Unorthodox ways to do things.

[paul b]

Steve, it is what it is. The hobby had to start somehow.

[mrholiday]

Paul, after reading your post, i LMAO thank you...

 

 

Lee

[dave w]

Paul, anyone with a lot of experience who claims to be unorthodox is actually just a little smarter than the rest of us.

[paul b]

You mean you guys dont do this stuff? ( How do you keep anything alive?

What would you have done before the internet, that was invented, when? Like last tuesday. The world existed a little while before computers. When you had to think on your own. Figure things out. experiment.

learn, cry. It was all exciting and not just look it up on Google and do what every one else does.

The hobby is bordering on boreing now, everything is done for us. There is no need to experiment.

No, let me try this and see if it blows up.

No, let me see how many pennies I have to add to cure ich.

No, how rotten can my pump get and still be able to put my hand in the water without getting electrocuted?

No, OMG it's eye popped out.

The temperature is 92! is that bad?

[ctenophore]

http://reefbuilders.com/2011/11/11/captive-bred-liopropoma/

 

Try doing that in the vacuum of information that was the pre-internet "good ol' days".

[zygote2k]

Here's something that we did back in the days before commercially available supplements were around- Centrum Liquid Vitamins.

A capful a day in the reeftank circa 1990. This went into the 100% algae scrubbed system and it grew fantastic corals and millions of aiptasia.

Elegance coral even reproduced in this system.

[paul b]

Over the years I think I did a few things that most people think is odd for some reason. To me my tank is supposed to be like a part of a reef or at least a part of the sea so I add whatever I find in the sea that I feel will either enhance the feeling or at least be interesting. We all know what a real reef is supposed to look like but if you see enough of them you may get bored. Thats why I add some things that I feel "enhance" it.

After so many years I have had every coral, fish and aquascape and I don't want to get bored so whenever I am at the sea, which is almost every day in the summer, I search tide pools and drag my net through the shallow water. Besides shrimp I find bottles, crabs, snails, cans, chains and various flotsam and jetsom that I find interesting. Much of it of course I can't put in the tank but if I feel I can coat it in some type of acrylic resin or if I think it can live in the tank, I take it home. I don't take anymore hermit crabs or horseshoe crabs because I know they will not live, but snails, shrimp and codium seaweed I bring home. Codium is cool seaweed and is very common on the east end of Long Island where I live. The stuff lives about 5 months in a tropical tank.

The local mud snails and shrimp live forever and are free. I can collect enough snails to fill a 50 gallon bucket easily and I can collect enough shrimp in 5 minutes to fill a 5 gallon bucket, with no water, just shrimp.

I also collect tiny anemones and amphipods.

Those things are just for interest but the most important thing IMO is bacteria. I collect a little mud every time I go just for the bacterial diversity. Is it needed?

I have no Idea. Is it good for the tank? I have no clue. But to me it seems to work.

I don't know of anyone else who does that, but it is what it is.

 

 

1/4" rock anemone

 

 

Rock crab (very cool)

 

 

Grass shrimp. (even cooler)

 

 

Old bald guy collecting in a tide pool

 

[paul b]

I am running out of un orthodox things to post about but I think just about everything I do is unorthodox and when someone comes to look at my tank, they seem kind of surprised. Everyone notices the bottles. I like old coral encrusted bottles (and chains)

Old rusty chains to me just remind me of the sea. Here in NY I am a boater and there are rusty chains all over the place in marina's and in shallow water. They came from ancient barges or tug boats, sunken shops or debris from bridge construction. Who says a reef tank has to be just fish and corals? I, myself never want to have a tank like everyone has, that would be boreing. I know I can keep animals alive, of course that is the first priority, but the next priority is to make it interesting.

I collected all of my rock in the Caribbean and Hawaii but after a number of years I wanted something new so I started to build rock. Eventually I developed the method I use now which is bent gnarly PVC pipe covered in cement. This produces a hollow rock that could be any interesting shape and being hollow offers increased area for bacteria to colonize. You also can't buy these interesting shaped rocks because it breaks in transit and we are left with roundish, boreing rocks. I never liked boreing.

I also collected most of the bottles in the sea but some of them are modern bottles that I "enhanced" by sandpapering them, then breaking them and glueing most of it back together. Then I smear on some cement and maybe some dead corals and barnacles. Those bottles look like they came off of Columbus ship. I guess it is un orthodox but I have always done it.

I would love to put a real anchor in the tank. The ones I have for my boat are about a foot and a half long but they are galvanized and I don't want to put that in but if I can find one an old one that is just iron, I will coat it with acrylic resin and re do the reef around it with it's associated chain. I think that would be interesting.

The most interesting tank I ever saw was many years ago in Manhattan in Aquarium Stock Company which was a huge aquarium store. In those days it was only freshwater and they had a large discus tank of about 300 gallons. In it was a real old toilet bowl, kind of broken along with all the associated plumbing and construction debris. It drew most of the oohs and aahs because of it's oddity. It sounds awful but it was anything but. :fun5:

Before and after "rock"

 

 

One of my older "rocks"

Structures like this supports my entire reef off the substrait.

 

 

Making a bottle

 

 

More PVC, hollow "rock"

 

Another home made bottle

 

 

How old is this bottle? Not very

 

 

I had to include this

 

[paul b]

I don't know how all of you guys top off your water but being I started this thread I will get into it a little the way I do it.

I guess you figured out that I like to build and modify things. My top off system is totally automatic and I only have to touch it every year or so.

I hung this (blue) bucket from the ceiling in my workshop so it is higher than my reef. The water flows to the RO unit through an electric valve. As long as the valve is energized, water flows. From the RO unit below the bucket, it flows to the acrylic DI to the left of the bucket. From there it enters the bucket. As the bucket fills, it raises the float which is a film container connected to that pink string. The string is connected to an old thermostat mercury switch so that when the water rises, the float rises lifting the mercury switch which shuts off power to the electric valve and the water to the RO stops. The bucket stays filled.

There is also a tube coming out near the top of the bucket in case this arrangement fails and the overflow would go down a drain, but that has never happened.

There is a PVC hose running from the bottom of the bucket, over my ceiling about 25' to another acrylic container on the tank with more DI resins and from there to a float switch on the tank.

This arrangement is designed to only supply water to the tank at about a drop every 3 seconds. The tank normally only needs a drop every five seconds so in the event the float switch gets stuck (which also has never happened) it would take a few days before the tank would overflow and it would only overflow a few drops an hour.

Under the tank is a DIY overflow safety switch which consists of a wire from a GFCI receptacle. The pumps on the tank are plugged into that GFCI so if there is a leak, the GFCI would trip off, shutting down the pumps.

I am sure everyone on here uses the same system.

 

 

Float switch

 

[Origami]

Paul, you made me smile with your float switch implementation! A film canister, string, and an old mercury switch (from an old thermostat, I suppose?)... shades of the genius of Rube Goldberg.

 

 

This approach was my ATO system with the improvements as noted. Throughout the day, topoff water would be delivered to my tank through an inexpensive peristaltic pump that I had on hand (timer-controlled). The source of the water was an 10-gallon pet food container. The water was refilled from a 33-gallon trash can filled with RO/DI every day between 7 pm and 9 pm. This was timer-controlled. The trash can was topped off three times a week, also under timer control.

 

The peristaltic pump and timer limited rate of delivery. The 10-gallon container limited how much could possibly be delivered should the timer fail. The automated refill/replenishment mechanism saved me from having to manually refill the top-off container every few days. By limiting RO/DI production to longer periods three times a week, I substantially increased the life of my DI resin. If it were only top-off water that I was producing, I could have limited production to once a week or even once every two, but I kept water on hand for water changes. (You probably don't remember those.)

[Integral9]

Have you ever used ozone to purify water instead of chlorine?

 

I was watching 'The Colony' (1st season) and as their wood supply ran out (which they used to boil their water) their resident "mad scientist" (a physics professor i think) rigged up a tesla coil that he used to generate enough voltage to arc and then built a small chamber to house the arc in. He then used a peristaltic pump to pump air through the arc chamber into a bucket full of water from the LA River. The water was also filtered through a 50gal drum with sand and carbon (which they made from burning wood). The whole cast drank the water and it didn't make them sick. There were some comments made about tasting the ozone the first time they tried it. I'm assuming ozone will evaporate out, like chlorine.

 

There are probably easier (but less fun) ways to get 10,000V and imho, everyone should have a Tesla coil.

[ctenophore]

You need to find another of the Queen Anne's Revenge cannons and build a tank around that. I would!

http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/news/weeklynews/nov11/qar.html

[sen5241b]

MY UNORTHODOX WATER CHANGE: I do a 50% once a month and spike the make up water with cal and mag till its precipitating. Cal levels stay fine for about 4 to 6 weeks without any dosing. I do have to dose a little alk by throwing five pinches (yes "pinches") into my water reservoir. In the summer I cut back to 2 pinches cause of higher evaporation. If cal drops before I can do the water change then I throw three pinches onto the plastic grate in the back of my Biocube and let it slowly dissolve. My tank's chemistry is near perfect.

[paul b]

Yesterday my un-orthodox algae trough fell in the tank. The thing is 5' long and luckily was still attached from the front so it didn't fall completely in and smash anything. I have a flimsy plastic bracket on the back which holds it on the back, top rim of the tank. It is actually a plastic angle that you nail on the corners of a sheetrock wall to protect it. It was strong enough for years because the trough is very light and usually only has 1/2" of water in it.

The algae grew so much in it that the water filled up and overflowed, this large volume of water was over the weight limit on the bracket that held up the trough so it cracked.

I removed it and cleaned out the algae, now it is back in service and I will maintain it better in the future.

All is well now

 

[paul b]

Wow, old thread, I accidently found it by searching for my last name although I am not sure why that is on here. I was just thinking earthworms. Earthworms are all over the place but we rarely, if ever use them for salt water fish, Why? They make great food especially for anemones and predator fish which go nuts over them. When you go fishing, what do we use for bait? Flakes? Pellets? Apple Pie? No, we use worms. Why is that? Because it is the best bait, Why is that? Because fish love them. For smaller fish just chop them up but anemones can handle them whole. You can also chop them real small and feed them to your corals. Great food, and they are free.