AlanM

That's a lotta bulkheads! OK. I'll use the normal stuff. Hadn't thought about roughing up the pipe, but I guess with a solvent weld cement like that a little roughness would increase the surface area and give a better bond. BTW, I don't know why no one ever told me about the PVC cutter in the past picture. It's super easy to cut even 2" PVC one handed with that thing instead of using a chopsaw or hack saw.

I don't know how far you want to go with this, but the Meanwell LDD's only cost about $6 each and can do 15 LEDs each if you use a 48V power supply. They are PWM dimmable. You can get an Arduino Uno (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11224) and a separate PWM shield (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/10615) to have 16 channels of dimming and maybe do a sun-up-sun-down effect.

Yep. S4 sounds like it's a great one. I prefer HTC and have rooted all of mine so far and run Cyanogen mod, but I think I will keep this HTC One stock. The Samsung S4 v HTC One thing might be one of personal preference. Do you like the UI that Samsung puts over android better or do you like HTC Sense better? I wish Sense 5 exposed more of the options that I got used to on Cyanogen (with it's host of customization for vibrate, ring, notification, etc), and I have a couple of problems with the phone so far. Google navigate uses the A2DP bluetooth protocol to give voice directions instead of HFP, so in my car I have to have the audio source set to bluetooth instead of FM in order to hear the directions). That might be a google thing, and not an HTC thing, though. Facebook and maybe other apps seems to do auto-correct on the keyboard widget different from other apps. It detects if you tap on the left or right side of the letter, and automatically selects the letter to the left or right in the autocorrect instead of automatically selecting the one you actually typed. This causes me to be unable to type the word "I" in a comment even if you picked "i" and "i" popped up to show that you selected it, because when you hit space it replaces it with the "u" that it thought I might have meant to type. Very frustrating. Some apps don't do this, by the way, so it's interesting that individual apps can override the way that auto-correct works. The lock screen and BlinkFeed give current weather, which I find less useful than daily forecast. I can observe current weather myself, but I can't predict what will happen in the future without NWS data. There doesn't seem to be a way to change the interface to show forecast instead of current conditions.

I like it. I assume he's using the narrow optics to get more power when at the more tilt-y angles in the front and the back so it will penetrate further and also to keep the light confined to where he wants it to go. Could have you bent the C-channels lengthwise as well so that you could have it be double-focusing? 8) Or build one of these with LEDs along the strips Which we have installed on one of our instruments at work. There are 17 tiny crystals on each bendable strip of metal. Then each strip can be turned independently, so it focuses in two directions in real time.

I cut them off to look at the joints and it looks like they had about 1/4 inch of glued depth, so maybe they would have held, but I will feel better with them redone anyway

Seems like either would do the apex well. The apex app is just a wrapper around a web browser. I got an HTC one last week, and it is by far the best one I've had. It has some unique neat things like very good low light photos and blinkfeed which I like and also Google zoes and video highlights to see another cool thing it does. Also it's machined from a piece of aluminum so it has no flex at all..feels really solid. Look up the anandtech review of them both. Very comprehensive.

Right, but then it would have pipe in it, so I wouldn't want to cut it or I'd lose the pipe too. 8) I guess unless I was careful and cut around the outside...

They're normal ABS bulkheads from BRS, I think. I got them from QuantumReefs. They just look like stainless in picture 2, I think. They're going into a 1-1/2" Sanitary DWV tee with a Street-1-1/2" NPT adapter on top and a 1-1/2" PVC cap on top of that. On one of them I drilled and tapped for a 3/8" NPT to 3/8" Murlok fitting for a Durso vent. That one is going to have a bit of tube in it which will bend over and go into the overflow box so that the vent gets filled with water and converts that drain into a siphon which will flush the overflow box if the level gets too high. Then I screwed it all together with teflon paste to try to get it to seal and try to leave a bit of lubrication so that if I ever need to take it off I won't break the back of my tank or the plumbing with the wrench. I did the quarter turn thing. I was optimistic until I started letting them go and they kept coming out unless I really held them. Thanks. The ABS that was exposed from the push-out stayed gummy for a while. I could feel it on the inside from where it pushed out and I was able to put my fingernail in it for a couple of hours afterwards. Maybe I shouldn't have used the cleaner because it's a solvent too, and might have softened it. One other thing I should mention is that I cut off about 1/2" of the depth of that bulkhead so I could get the fittings to take up a bit less room. I figured about 1/2" of contact area would be plenty since it's not holding pressure, but since these fittings are tapered along the depth so that it gets nice and tight when you put it in maybe I didn't leave enough material to grip the pipe while the cement dried so the taper in the bulkhead just shoved these out. It's possible that these would hold water, but I think I'll not risk it and will just get 4 new ones and new fittings and try it all again. This time I'll put the PVC into the bulkheads first and clamp them overnight. Maybe I also won't shave off the back of the bulkhead.

Rob, it's a BeanAnimal overflow. I know 1.5" is big, but that's what the design recommends, and I'm trying not to deviate too much at least for the first attempt to get it to run correctly. I'm already putting in a nearly horizontal run over to my sump area, which isn't recommended, and which may cause the full siphon drain to vapor lock and never start. The open channel one exposed to air (with the murlok fitting in the top) can be quiet if the diameter is large which keeps the water as a film flowing down the outside. The threaded caps are for cleanout and the sanitary Tees (which don't seem available in sizes less than 1.5") are to help the water be quiet when it's making the turn to go down. There's pretty quiet, and then there's silent. I'm going for silent and maybe getting more complicated and using larger pipes than "pretty quiet" would require. We'll see if it works or not as I only have what the BeanAnimal boosters say to go by, having not done one myself before and not knowing enough about finite element simulations to do the calculations myself to see if it should work. 8) I've seen 7-8 tanks now in person and most of them range from pretty quiet to kinda loud, by my ear. The only really quiet one I saw was behind a wall.

Thanks. The near one in the last pic was regular cement and it seemed to push out about the same as the green stuff. I have that stuff too, thanks. I glued them all now, though, so I don't have another one to try it on... It seemed like this must be what everyone who doesn't use schedule 80 bulkheads does, so I figured there should be lots of successful users.

I glued 1" PVC into my 1" ABS bulkheads. I used the special green transition cement which is designed to go from ABS to PVC, so I thought it would work out well. First, I used the clear all purpose cleaner that says it's for ABS, PVC and other stuff. Then about a minute later I put the green stuff on the pipe and the bulkhead and shoved it in and counted to 100. As soon as I let go it pushed it way out. Like 1/4" out. I tried holding the next one for 2 minutes, but it pushed that one out too. What gives? The last one I tried using regular PVC cement, but it pushed out too after being held for 2 minutes. These are only gripping now by about 1/4" of meat, so I'm probably going to cut it all out and start over with new bulkheads, but what do people do to glue in their ABS bulkheads since the product that is supposedly designed for it doesn't seem to work well? The ABS seems to stay soft for a really long time. Should I put them in and clamp them for a while to get them to stick?

We are going on a train ride with my 4 year old's classmates that morning, but if we can swing by at 1 I will do it.

That canopy really is cool. It looks so much like you grabbed a chunk of concrete and decided to hang it above your super fragile looking rimless tank. Just a really nice contrast of texture, and adds some drama and danger to the display. Smasher vs breakable with gravity sure to win some day, stone vs water. I like it a lot.

I am having trouble sending pm on my fancy new phone browser, but I can come and help and maybe bring a 4yo supervisor with me.

I love this feeder and the video and if my wife allows me to raise baby brine shrimp I'm going to have one in my tank. I'm putting bookshelves around the tank, so maybe I can put a false front of books on it and hide it somehow. Wonder if I could do that with a black worm farm too and feed the worm farm our old Trader Joes bags, hmmm. Like Huly said about Pez in a different thread, I love how mandarins look and low they move around. They are definitely one of the fish that I'd love to be able to keep, but I don't want to do it if it's not going to have fun in my tank.

A few lfs have Nutramar Ova, which mandarins supposedly like too.

I should also mention that BRK, which has a reputation for always having lots of fittings and plumbing stuff including pre-made manifolds, also keeps 1-1/2" and 2" in stock. Since most of the club lives in VA, this is probably a better solution than Lowes for them.

So add Lowes to the local sources that carry Spaflex. At least the 1-1/2" stuff. They'd had a label for it on the shelf forever, but they only had a spool of braided clear PVC tubing in that spot. Sunday I was there getting something else, and I saw a couple guys working in the plumbing section. I brought them over and pointed to it and asked if they intended to carry 1-1/2" spaflex, because the stuff on that spool wasn't it. They looked around on the upper shelves, found the box that had the right number on it, schlepped the big stairs over, and voila, a big box of spaflex. Nice. Now at least the Gaithersburg Lowes has it on the shelf.

Some progress. I got the stand puttied, sanded, and painted. Also painted the back of the tank and have most of my LEDs mounted on the heatsink. I ran out of 4-40 screws and washers, so waiting for more from McMaster now. It's interesting how the front panel of the tank is "low iron" glass and it looks much less green than the sides when you're looking at the wall through the glass.

Yep. Box was dented, but this box was inside another box. I remember feeling that LEDGroupBuy packed it really well, so it's possible this happened when someone at my house knocked it over. It's a pretty heavy thing and could build some momentum when falling.

Mling, He uses newly hatched brine babies (napulii) which still have the teensy droplet of oil "yolk" which is great for fish. In one of the threads here he posted a pic of the cool hatchery that he uses which takes advantage of the babies attraction to light to separate them from the unhatched eggs.

So you're basically raising your fish on paper bags. Are those paper bags organic, locally sourced, and sustainably harvested? 8)

I'm doing three groupings about like this: They will all get 60 degree lenses. Above the top left LED you can see the big dent in the heatsink. Thank you, UPS. It has apparently been like this for a while because it has taken me a while to open the box and look carefully. I didn't notice it until probably too late to make a claim. Oh well. I'll put that in the back.

Ok, great. Yesterday I pulled wire to the tank location from the basement sump area for LED power (I am keeping the power supply in the basement because its fan is so loud), Tunze power, Tunze-Apex VDM signal, and Cat5e to the sump area, so I'm getting there.

OK, so that's backwards from how Scott says it works. I read the info on the Apex webpage, and that's what they say as well, which makes it sound like you need two different EB8's in order to get redundancy. One to report the outage, and another to stay up because it's plugged in to the UPS. This does seem to be what they describe here: http://www.neptunesystems.com/products/apex-controllers/apex-controller-system/ It's possible that this has changed now, though, because in the Comprehensive Reference Manual it says: There are two power sources available to the base module – via the EB8 and via a 12v adapter. Beginning with release 4.03, a new option has been added, enabling the base module to detect a power failure on the 12v port in addition to the EB8 AquaBus port. You can read more about this feature and how to provide uninterrupted power to your controller in the FAQ section at the back of this document. The FAQ question is on page 112 of that document.