AlanM

That picture is awesome, but it honestly looks even better in person. Brighter. The colors are not showing as well in that picture as in real life.

yummy.

Most here will tell you not to get a hippo tang. Look up banggai cardinals and pajama cardinals and various types of gobies. If you have a good lid you could add in firefish or a small wrasse.

Fw ich is not the same thing. If you just let it dry out, that is enough. No need to sterilize it, and any cleaning residue will do more harm than good.

There ya go. With mine I'd get green goo for a while with nice looking big bubbles at the top of the cup, go away for a few hours, and come back to see piles of white foam filling the locker all of a sudden. No idea what changed, but something did. Part of my problem was in not knowing what a correctly dialed in skimmer was supposed to look like before it started pulling skimmate out. The guys I consulted had done it before and were able to tell me. In Rob's case he showed me the extreme amount of solid doody his CS1 had pulled out in the last month or so and how to set the foam level right after cleaning out the body of the skimmer.

Dunno. It was just a little one with barbs about the same size as the interior dimension of the tubing and of the feed fitting. I'm not controlling the recirc pump, by the way. I'm controlling the feed pump. You need a little powerhead like an MJ400 or MJ600 pushing water into it. In my case the MJ600 by itself was too much so the Tee and valve help divert some of the flow. It could just be that both of us have very little organics. I have basically the same bioload as you with two conchs and three turbo snails. Not a ton.

Nice. Actually, I kind of guess how much salty water was removed by the skimmer overflowing and filling up my skimmate locker and toss a little powder in to "saltify" the water that was added by the ATO to replace the stuff that the skimmer took out. I'd have to be wrong for a really long time to move the number on my refractometer very much I guess.

I've grown bio films in a lab. The population sometimes changes based upon temperature. Some only live in a narrow range. The "cold water" folks are probably guessing that the bacteria or micro-whatevers that like 68 degree water are different from the ones at 78 in their tank. Like you, I bet there's no difference and if there is, does it really matter? The 40 mile people are probably the ones that are afraid to get a little bit of people generated doodoo in their tank. They're also surely not ones to start their cycle by peeing in it, but depending on what you drank I think that's cheaper than store-bought ammonia.

No. I didn't hear from them on the forums and never emailed them about it. I got some advice from YHSublime and zygote2k and BowieReefer. I ended up with the feed pump going to a Tee with a piece of tube facing down and then to a small ball valve supplied by Avast with the skimmer and then to the input barb on the bottom. I valved it way way down with the output effluent valve wide open so that the foam only came up to the top of the sticker in the picture, then I closed the valve for water coming out until the foam raised up to just where it would start to overflow with the collection cup off. Then I put the cup back on. A surprisingly small amount of water is going through the skimmer, but I don't have a good point of reference for how much is a lot or a little for a recirc venturi skimmer. I haven't measured how much goes through, but it's just a trickle. It's collecting some crud now. I think I just don't have that much crud to collect because I'm feeding very little at the moment. Just enough to keep the bacteria happy, basically. And now enough to keep a cute pink predatory crab who now lives in my sump and is named "crabby" by my two year old.

I guess I will have to get way more careful in the future. At the moment if I want to raise it a smidge I toss a little bit of salt mix into the sump under the drains where they enter the sump and count on it to dissolve it and mix it in.

I don't know all the details about what Robert does, but his was the first home reef tank I saw in person and it was so pretty I bent his ear for a while asking questions. Some things that he does that most people, including me, will find hard to do are: - almost entirely keeps his hands out of the water. - uses a really big downdraft skimmer downstairs with most of the rock in his system in the sump. - injects bubbles on purpose from time to time into his return lines to keep the coral on their toes - feeds on a very regular schedule - doesn't add anything to the tank for years, preferring to let it all grow

We are getting rid of some APC AP7901 rackmount network switched PDU's. They have a web-based interface which lets you control each outlet and switch them off singly or in groups and can also report on amperage on each outlet. I'm wondering if anyone has used these to control stuff on your tank. It would be a step up from DJ power strips and they're available on ebay for around $100 or less. The web interface is not super great, but it would be possible to wrap an SNMP client into a nice PHP webpage or something on your desktop on the network and be able to turn outlets on and off pretty easily. What do folks think?

The white PVC I get from Lowes is always all beat up like that. Like someone just rolls it around on the asphalt behind the store before putting it on the shelves. Which it turns out is pretty much what they do with it. I got a box of fittings from FlexPVC a while ago which were all good, but never got pipe from them.

Looks fine to me now too.

I used Dr Tims. Not sure if it worked or not. I had high nitrite for about two weeks before it started dropping. Took a month before it was all through and up to the point where it could handle 4ppm of ammonia per day. I am waiting another couple of months while adding as much microfauna I can get my hands on before putting in fish I have to feed. I will probably be visiting Marine Scene in Herndon to get some sand from them because they apparently have a bin that they constantly add live Florida stuff from the gulf into.

How is the image quality for that camera? I've been kind of looking for one for a while, but the ones I can afford all look cruddy.

Sounds good, but puratek.com looks thoroughly hacked to me. My browser shows lots of nonsense about casinos before their CMS content. Not a good sign for a "cloud" aquarium controller company.

clean up crew

Reading chucelli's posts about LEDs on reef central is what directed me to WAMAS. I was hunting for more pictures of his tank and discovered he was lodal and in this club. His tank is beautiful.

Cute crab from Rob's sump container of grunge. Now that's what I call a redbug.

Was not a serious response. I actually have no idea how you'd quarantine all these fish that need lots of room.

I'm not sure what the Apex version of the ATO Deluxe would do. My deluxe has the low water sensor going right into the black box on the back of the peristaltic pump which also has power going to it. Does the Apex version of the Deluxe have the sensor going to a separate small switch like the skimmate locker has and just has a power plug going to the peristaltic pump which you'd plug into the EB8?

A separate 100 gallon tank for a minimum of 8 weeks for each fish on your list is what I'd recommend. You probably have room in your house and engagement for 9 more 100 gallon tanks, I'd guess. 8)

I do have an Apex, but don't have a camera, so I can't help much aside from those instructions Coral Hind already posted.

I am still following my plan of not adding fish for at least 90 days, but Rob just dropped a ton of life on me today. I reconfigured my sump, and put the skimmer, and reactors in an upper 20L tank drilled for a glassholes box (which I kind of hate because it is so noisy and will cap off and put in a herbie or something). That gave me a bunch of room in the sump for a fuge, so Rob (zygote2k) gave me his box full of deep sand bed, weird sponges, a ton of feather dusters, a big pink crab of some sort, apparetly some fire worms and a pistol shrimp. Probably other stuff in there too. i dumped some of the stuff rattling around in the bottom of the bin I brought it homw with into the main tank too. Ended up being kind of a lot of little tubeworms/feather dusters. Fun stuff. Thanks Rob!