AlanM

I have the same unit. I'm also getting about 4 to 1. Nature of the thing. If you want you can put the waste water into your clothes washer. You can increase the temp of the incoming water by getting a long coil of tube for input to the RO/DI and dropping it into a bucket full of water with an old aquarium heater keeping the water at 80 or so. Then you can even use the waste water from the RO/DI to rinse out the bucket so it doesn't get gross. Someone here suggested this scheme to me, and it's working great. I'm not convinced that any house built since the 70s has significant lead and heavy metals in the hot water output that the RO/DI can't remove. If it's coming out at 0 TDS, it's 0, no matter what went in, I'd think. Water heaters are also usually glass lined, at this point. Maybe it's the contribution of the sacrificial anode to the water that people worry about?

That pressure vessel looks crazy.

I thought you weren't really supposed to be able to directly compare LED PAR numbers with MH PAR numbers because of the way that LEDs emit light not being as easily detectable by PAR meters, so the LED's always read artificially low.

Little thread hijack here. Rob, I'm getting ready to set up a tank in the near future, but you've obviously seen lots of them. How often do you have to mess with bulkheads like that? Does it make a difference if they're installed correctly? Was considering setting something up where I'd have little hope of getting access to the inside part of the bulkhead and was going to just try really hard to get it right so I wouldn't have to mess within ever.

Here's an example of a tank using Tampa Bay Saltwater live rock. The guy even went from Texas to Tampa to go diving with Richard from TBS to get it. Fun stuff. They collected it during the day, packed it and brought it to the airport that night, and picked it up from the cargo area in Texas the next morning. Neat. Months later he's still finding stuff that he didn't know he had (including a mantis, yikes). http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showpost.php?p=20706252&postcount=466

Yes, my TDS was 120 going in to the canister. I disconnected the dual sensing line and dropped it into some tap before I started just to see. It seems quiet today. I have soaked three times in tap for an hour each time with a maxijet 600 going in the bucket. Now doing a soak overnight in ro/di and will just let it air dry after that for a while.

And if anyone says that they haven't seen the BRS color changing resin ever change color for them, here ya go. It was entirely blue when I installed it yesterday, and it's changing from the bottom up. Distressingly fast, actually. 6-9 TDS coming out of the RO which seems reasonably good, 0 TDS coming out of the DI. I've probably made about 50 gallons total so far. Hmm. Also, the RO stage, it seems, makes a terrible humming noise all the time. If I open up the flush valve I can get it to stop briefly, but it always comes back. Sometimes it goes away if I whack it too. Or move it around. Maybe it's the little flow limiter coming out of the RO waste that does it? I can hear it throughout the house because I have the thing screwed into the wall and it resonates. Any idea how to get rid of the noise for good?

Here is the after picture of the rocks. Cat is curious.

Thanks, will do.

OK. The recipe I found for resurrecting old rock on RC said to make the acid with RO/DI and soak and rinse in RO/DI too. I'll start using tap and rinse later. Will make it a lot easier. I have a jug of prime that I'll pour in for the first soak. Prime is stinky, though. The wife will wonder what I'm up to.

Wish I had a before picture. I took the rock out after about an hour when it had stopped fizzing and dumped the water under my deck to let the groundhogs deal with it. I've started taking a bunch of pictures to document things, but only started after I did the bleach on the rock. I can describe what it looked like before. It had been sitting out dry in a bucket for a few years. The bottom parts of the rocks were kind of dark tea colored with lots of what looked like little dried worms growing on them. The top parts of the rock had a variegated green sheet which I could pick off with my fingernail of what looked like dried algae. I'll take after pics tonight. There's still some dark staining left on the underparts of some of the rock. Some of it was very porous to start with and now it's pretty light and fragile, but really nice looking. Very white and clean. Still smells a little like HCl even after rinsing like crazy. Since your a chemistry kind of guy, will the HCl evaporate like bleach? I'm making RO/DI rapidly and plan to do a few rounds of soak and dump before I start trying to use this stuff anyway. Then I'll put it in a can with a heater, powerhead, some Petsmart saltwater mix (topfin brand, I think? Pretty cheap stuff), and a bacteria culture and add ammonia to start enlivening it until I get a tank set up.

Today I used 20 gallons of my new RO/DI water with 1.5 gallons of muriatic acid to nuke the old rock I had bleached last week. Here are the pictures of just after putting the rock in and 5 minutes later. The calcium in the rock seems to neutralize the acid very quickly since the foam settled down fast. Will leave it in there until later this afternoon.

Set up dyndns and an apex and a webcam so you can see tank stats from Phuket? Put a couple moisture sensors on the floor feeding info into apex and texting you and your reef buddy to come drink a beer and please mop while you're there.

So I'm in bidness. Took advantage of some black friday sales at BRS and Avast and Quantum Reefs and started buying stuff. Hooked up my first saltwater tank related thing. An RO/DI unit. When I did the plumbing for a basement bathroom I added an additional outlet with a 3/8 shutoff for an RO/DI and I hooked it up today. Fun. Filling up a brute with water so I can acid bathe some old rock in it which I've already bleached.

Are the pipes right up against the back of the tank glass? A shadowbox would be very cool instead of black on the back if you have room between the back and the pipes. http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1868825&highlight=shadowbox If I was doing an in-wall one I'd for sure be putting a shadow box behind it. 8)

Are there ever WAMAS field trips out to the eastern shore to this place?

Ah, missed that. Thanks.

I was figuring that wasn't egg-crate because that would make them enormous. I thought it was that plastic fabric stuff that's used to make yarn cozies for kleenex boxes, but that's usually white, not green, so I asked.

Wow. How active are they at waving their arms around and what's the diameter of the ones in those pictures?

Yikes. I just received my RO/DI and float valve yesterday and was going to install it in my trash can today. Good thing for me to read right now.

Is the back of the couch up against the wall beneath the tank or is there space? Maybe put a nice shallow table or desk beneath the wall opening with a chair by it and some pictures on the wall around the opening. Is there any way that the tank would fit in that opening like could you pull it out 4 inches so the glass was nearly flush with the wall and then put the quarterround that smallreef suggests on the front of the trim rather than the back to hide the frame on the bottom?

Think a frogspawn would work in there near the top of the tank if it's not too close to other stuff? I know it's LPS and then I'd have to watch calcium and other stuff. Hairy mushroom would be fun to watch and there are some really pretty ricordia and zoas. Want to see if I can get a Xenia to pulse, too. Some people say they grow in a salty ditch, some say they are hard and they melt on them. I'll be running 2 96W power compact lights, so not a whole ton of light. Was going to get one 420nm/460nm bulb and one 420nm/10,000 bulb to try to get some nice fluorescence from any coral and brighten up the fish. Also will run two Koralia 750's on a Red Sea Wavemaker that I also got in the pile of stuff which should give lots of flow. Shouldn't create a noise issue, but I'll ask the assistant directory who has an office door right there if it will make her have to tinkle all day. It will go in the waiting room by the front door. Turns out the lobby has too many other things in it: fire-alarm panels, auto-defibrilator, fire extinguisher, two sign-in touchscreens. Straight across from the doors as you enter would be great, but that goes right into the gym/multi-purpose room. So it will go just inside the door to the admin offices where there are nice couches and a table. Less visible for the kids, but I hope people will check it out regularly. I have a QuietOne return pump from the pile of stuff I got from Karl. Looks brand new after running some muriatic through it for a while while descaling the tank with the same. I was just going to use it to push water through a reactor or up to a separate fuge in my home tank eventually, but I can put it in the school one.

Thanks, Dave. The building is climate controlled 24x7 much better than my house. Was considering just skipping the heater and counting on the combo of lights and return pump and powerheads for heat in the high 70's. I had hoped that an auto-feeder dropping flakes and pellets would take care of the weekends and holidays. I'll skip the starfish. Do the other ones sound OK for a school tank given your experience? I'm there every week day morning and evening and work on the NIST campus with the center too, so can get there quickly if bad things happen. Eventually I'd turn it over to someone like zygote2k's service company if I stop being involved or break it down and keep it at home. Seahorse tank would be well loved by the kids, I know, but they seem a bit beyond my husbandry at the school, and I think they need to be fed very often, right? It will be fun to get this one into the school, and maybe once they have one saltwater going in the lobby the classrooms could get a fun one like a little mantis tank which could eat stuff and generally look like an evil little alien creature. I think to make the tank safer I'm going to put in a glass-holes overflow to a 20L sump and put the HOB skimmer in the sump. Just got the overflow and 20L from a member here.

I didn't even realize that the guy in the doctor's office was a royal gramma. Thanks. Kind of ironic, though, that I'm contemplating setting up a tank like the one that all of the characters in the movie were trying to rescue Nemo from. Good thing irony is lost on pre-K kids. So for a Nemo tank I'd gradually add: a cleaner shrimp (Jacques), clown (Nemo), tiny hippo tang (Dory), with plan to move it to my home aquarium within a year, royal gramma (named Gurgle in the movie apparently, never knew that), red bali starfish (Peach) once I've got a good crop of algae going and a bunch of snails, crabs, and pods and some softies. Would feed pellets and flakes daily on a timer and nori sheets for Dory and maybe some of Jan's food couple times per week for the crabs and coral and other fish as a treat. Wonder if I should just go ahead and drill it and put an overflow and return on it so I could put the HOB skimmer and ATO underneath and away from prying hands. Even though the tank is only 12" deep, so a 20L wouldn't fit, but I could have it off the wall a bit. I don't think there's a brace in the back down to the floor. All the weight is on the ends in this stand.

Thanks, Dave. I know you've set a bunch of them up in schools and Karl said that he'd given you stuff in the past but you couldn't take this stuff for a school at the moment. What have you seen success with in schools? I assume it would need to be some softies and fish that aren't finicky eaters but can tolerate a little bit of overfeeding, underfeeding, tapping on the glass, and less than perfect water quality since it won't be tweaked all that often. Think I would be successful in the 45g if I did a few softies, 1-2 clowns, a royal gramma, a saddle valentini puffer (as the big guy in the tank), a banded coral shrimp (which might end up as puffer food, I guess), and a buncha snails and crabs like hermits, emerald, porcelain for the kids to watch and skip the goby/pistol pair because it's bare bottom?