is right above the greenhouse, so I got lucky. Plus the 6:12 pitch allows me to put the water heating panels right on the roof without reinforcing raised panels to withstand high winds. That's being lucky twice! I've been thinking for years about how to do a large cheap solar water heater, so try to suffer through the next short paragraph regarding costs. I decided to make my collector panels the same size as the 4'x12' and the 4'x16' twinwall polycarbonate sheets which are used in greenhouses and sunrooms. With that cover glazing at $1.50/square foot (s.f.), I'm laying 1/2" R-max (30 cents/s.f.) on the existing roof for heat protection, and then a horizontal run of corrugated polycarbonate ($1.00/s.f.), and finally a roll of EPDM rubber roofing liner (40 cents/s.f.) as the black sun absorber. I should add another .30 cents per foot for piping, pressure treated 2x6's for the panel sides and for fastening screws. The whole collector is about 750 square feet which cost about $2,500 and should collect 1,000 BTUs per square foot per day. That's about 750,000 BTUs/ day for the whole collector. OK, that's it on the math. That wasn't too bad, was it? Handling the hot water is another matter. The greenhouse addition has a basement and I'm putting two steel 275 gallon used oil tanks on the ground floor, lined with EPDM rubber. The water coming off the collector will be very hot so I need steel tanks and EPDM to handle the heat. The hot water from those tanks gets pumped under the 3,500 gallon tank and under the greenhouse floor through high temp tubing (the stuff for radiant floor heating). The 2x4 joists under the tank make natural heat traps and will warm the bottom of the tank. Other pumps send the hot water through 150,000 BTU heat exchangers (simple $130 radiators from ebay) that I'm installing in my main furnace duct. I need to leave the furnace fan running all winter to bleed enough heat off the water and get it under 150F so CPVC pipe can handle the rest of the flow. OK, that's it on the solar collector. Now back to the fun part. Regarding frags, I need to start with hardy, cheap corals (Bali green slimer, sinularia, leathers, gorgos, zoas) and I'm happy to buy big cuttings as well as trade for any sized frag. I have a contact where I can get any fish imaginable for frag trading. I can't even guess how many frags I need to start with to fill the big part of the tank which is 240 cubic feet. Maybe 1,000?

In my experience, the carpet in these circumstances never really dries out, expecially if it is on a wood floor, and it smells bad for a long time while the jute backing of the carpet rots. You're in the basement so probably have a concrete floor, which is better. But my two cents is also to jack up the tank, move it, then put it back over plain concrete and keep extra carpet whenever you need to. But in 5 years when you move the tank, the carpet will be of two different colors. The extra carpet will look new and will not match the worn color of your 5 year old carpet. This will also leave unsightly loose ends to the carpet in the meantime. You could pick up 15 square feet of floor tile from home depot and make a tile pad for the tank. That way when you change things in a few years you have the option of putting in a new carpet piece, or leaving the tile pad for something else.

Everyone starts with beginner questions. And everyone has done something stupid on their tank. So ask away.

If it eats aiptasia, find a mate and breed it. You'll make a fortune!

Nice looking babies.

AlanM and WilRams, It would be nice to nail down if oxybenzone is the harmful agent or not. A biodegradeable sunscreen is a great idea, getting scammed by another company that offers fake products to help the reef is not a great idea.

good points. But that raises another question, if the tripod has some kind of flipping or extension mechanism to be moved over the water, it should get exactly 90 degrees to the water and avoid glare. So maybe I'm wrong about that, and a lookdown box is helpful because even a tripod doesn't get the exact 90 degrees to avoid glare. I'll look up the prices of Gitzo.

Hey friends, I have a Nikon D100 which is a digital slr, with a 105mm macro lens, the nikkor micro 2.8. It has built in image stabilization but I'll use a tripod anyway. Who makes a good tripod? Does anybody else use Nikon and the macro lens? I know the D100 is an old model. I also need tips on how to take good pictures but there will be time for that later. Thanks

Great quality on the video. I'm sure you were in a hurry.

Do we have a good website builder in the club?

In the wild these beautiful creatures live for 150 years. If you're an expert aquarist it will live for 5 years. I'm sorry to say, but it just isn't fair to take 145 years off their live because it's pretty. Leave it in the wild to enjoy the life it deserves. Especially the brightly colored ones. They are very rare on the reef now. The vast majority of them quickly die. Why should we push them into oblivion? Everyone has had the same thoughts as you. Colored anemones are almost too beautiful to resist. But please resist them. There is nothing wrong with red bubble tips, they have great color and are very sustainable. Same with a cousin of the carpet anemone, the maxi mini carpet Stochydactylum tapedum (sp). They have extremely nice colors and can be propagated by slicing them in half just like a ricordea florida. I don't know if anyone is actually propagating them, but for the sake of the wild stock, they look like good candidates for propagation. I'm not trying to rain on your parade, I'm just letting you know the reality of keeping carpet anemones. There are easier ways to learn lessons than by killing these beauties. Wait until someone learns to raise the planuae through sexual reproduction, then buy all the little babies that you want. If you make the decision to buy one now, nobody will start hating on you, because we all love their color. But please don't learn a lesson the hard way.

I hope it doesn't get removed and I hope your friend gets the EPA to classify CO2 as a toxic substance. Good luck.

Maybe they walked barefoot on some of the zoas that had fallen to the floor and broken up. That seems more likely.

I think you've got a way to at least make enough money to pay for your hobby. Which is saying a lot, given how much most people spend. I haven't used Rod's predator blend and I have nothing against the frozen food preparations. But I see those 3 oz frozen packages for something like $8 and do a little math in my head and get to $45 a pound for fish. I think if you're trying to turn a profit you could put shrimp or salmon chunks in the anems and the whole pieces should be taken with little waste. I think whole pieces of shrimp or salmon are more like $4 per pound than $45. That kind of thing might not matter if you were feeding a 30 gallon reef tank for fun, but if you're trying to be profitable I think you can't go wrong with real shrimp and other alternative whole fish for variety. That's just my two cents worth.

I'll buy one of the real books when it comes out. I'm not into reading e books so much because i prefer to keep my books for future references.

Faerieanette, It is sad to hear of your medical hardship and that it forces you to sell your tank and house. If I were in the buying phase I would seriously consider your nice setup. I wish you the best of luck and an end to whatever hardship has currently affected your life. Hopefully you can give the club a positive update at some point in the future.

You came to the right place. People in Wamas are very friendly and helpful.

Good job. If you've gotten them to 14 days you're past the hardest part. Did you see the Roger Williams Univ. exhibit at MACNA? They had 21 day old clownfish larvae in their modular larval rearing system.

Valeria, every time I looked around I saw you or your brother. Both of you did a great job. I saw firsthand how much work the WAMAS executives put in and how exhausted they were from going non-stop for the 4 days. They are an amazing group of hobbyists.

There were so many interesting exhibits that I didn't realize I walked several miles a day.

I can help you Thursday from noon to 4 p.m. Let me know if you still need help.