Ira

How about buying a generator and some extension cords? The weather that time of year shouldn't be too bad so you wouldn't have the drain from the heaters much. A 400ish watt generator is only a few hundred dollars and could easily run the filters on the tanks and maybe a small heater at a time and keep the tanks pretty happy and healthy. Would be nice for the future too.

I tend to go by the 1/4 cubic neon rule(Yes, I made that up myself)... If a fish is 8 neons long then it's about the mass of 8^3 neons, so 512. Divide by 4, gives you 128, so it needs 128 liters all to itself. Ok, so I don't follow that, my 440l cichlid tank has an equivalent of 5000 in it, hehe.

Mine has only been going up about .2-.3 degrees during the day. From 24.9 to 25.2 or so. But, I bought a nice quiet box fan that's sitting behind my tank blowing at the MH and across the water plugged into the timer. Keeps the lights nice and cool at least, I can actually touch the pendant comfortably.

A 404 wouldn't even come close to doing a 1000L tank. 200L each is more like it.

I don't think there are any that flow that much. Probably you'd be best going with something like 2-3 404s or similar. Or you could have it drilled for a sump with an overflow and fill that full of media.

10 mm gets you about a 2.4 safety factor, 12 mm a 3.4 and 15mm a 5.4 So, 15mm is WAY excessive. And I'd guess you'd spend 3-4X as much on glass as for the 12mm which would probably be a few times as much as 10mm. Of course, if cost is not object... That's according to Warren's glass thickness calculator, BTW. Oh and that guys 3mX800m tall tank at 10mm, I hope that glass is a lot stronger than normal 10mm glass because it's coming up with a 1.013 safety factor. A stray current hitting the glass might break it with that little of a safety factor.

Hmmm, Looks like, let's see...The long end will be about 345L and the short end will be about 266L. Oh, wait, those are along the BACK ends, so part of it will be overlapped. Ummm... The overlap would be 370mmX 460mmX500mm, so we'll delete that... That's 81L. So the tank's max volume is 530L, if you want to assume 50mm of airspace that'll just be taking 10% off so it will be 477L of water. You know what I'd suggest? Intake at one end, outlet at the other, get some nice current flow like a river tank.

Have a look for albino plecostomus. From the sounds of it, it's just an albino common pleco. So, yes, it will get fairly big. 30CM ish.

You could put something like 100 tetra/guppies without much trouble in a tank that size. Give or take a bit.

Yeah, Pies, his marine knowledge seems at best to be extremely outdated. But, he's the only one in the Wellington area... Had a chat with him today, he didn't have a clue what I was talking about when I said I wanted a PC bulb. Helpful guy as far as he goes, though.

I think any fish weak enough to get stuck like that was probably almost dead anyway.

From the looks of it, it's the standard hack the top off and shove it in the gravel type.

Once you make yours up, if it works well I might get you to build one for me too...Not quite so big though.

You could have a look at some DIY needlewheel options. I've seen ones using a chopped down bioball. Using a transformer is fine for low wattage stuff, but I kinda worry about losses with higher wattage. Anyone know what kind of efficiency the average transformer has?

I've asked at every pet store I've visited over the last few months, noone has any. They USED to have some, but I hadn't bought any in ages since my FW fish weren't too fond of it and that's all I had at the time. Next time I'm at your place I need to remember to get a bucket of water full of mysid shrimp and pods and things, I don't have any.

I have. Who do you think the single 3K-5K vote is?

I haven't been able to find any frozen mysis. I've got some krill stuff but it seems to be mostly brine shrimp.

Hmm, not counting electricity/food, let's see... Say $3300 ish

My guess is that somesick bastard dyed a pomeranian pink and then drowned it... :lol:

Depends a LOT on the cannister filter. My wimpy POS eheim barely trickles in my 2ft, I have to have an airstone running in it or the fish would suffocate. But my 404 puts a very nice amount of flow in it.

I don't think you'd find too much of a flow difference between using 40mm feeding the sea swirls compared to a 50mm. The two sea swirls would still be the biggest restriction. Even the 2X20 is only 2500ish mm^2 area compared to the 40mm being 5000 mm^2, the 50mm at 7850 mm^2. So, uhh, my point is that you're worrying about making the already least restrictive part less restrictive, you should think about making the most restrictive less restrictive. But, you can only do that by using bigger sea swirls, but you're not going to really make any difference anywhere else. I say throw it all together the way you've got it and call it good. With large radius elbows and all that you're not going to be able to squeeze more than a tiny bit of extra flow out of it. Put your time and money into some other component.

Note to self: when topping off the tank water(I run a hose from the sink through a micron and DI filter) don't leave it trickling and then go to watch a tape of The Practice and forget about it. At least it looks like only a few liters overflowed the sump and I'd been planning to lower the salinity down to 1.025ish anyway...Just hadn't planned on doing it all at once...

Hence why most vehicles have a towing rating. Though, I have seen little daihatsu RC cars with 1 hamsterpower engines and a maximum towing weight of negative 200 kilos towing trailers with a couple horses in them...

From what I saw of it I suspect it waits for any mice or cats to pass by the sump, throws out a tentacle and grabs it.

Takes me around half an hour-45 minutes to fill ten 20L jerry cans with a bucket. A trailer full of 200L barrels would be nice if I could get it to the water, but can't.