Ira

Wow, I'm almost convinced to get an iwaki. Well, ok, I'm almost convinced to get one if they weren't so expensive.

I've got a bunch in a big polystyrene box. Been in there for about 2 years, I even forget to feed them for a few months at a time they're still living happily. Speaking of which, I need to make some food for them...

I think that must be where Suphew got them, The Pet House(I think) In Paraparaumu. All he really has is maybe 10-20 fish. But, that's more than the rest of the Wellington area.

Ah, you must be new then, welcome to the internet.

Very nice tank. And it doesn't look nearly as chaotic as most.

I've found I seem to have better luck with photos using the flash but with the camera hard up against the glass at an angle so you don't catch the reflection in the picture. Haven't had a chance to try on my marine tank with 10 times as much light as before though. Likely changes things a lot.

For me, at the rate I've been doing water changes lately(Been REALLY slack) if I wasn't on tank water so the lost water with an RO wouldn't matter, I'd seriously consider ASW. It seems at the moment the ASW would only be costing me $10 per week. Now, if I wasn't being lazy about water changes it would be more like $20-30 per week.

Dowelling, that sounds right! The dowel wouldn't rot any faster than the rest of the wood...Well, a bit faster if the driftwood is a hardwood, but it should last for several years easy.

Yeah, cable ties, fishing line, maybe stainless screws, I wouldn't use normal ones because they'd just rust and that would be annoying. I suppose if you wanted to be fancy, I'm not sure what the technique is called, but you drill holes in each piece and put basically a wooden rod in to hold them together? I think that would actually be the nicest way if the wood is something where that would work.

And I think it might be easier to get a set of chest waders so you can just wade out into the water, shove the jerry cans underwater and bring them back out. That's if you don't have a pump. Using buckets to fill the jerry can while balancing on rocks gets a bit old....

What's blanket weed?

Yup, you're wrong. This keeps coming up for some reason, don't know why it's very basic, anyway... Because it's a sealed loop all the pump has to do is move the water any distance the outlet is above the water level. Take a hose, put one end in the water, suck on it until you get a siphon going then dangle the center of the hose near the floor and hold the other end up above water level. If the pump had to pump the water back up to the tank's water level then when you do this the water would simply stop at the lowest point in the hose because there is no pump to pump it back upwards. Obviously, this isn't the case. The water naturally flows through the hose until it's matching the level in the tank. That's exactly what it does in the cannister filter. Now if you lift the end of the hose up so it's say 6 inches above the water level, that's the only height that the filter would have to actually pump it. So, you're only losing 6 inches of head worth of flow and whatever resistance there is in the hoses and inside the cannister. Drop the outlet into the water and then the only losses are resistance in the hoses and cannister because there is no head. Now if you were talking about a sump, then yeah, that's not a closed loop and the pump WOULD have to pump it the height up to the tank.

Unless you have the outlet of the cannister filter above the tank, there is no head that the pump has to pump against. The only restriction is any media in the filter and the hoses, NOT pumping the water back from the cannister up to the tank.

Jo and I tried to get our work to get a FW tank, no luck. Maybe I could talk them into a marine tank, cause I'd have heaps of time at night to babysit it.

I'm in. Makes it a grand total of 2 people and a maybe, from the looks of it...

Rinse the muck off them, but not dry cleaned.

Try a Jaquar cichlid, they look pretty aggressive.

You'll probably want a big pile of liverock and some powerheads.

You've got an oscar, throw them in with him.

Yes.

The problem is you added way too many nutrients and not enough plants. For the tiny number of plants you have in there you don't even really need any fertilizer.

Hmm....That's a thought, I know a lot of the artificial salts add extra minerals and elements, but shouldn't if it's evaporated and then redissolved end up being the same as the seawater it was created from?

When I've got a spare $200 that I don't want to spend on my fish, I might go there for dinner and see it...

Heh, I was thinking those are really good prices.

Hmmm, last time I saw them they were $150ish.