Phantom

I've imported a lot of fish tank equipment, especially the LED's I'm using to light some of my tanks. I'm also using LED lighting in the house, so much cheaper to run and pretty cheap to buy out of China. It's worth shopping around, but make sure you're only doing it on a casual basis to avoid being classified as an importer as others have said.

If you really wanted to, it's pretty easy to find out. I too wanted to know to see what services he offered etc if he had a website. Awesome to know that he's continuing to support the tank. I only hope there is a good outcome for the fish and corals in the end.

If you can afford a place like that, you can afford to pay a company to maintain it for you

Yeah I reckon. A tank like that would be far more than $10k. I'd buy it if they were selling the setup that cheaply. However, Kim Dotcom was only renting the property, so I'd say that is just part of the building and will go to the next person to live there.

I too have one of these sink pumps and I swear by it. Makes life so much easier. Have been using the same one with a the plastic fittings for about 5 years. I attach mine via a long hose to a gravel vac, just have to remember to remove the gravel vac when putting it in fill mode, as the gravel vac has a 1 way valve

I agree with the above comments. I don't run carbon and tell most people not to bother with it unless removing meds. It does help polish the water though. I personally run lots of noodles along with a bag or 2 of purigen. Purigen is something I wouldn't go without now and it is well capable of polishing the water a bit.

I have no idea where to get them, but at work we have a timer called "theben" which we set up to play a buzzer for 5 seconds for start and end of breaks for our factory staff. I think ours is capable of having 72 different programs, each with their own timer in seconds .. or 36 programs with start and end times in minutes. Searching suggests a few electrical suppliers that might have them in NZ. Also, if minutes are fine, the cheap digital timers you can get from bunnings for about $10 will give you 10 programs that are done down to the minute.

At home I use slingshot / slingshot iTalk. But I don't think that's what you're asking. At work we use a plan from a local company called The Total Team, who basically re-sell FX Networks. They have a plan for Chch users that gives us unlimited data, 0.75Mbps CIR, 30Mbps PIR (but it actually gets up to 80Mbps PIR for us, which is the throughput limit of our router). It's $795 + GST per month. We also pay $100 + GST for our direct link to 2talk who provide our VoIP trunks. We're on the middle business plan for that. 10 lines, lots of minutes, heaps of DDI's. We also add in the 1000 minutes to mobiles addon. The 2talk bill is about $250 + GST per month. We were paying about $150 for ADSL from Telecom, 40GB of data or so. We also had a Telecom bill for our 6 lines and calling in the region of $1500 - $2500 per month. The call quality is far superior using 2talk than it was from Telecom and we have a much faster and unlimited fibre connection, costing us less overall. Win all around. P.S. I know 0.75Mbps CIR sounds low, but it's way higher than ADSL CIR's. I've also never found it to run at anything less than PIR anyway.

Yeah, I'm the IT manager where I work and I've switched to 100% VoIP. However, we have a fibre connection coming in for our internet access and they also provide a completely separate 5mbit link direct to our VoIP provider. Works great. We pay about $250 / month for 10 "lines", 30 DDI's and we use about 10,000 minutes of calling a month.

Hi After the earthquakes I didn't have any issues getting the word out by cell. Facebook is great, 1 post and everyone can find it. By the time I got home to use a landline, the lines were dead anyway But yes, that is the benefit of a landline

Yes it is down when the network is down, so if that happens to you then you need an alternative. If you have a smartphone, you can use your voip line on that. The only time mine has been down in 7 years is from the earthquakes, but landlines were down too. I've never had quality issues, in fact I think the quality of the call is better. I now also run all of our work phone lines on VoIP. Took our phone bill from $2k ish per month down to $250 per month. Our phone always rings. If you are a heavy user who is maxing out their line downloading things or running p2p, then you may have some issues. There are ways around that if you have a router that supports prioritisation or reserving bandwidth.

That's the thing with Naked DSL you don't, but you can use a VoIP line. My VoIP line is $11 / month for a phone number, 20 or so features like call waiting, call minder, caller ID as well as 500 calling minutes to something like 40 different countries. The traditional landline is $41 - $49 depending on where you live, and you get no features and no minutes.

I use Slingshot. Works well. However, you have to keep in mind that slingshot is a value for money ISP. You get great data allowances for low prices compared to the competition. It does mean though that at peak times, you won't get your full line rate available to you. For browsing etc, there is plenty of speed. If you're a serial downloader, you might think it crawls No IPv6 .. you'd be lucky for any residential ISP to be pushing this out this early surely? Static IP $10 more, although I get one free *cough* Naked DSL is available, unlimited naked plan if you wanted that. I've used their iTalk VoIP service since 2005 as my primary phone line. Never once had a problem with it, great service. Haven't used a landline since. Forum / IRC is good .. but I'm biased as I'm an administrator on the slingshot forums .. IRC support is there, but the chan is used for other stuff most of the time. A few of us are there all the time though and will try to help if needed. Personally I'm just a customer, so I can't do anything that requires access to slingshot's databases. Hardware is all the same these days, they provide NetComm gear which is actually pretty decent provided you don't let it get too hot. I personally buy the same stuff for anyone I assist with issues.

Lead-free isn't useless. I actually prefer it. The only thing is people have to be re-trained on how to deal with it. People got used to seeing shiny smooth joints and judged the quality of their work on that. Lead solder is very forgiving and can look OK from the surface even when it is a poor quality joint. Lead free however is not so forgiving and until you can do it right, it will sure let you know that it wasn't so good. This leads to process improvement and a better quality of work all round. Generally any products that have been made using lead free processes will have gone through this and now be producing a top quality solder joint each time. My background to making this claim: I used to run the PCB manufacturing line of an electronics manufacturer during the switchover from lead to lead free, was also one of the only trainers in NZ on the 3 main international standards for electronics manufacturing. As for your PS3 issue, it could be anything. If it was me personally, I'd bring it in to where I work and run it through one of our reflow ovens. If you've replaced the laser, chances are it's something else, something you haven't seen.

I'd say that 3.5W will probably produce more light than the existing 11W, provided the LEDs are decent. I have a nano marine tank and replaced 20W of halogen with 1.4W of LED. You can see pictures here http://www.fnzas.org.nz/fishroom/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=53458

If it's ongoing and you can get more .. I'd probably be keen at that price!

looking good

I'm pretty new to this, but I've used Red Sea and more recently Dupla Marin. They're pretty expensive compared to the salt recommended in this thread. Is it worth switching and getting it shipped down to Christchurch?

I asked that question about the aqua one skimmers and got so many people telling me not to be cheap and get something good. Bubble Magus are really good value for money and was what people recommended I get unless I could afford something like a Deltec (which is what I have). Deep Blue Aquarium are the BM sellers in NZ and you can get the Bubble Magus NAC5E Skimmer which is a hang on back skimmer you could mount onto a Juwel. They're only $239.90. Rated 300 - 500L so plenty for a tank your size.

A skimmer is worth whatever the most is you can afford to spend on it I was asking those kind of questions 6 months ago and everyone told me to buy the best skimmer I could afford and I won't regret it. I now have a reasonable skimmer and I certainly don't regret it.

Brothers tend to be cheaper up front but far more expensive in the long run. Had some good experiences in the past with Canons, even put a few in at work at one stage. Other than that, no real recommendations, I only work with laser printers now.

Why use the filters? I have a Juwel tank as marine and ripped out the built in filter. Running a Deltec HOB skimmer instead.

It's a great shop, I can't wait until he has the back wall of tanks up and running. Already bought a bit of stuff from him (corals, fish, lights, suppliments and a few extras).

That's how I understand it to be from the limited research I did before committing to finding appropriate LED's.

I'll try to grab some pics in the weekend. As for the violet light, true actinic bulbs used for reef tanks peak at a wavelength of 420nm. However, I believe they also offer high levels of blue all the way through to around 460nm. I've tried to replicate this using LED's by using a 420nm and 450nm wavelength light source. I'm not the best person to answer why actinic light is good, but I believe it has to do with the way chlorophyll absorbs light during photosynthesis in a reef. This has something to do with the ability of the wavelengths of this light being able to to penetrate deeper into water than other wavelengths.