icecool2

The AFCI does go in your circuit box, but you can do it yourself if you feel comfortable. You just turn off the power to the panel, pop off the existing breaker, pop on the AFCI, attach a couple of wires and you're done.

Definitely anything that comes into contact with water should be on one. You should also consider getting an arc fault interrupter on the same line. If something sparks, but doesn't actually cause a ground fault, you want that clamped down.

The cord you can find at any home store or electronics retailer, although they'll charge you a lot for it. The IEC connector is going to be harder to find. You can try asking at a home store, but I don't think they carry them. Digikey is a good source for both: Connector ($0.70): http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/703W-00%2F04/Q212-ND/245553 Cord ($3.18): http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/AC30UNA/993-1039-ND/2384475

They are 100% carnivorous. They are effective at cleaning up meaty scraps that may wind up in your sump. If that isn't likely to happen, they will starve. You can ID a whelk most easily by its eye. If you can see a well-defined eyeball, it is NOT a whelk. If you just see the dot of the eye, it is a whelk. Now, keep in mind that nassarius vibex is a whelk species, but it very welcome in our tanks.

24x12x24" = about 28 gallons. (times 2)

I like this better.

I'd say leave the inhabitant level where it us for now until the tank is settled at the school for a while. You can get away with one or two more small fish. As for the pH, don't stress about it. It will go up and down during the day and day by day. Here's a trick for your class to play with...(might not work as well in a school) 1. Measure the pH of the tank 2. Open a window for 45 minutes or so. 3. Measure the pH again. Assuming it works like in a house, the pH will go up. Has to do with oxygen exchange and such. Origami would be able to talk more about the whys of this I'm sure.

I'd move both of the top-off tanks to the bottom shelf (unless they are gravity feed). That would give you the space on the center shelf for a QT tank. Chiller on the top might be a problem with heat rise. Do you have a fan in that area?

Lucky you didn't put them in the tank early. QT should be 8 weeks to allow the full life-cycle of a lot of these parasites. Have you thought of trying hypo-salinity instead of copper?

They aren't toooo "bad" per se. They can be though. The problem with whelks is that they can bore into the shells of your other snails and eat them. I used to just toss them in my sump to keep it clean.

Definitely a whelk.

The fan on mine is 19dBa and I really can't even tell it is running. With the other ambient sounds of the tank, you need to get close to hear the fan. At 47CFM, with two fans, you are right around 210W. If you can get to around 55CFM, you should be good. That's around 270W. Keep in mind, these are rough calcs.

OK, good Two fans gets you about 170W. What's the CFM of the 140mm?

With the room at 70F and with 38.4CFM, you'll get about 97W of dissipation. Even if you aren't running all of the LEDs at the same time, that can't support your 100W chip alone. That being said, you always design for the worst case (all on at 100%) and that gives you 204W of needed dissipation. Testing slowly isn't really a good approach when you know going in that you have a problem. You essentially can run the LEDs at max of 50% with this setup. You could save yourself money and get lower power LEDs since you can't get the full benefit of the ones you are using. Not trying to argue, just making sure you are getting your money's worth.

I did a quick calculation and this heatsink won't cut it with a fan that size. Where you stand right now, assuming 30CFM from the fan, room temp of 80F, temp of the LEDs at 100C and based on the dimensions of the heatsink, you can get 84W of heat dissipation. Double the number of fans and you get 140W of dissipation. You need to boost the number of fans, size of the fan or airflow of the fan big time for that heatsink to work. EDIT: a 15" heatsink (same profile), with three 30 CFM fans will get you 283W of dissipation. This all also assumes you run at 100% with the LEDs which requires ~200W of dissipation.

^- I was thinking of the same thing when I read the post title. I think they are easy to keep with the exception of their need to be constantly swimming. Rectangular tanks are generally not going to work since they take wide turns. Round tanks don't give them enough swimming room. In both cases they wind up banging up their faces pretty badly.

My clown is named Jaws and for good reason. She's a little monster. She goes right for the webbing between my fingers. I've since trained her to stop. If you flick towards them every time they come near your hand they learn (VERY slowly) to stop doing that.

Until my move when they died for other reasons, I had two clams under my LEDs with no trouble at all. They were both at the bottom of my 75g. The derasa grew about 3.5" in a year and a half or so and the crocea grew maybe half an inch in 6 months. I didn't do anything special acclimation wise. They shifted around for a while until they were happy.

Looking great! Those ceriths will spread out and spend a lot of time under the sand too. I don't personally mind the look of them there, but I know what you mean. Maybe try a sand sifting cucumber or something like that. At least there is only one thing on the sand then.

I installed a new light at my mother in laws house in her laundry room. I took down the old light and discovered that the power for half of the outlets in all 3 bedrooms were T'd off of the light fixture. Unbelievable that an electrician at some point actually thought that was OK.

I thought I would share this video with everyone. I'm still going through my pictures from Hawaii (I have some snorkel photos to share), but I wanted to get this video up now. We decided to stop by Laniakea Beach on Oahu's north shore and see if we could see anything cool. This beach is also known as "Turtle beach". There were two huge sea turtles there when we stopped by, LUCKY US! I took a video of one coming ashore to rest. I'll try and upload the HD version when I get home.

I hope your neighbor doesn't have a 1000W MH fixture hooked to the outlet you're paying for!

I do for the 75g, but it wasn't hooked to the 24g. Could have been a power problem, but none of the clocks were off and everything was working on the tank when we got home.

I wanted to pass the sea hare on to someone else in the club, but the move was quickly followed by a vacation and it just didn't happen. Expensive lesson. My 75g pretty much runs on autopilot once it is setup, so maintenance really isn't a problem. I'll get it back up and running and replace what I lost.

I think it was the sea hare too. I can't say for sure though. It was very healthy when I left, but there wasn't a lot of food in that tank for him. In other news, my wife is a very smart woman. She said, "Why not just setup the 75g tank while we live here and sell it before we move again?" Why didn't I think of that?!