Folta

I have one that molts pretty frequently like that. I heard they molt depending on whats in the water, ie. enough iodine, etc. Not really sure. My coral banded shrimp though is becoming a nuisance at night.. I keep getting woke up by the sound of something 'jumping', and when I look in the tank, the CBS is up near where my clowns sleep.. I think he's bugging them (the CBS, if outstretching his claws, is about 5-6" wide, the clowns are about 2 1/2" - 3" long). Should I be concerned?

I'm still interested as well. As I'm also from MD, my vote would be for rockville too

Ah.. so it would be too big to be used over my 55... Right?

How big are the lumenarc reflectors? My current tank, a 55 gallon, is only 13" from front to back.

I believe the m80 ballast would just overdrive the bulb. On http://www.cnidarianreef.com/lamps.cfm you can see that the par ratings for the m80 ballast are higher for pretty much all the bulbs.

Very nice.

Ok, so let me just make sure I know of everything to get for a metal halide setup. This is under the assumption that I'm not using a canopy, and going with a pair of 250 watt bulbs. 1. 250w Metal Halide Bulb x2 2. Pendant x2 (or should this be 'reflector' ?) 3. Ballast x2 4. Wiring x2 Ok, so wiring would go from the outlet to the ballast, then the ballast to the pendant (reflectors?). I would need 2 grounded power cords that connect from the outlet to the ballast, and then 18 gauge wire to connec the ballasts to the bulbs. Right? Currently, I'm leaning toward the XM 10,000 for bulbs, no actinic supplementation at the moment, but will add down the road. Ballast, I'm leaning toward magnetic for the price, also the par rating I've found seems to be slightly higher with this over the electronic ballasts I've seen. (Icecap, ARO, CoralVue, Blueline..) Does anyone have this setup? Also, I know there was a thread about MH bulbs a few months ago, anyone have the link to that thread?

Fishface, thank you for your response. I've heard that before about the PAR rating. Maybe after getting the par meter, people in the club that run MH's can add their bulb type / reflector / etc to a thread. Or, perhaps even better, if the webmaster could make a section with this type of information? I've been following that thread about the PAR meter, but didn't chime in as I don't have MH yet. Although, maybe it'd be worth it to see how much light my jebo 260w pc lighting is really putting out Thanks for the link, I'll have to read through it.

Just bumping this up. I think I'm going to upgrade my lighting to MH's as well, so I can start getting acros, etc. So, lets discuss different brands: DE vs. SE Reflectors (very important imo to get the most out of your lights, whatever you choose) wattage (prices for bulb replacement vs. wattage output - 2 400's cheaper/better than 3 250's? etc) ballasts (electronic vs. magnetic, cost, utility, differences in resulting lighting, etc) pendants vs. retrofit kits (cost, output, etc) Bulb colors (maybe some people would be kind enough to provide pictures of their tanks with their bulbs in this thread and list their bulb colors - keeping in mind that it is different in person though) Hopefully there are some people here who can give some valuable insight, as I'm sure most people who get into this wonderful hobby and stick with it want to upgrade to MH bulbs at some point, and I think this would make a good reference to have.

PM sent for the tank/sump/stand.

So... have we figured a date for this thing yet?

You should go fishing Get a really tiny hook and line, put on a piece of food, and don't feed the tank for a few days.

That sucks. I'm glad I avoided the whole damsel thing.

Also, two tangs would definitely be too much for a 55.. most people say that one is questionable (I have a 55 with a yellow tang myself though).

On a side note, at what type of temp (or how fast of a change) will we start seeing problems with the corals? Monday I had left my windows open, and the temperature in the tanks got into the high 80's. Monday night, I started up the AC and the temperature has since gone back to normal (81 degrees, not much fluctuation). All the corals seemed to open up fine with the exception of the montipora digitata, which for the first time didn't show any polyps at all the whole light cycle. The only other change was the additon of the hammer coral on Saturday.

Nice looking corals. I've heard of a trick (although I've yet to try taking top-shots so I haven't actually tried; maybe you can and tell us how well/not well it works) is to put a piece of glass or acryllic material on the surface of the water, and snap the photo through that. The problem with water is that even with everything off, its not going to be a perfectly flat surface, and will distort the image, etc. Anyway, this should make it much like taking a photo through the side glass.

I use photobucket to host my photos. One nice thing about the site (the free access limits size of photos, but its actually not too bad) is that you can upload your high mb pics, and it will resize/redo them for you, to be a small amount of mb. Then it provides you with a link, and you just have to copy and paste it.

I have a 55 gallon, the magnet seemed to hold strong. I would suspect it would do for most tanks, but not really certain. It doesn't float if I were to pull the magnet away from the tank and let the inside piece drop. I have a magnetic algae cleaner that has the little pad on the inside piece as well. That was a pain to use for the coraline. I also have two handheld scrapers (one with an edge, one with a algae scrub pad) and it wasn't doing much. The blade one just glided right along and made the glass look very very nice. I looked for scratches afterwards too, especially in the spot that I accidentally let the magnet go sideways and pulled imagine turning your razor blade sideways, yet pulling in the same direction that you were pulling). - not any sign of scratching as far as I can see. It seems pretty inexpensive, and isn't as good as the pad one if you're just getting rid of diatoms.. personally I am glad to have one of each (the pad one also acts as my holder for nori for the tang and wrasse). Hope that helps!

Nope, glass tank. See one of my previous posts

did a google search and found this: Penn Plax Razor Scraper

ok, the brand is 'Penn Plax'. here's some shots of it: These first two are the backside of each piece: and this one is the picture of the blade half:

Just noticed this post, but I'm at work. I'll post make/model tonight when I get home!

I found out that I actually have a coraline aglae magnetic scraper. It looks just like the scaper with the pad on it, except instead of a pad it has two razor blades. I tried it out, cleaned the entire front of my tank with easy in less than 10 minutes, and that was with taking me time Glass tank, obviously.

success with the second link!

I got 'page cannot be found' when clicking on the link.