Ira

Hmmm, I'd be worried about keeping the tank full if it was flexing enough to pull the center support off. Anyway, When you do reglue it try making it a double layer of glass Kind of like __---__ Except overlapping. That will give twice the area at least.

I believe it's because of high light. I doubt it's too much light because my tank is far from highly lit. But I only get it on the leaves near the surface. The leaves turn red except for green veins, right?

This is REALLY asking for a sex toy or doll comment, but I'm not going to make one...Oh, oops, guess I just did...

The stupid comments in parentheses totally ruin it.

Wierd. But, as long as it seems happy I wouldn't worry.

Huh? It shouldn't make any difference where you take the water from as long as you've got a reasonable amount of circulation. I'd guess the white is supposed to mean clear. Sounds like you don't have any ammonia.

I'll take one of each, please! Nah, not ready yet.

I give you 9 months before you've got five foot long redspots.

Five redspots!?! That'd look impressive...You're going to need a MUCH bigger tank.

When I went on the tour of the national aquarium a few months ago they didn't go into too much detail on the filtration. I think they said they've got an intake out in the ocean, countinuously changing the water in their big tank which is also run through 4 MASSIVE sand filters. For their smaller tanks I think they also have a small sand filter(Not sure on this) and something like a dozen UV sterilizers on the return from each of them going to a main sump and then back out again. Something like that anyway. Not quite sure how you'd make the water levels stay constant be MUCH easier with an overflow. Might have to use ball valves to get it close enough and just let the pumps suck air occasionally and stop for a moment if it gets ahead. Obviously float switches like Mgilchrist suggests would be preferable to just turn them off for a minute.

Heh, There we go. looks like Disable bbcode being checked would do it.

Pies, have a look at the checkboxes under the reply box, is disable HTML in this post checked or disable bbcode? Just to test it, (Disable HTML unchecked, disable bbcode checked)

I keep meaning to find out when and where the wellington club meets. The Upper Hutt club is getting a bit...Small.

The minimum is about 200 liters, bigger being very preferable.

With my idea, if one pump fails the other one will drain its own tank and stop once it gets low enough and before the other gets too high. It'll sit there dry for a while until you fix it, but I don't see another way if you don't want to use float switches. If the sump's pump fails you should still get some flow siphoning from the sump into the main tank, just probably very reduced. Although, if it's going to be about 1 floor up you could actually get heaps of flow.

I found daphnia too small for my cichlids, they mostly ignore it. BUt they LOVE mealworms and they're pretty cheap and easy to culture. A 1000 pack from Biosuppliers is about $30 including shipping and that'll be more than enough to get a massive culture set up.

They shouldn't suck air constantly. The idea is that under normal operation the intakes are well under water. At least an inch or two anyway. That should be sufficient that they wouldn't suck any air normally. But if for example the tank>sump pump fails(Or just is out of balance and out runs the sump>tank) the tank water level will drop just enough to stop. If the sump is going to be over 500L that gives quite a bit of leeway and both the tank and sump should have enough extra room for 2-3" of water or an extra hundred liters.

The tank won't cycle without any fish in it unless you've got some source of ammonia. Just filling the tank with water doesn't make it start cycling.

You could adjust the levels of the intakes on the two pumps so that when the water level of the sump gets low enough(And the tank almost overflowing) it starts sucking air instead of water and stops. Then do the same on the other end. Once enough water flows back it should start pumping again. Or use a couple of float switches to switch off the pumps if the water gets too low.

I haven't seen many fish lists, but the ones I've seen only had common names on them.

Here you're lucky to get them with a common err common name.

If I'd known it was so crappy I wouldn't have bothered, I wouldn't care if it was only generally accurate, but I wouldn't even call it that. Noone sells salifert test kits that I've seen though, where do you get yours? I just tried my other ammonia test kit assuming it works ok it looks like it's about .5ppm. But, I dunno if it does because the drops just congeal in the test tube immediately.

If it can handle 5 degrees that would be close for me. I think about 7 degrees would be enough except for the hottest days. I was thinking a small second hand beer fridge would be a good cheap cooler. Or at least wouldn't cost much if it fails. Everyone still seems happy, except for one of the big snails, he's probably a bit annoyed at having a chiton stuck to his shell. And the Blennies seem fascinated by the snails, they're always following them around.

ugh, I hate punga logs. Nasty little disintegrating weed and spider magnets. But, I guess they'd be good for a frog pond.

I grabbed a new ammonia test kit, a hagen one...And I still have no idea what the ammonia reading in the tank is. It's dark green and there's no dark green on the color chart. Using 3 different types of drops seems to be a pain in the ass, especially if the end result doesn't match the color chart.