Warren

Sounds about right to me. It's a lot of light though so you'll need to have perfect water or you'll get a lot of algae. The planted will grow like mad as well. You'll end up with around 100mm a day on Cabomba and one new leaf every 2 days on Sword plants. Most other stem plants will grow between 25-50mm a day as well. You'll have to trim most plants once a week and some twice a week. You'll also need to do 50% water changes once a week so the nutrient level doesn't hit the algae break-out point. With this much light you'll have to let the plants grow berserk by maintaining excellent water quality and fertilising twice daily. If the plants aren't out competing the algae the all you'll have is algae... I had a little less light than this and had to use RO water mineralised with some of the basic salts found in natural waterways and also server as plant macro-nutrient. I used a tailored PMDD twice daily to maintain the system. Phosphate and Nitrate are you enemy. Phosphate needs to be unmeasurable or you get algae. Nitrate needs to be about 10ppm so you don't get cyno. Time teaches you the correct does rate and mix for you PMDD. Read the Sears Conlin report on The Krib. It teaches you pretty much everything you need to know and the knowledge you gain actually works. http://www.thekrib.com/Plants/Fertilize ... onlin.html

No, not unless you're prepared to spend a lot of money. If you know you'll be there when a long power-cut is going to happen then the inverter / car battery idea is likely the cheapest option for small loads up to 12 hours.

I have a 2kVA Online Dual Conversion UPS (Sinewave Output). It's enough to power the only tank I had for 3 days. It could run a 100W pump and 300W heater (heater on 50% of the time) for this period. It did require quite a few batteries to be connected. There's 240AH of batteries @ 72VDC (12 x 120AH in a series parallel arrangement). Luckily I get this gear at a very good price from my work. Normal sell price for something like this would be well over $4k...

Looks like we're all set. Other than the potential weather issues I'm looking forward to it. Sounds like any of the really bad weather should be right up north and miss us (with some luck it will miss everyone).

Sounds like a done deal!! I've just finished organising the HBAS people - looks like a total of 9 coming over. Looking forward to it!!

Hi Stella, We were targeting around 1pm to be at your place to allow time for lunch first. There should be 9 people minimum as long as nobody who said they'd go pulls out. How does this work with the Kapi-Mana people? I'm allowing about 2 hours for the trip, leaving at 9:00am, about 11:00am at Wet Pets, lunch and then your place at 1:00pm. This will allow leisurely drivers the chance to leave earlier or arrive later and spend less time at Wet Pets or have a shorter lunch. As long as we target 1:00pm at your place it doesn't matter when people leave. Let us know if 1:00pm is no-good...

This topic has been cleaned and all the personal attacks have been removed. Action is yet to be taken against the offenders. Keep it civil. Action has now been taken, please - no personal attacks, contact a moderator or administrator if you have issues with any post.

The same ballast can be used if the bulb operating voltage is the same and the wattage is the same. I have come across bulbs that operate at different voltages before for the same wattage. If this happens you will get two things happening - the bulb life will be lengthened or shortened depending on whether the voltage is higher or lower (will also effect the power in the bulb) and the colour will be wrong due to the arc operating at the wrong temperature. This is more typical of boutique lighting systems so you have to use their expensive bulbs... You need to get the full technical spec for the bulbs you plan to use and make sure the operating voltage is the same. If not then you'll need to change the ballast to suit as well. The impedance of the ballast is set to create the correct voltage on the bulb and is critical for the correct life and colour.

2 Adults, 2 Servers running 24/7, 1 heatpump, no tanks!!!! = $200/month. Used to be $260/month with 1 x 1200L planted tank (500W MH + pumps and heaters)...

Cool, I've only ever had medium sized planted tanks (approx 1200L) but this looks cool. I may just have to give it a go.

Ooh, I'll be there!!

I'm with Airnet (not available in all cities in NZ). It's a wireless microwave link at 4Mbits down, 1Mbit up. I get sustained 450k-480k byte downloads at any time of the day (depending on the speed of the server at the other end). No throttling like many other ISP's. It's not cheap at $79.95 / 10Gbytes but the service is exceptional and amongst the fastest in NZ.

Great result and what I've come to expect from these guys. I've known the owners of HFF for many years - they are one of the few good people left with passion for what they do in the hobby. Their concern for any service related issue like this has always been genuine. Good on you guys!

Acrylic doesn't make a good lid. As it sits with no mechanical support in the centre and it's not rigidly fixed to the edges of the tank, it will sag. Acrylic has a very poor memory - this means it doesn't remember it's initial shape and will deform to some new shape over time. If a cross brace is put across the middle it will stop the sag but will look bad. I've tried using acrylic before for lids and it's always sagged. You can turn it over but it just sags the other way after a day or so. Lexan (or polycarbonate) works very well though. It's much tougher and doesn't sag. Doesn't smash if you drop it either. It's the stuff used for windows...

Try an LM35. It's not too bad with 10mV/'C output. A simple rail-to-rail opamp can be used to add gain to boost the output to 50mV/'C (or more) so you can use the full range of the A/D. You'll also need to implement a PID controller in the PIC otherwise you'll likely end up with the temperature oscillating a bit due to the large mass you're trying to heat. Any delay between the heat source and measurement point will cause oscillations and overshoot in the temperature. The average temp will be ok though but you may bounce around the setpoint a bit. You may not need PID but be prepared for it as it's normally needed in most control systems. Don't use PIC's much so can't point you to a good reference site to get a free PID. Also, make sure any parts you use have low-drift and good temperature stability.

Yeah, it's a really big place!!

It was fine in Napier until a short time ago. I'd just ducked out to a friends house for a while and thought - nah, won't need shoes, socks will do. Then it rained - not much but enough to wet my socks when I walked back!!

:lol:

It may be useful to enforce proper temperament testing of all dogs when puppies. Some dogs have a vicious temperament and some don't. A good owner will help a lot but if the tendency is in the dog to start with a moments inattention could be fatal. It's not the dogs fault and sometimes not the owners fault, but mostly the nature of the dog that causes the problem. I've seen temperament testing done on quite a few different breeds of dog and it works very well when deciding where to home the dog and what it will be suitable for. I don't know if will work successfully on all breeds but if it could it may just head off the bulk of the problems (really bad dogs could be culled). As Afrikan says, picking responsible owners is likely to help as well.

We'll mention it at the HBAS meeting next week to see if we can't organise a trip over too. We may be able to car-pool a bit and get a few keen members. There's growing interest in Natives here so it's likely to be worth it just to see your tanks alone!

Bristlenose damage the membrane surface of the leaf. Then that section of the leaf dies and rots away. Initially there seems to be no damage then it shows up a day or two later. They seem to be the only algae eating fish to cause that type of damage to sword plants.

I'm sorry it's come to this. I guess this thread was really the last straw. This thread wasn't so bad compared to some of the other recent ones. However, for better or worse, I chose to use this one to try to put an end to comments made that may or may not be justified. It was not intended as an attack on this thread specifically. I hope people can see fit to take a little more time and effort to resolve issues prior to posting in the future.

You guy's haven't overlooked mentioning bristlenose have you?

Probably best to talk to us first. The FNZAS has a bit more weight. If we can't sort it out for you then we're likely to make a statement of some sort. At least if we make the statement (by committee) then we only have ourselves to answer to... We're here to support the hobby and if members are getting a bum-deal then we want to help sort it if other avenues haven't worked. We have help members out on the odd occasion in the past.

Don't see it either left or right John. I see it as very simple common-sense. People need to get their facts right and at least make the effort to contact the people causing the issue before posting any personal comment publicly - common sense... Can't see why this is so difficult for people to understand. To do otherwise causes trouble.