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The plumbing thing is stupid. I just went and got a $3 plug to plug up a connection to a water heater in my sleepout(Never use it, overflows constantly onto the roof if the wine cork I jammed into the pipe on the roof pops off) and installed that, I guess legally I'd have to pay $70 for a plumber to come over and say, Yup, that $3 plug is definitely screwed in.

No, backpressure will be exactly the same.

It's normal, no idea what it is.

My understanding was that to do the wiring you only need to be certified if you're doing it professionally. I can do all the wiring I want in my house by myself, but Bob the tradesman can't do anything unless he has an electricians certification.

I was thinking, I could use more rock...Anyone know where a good place is to get the proper ingredients for Garf.org's aragocrete? Also, anyone interested in having a wellington club meet to make a bunch and everyone shares the cost of the ingredients? I volunteer Pies house for it.

I assume you've tried adding carbon too, Pies?

And it's only been within the last year and a half or so, maybe 2 years that it's been particularly active.

Or the difference due to it being while the lights are on(I assume) and only for a few hours is too small to be noticable.

No, you can't use normal flouros. If you do that you may end up not wasting your money on "aquarium lights" Then you'll spend the piles of money you saved on fish, overstock your tank and then have all kinds of problems. (In case you didn't catch my sarcasm, Yes, you can use normal fluoros) It usually looks better if you get 6500K ones, they're not as yellow. Usually sold as cool white.

Hmmm...I'd go for a 440 with a 60L sump.

As far as keeping things quiet, you could try using a relatively small return pump. Something like 1000LPH should be fairly quiet and be enough flow. If it's a submersed pump that will keep it quiet too. if I had a smaller one that would eliminate a lot of the noise from my tank. It's not the pump that makes the noise, it's the water splashing through the grill into the overflow and a hissing noise from the air going into the standpipe. Less flow, less noise for those.

Filter wool may help clear it up faster too. I usually just rubber band it around the filter's intake.

Just don't use DI water, you'll have all the ions you could want.

Maybe definitely is too strong a word, but since the water flow and lighting in the sump and tank are different, the only thing that's similar between the two places are the water or something in the water. So, it's reasonable to say that's where the problem is. My Xenia started to look really grumpy a few times, only commonality between those times was the alk dropped, but it was much lower than 8.1. Down near low 6s. Bring the xenia over to my place, I'll look after it for you.

Looks like your standard pond snail. Basically harmless, doesn't eat plants, cleans algae well, just ugly and breed fast.

I think I'd lean towards using a lower kelvin, brighter bulb and putting an actinic flouro tube or two over the tank. Seems to be a HUGE difference in brightness as your kelvin rating goes up.

Also it gets the heater out of the tank so declutters it a bit since few FW tanks have sumps.

Looks a lot like a gold severum.

Hey, Chimera, how much to make one of those plate rock thingies for me?

You could try painting it with any kind of paint and then cover it with polyurethane. That should be non-toxic and will protect the paint.

If I was making a new stand I'd probably get a good heavy duty steel frame made for it. Like my current marine tank badly needs a new stand. It's very half ass diy'd.

I'd love a niger trigger. Ao they ae defintiely reef safe? What kind of size tank would be necessary? Might get in trouble in a few places mentioning that I bought myself a niger...

Doesn't necessarily have to be T5s. NO actinics will work fine, you just might need two 4fts where one 4ft T5 would have been fine.

You can also put it in a blender, chop it up fine then freeze it in sheets and break off whatever you want to feed out.

Only thing you really need to do is rinse it really well. Maybe soak it in a mild acid like vinegar or similar for a week or so once it's set for a while.