lduncan

I DL'd that the other day. The time lapse in there is awesome. The whole documentary is extremely well shot and edited.

My tank power bill for last month was around $190. Time to downgrade to 250's I think.

The reason I'm decided to design my own is really because no one has created one with the features, ease of use, and flexibility I need. I'm not a fan of X10 either. And they all look ugly too . I wanted something which looks good, is easy to use, has powerful features, highly expandable, and capable of streaming video, so I can check on the tank when I'm overseas. Within a few months I should have some fully packaged prototypes ready for people to test. I've just finished with university, so I've got more time to spend on this now. Layton

Kind of. It's been mid 20's and up to 30 recently down here, but the tank is steady on 27 (being in the garage helps stabilise the temp). Layton

Must be Ich season. I lost my adult Emperor Angel over night. It was fine yesterday, but this morning it was dead on the bottom covered in whitespot. I haven't seen any signs of ich for many months. None of the other fish have it. Maybe the ich was just a secondary thing after the fish had died?

Yip it's as with anything, it's far more dangerous when boiling hot! (Kalk can be pretty bad at high temp too) The reason it feels slippery is because it's used in making soap when combined with oils or fats. When you get it on you hands it slowly turn the oils to a soapy substance. It's safe if handled properly. You can have (and I have had) a highly concentrated solution on my fingers, and you can wash it under plenty of cold water and have it show no signs that it was there. It doesn't hurt nor does it leave any permanent mark. If it is left without washing soon after however, it ends up drying the skin out, and you can get cracking and sometimes splitting. Just don't use boiling water when you mix it up, and if you get it on your fingers wash them with heaps of cold water. (Just like you should do when you burn yourself on the halides! Don't know how many times I've done that!). Layton

Yip, that's why it's called caustic soda. Can be nasty, if you're careless, good thing is if you spill it on yourself, you can just wash it off with plenty of cold water to avoid a burn. Other acid or alkaline chemicals aren't so user friendly.

Actually the "Draino" brand is not the best. They use other chemicals as well. I'll find the container that i use and post the actual brand. I get it from "Fresh Choice" supermarket (Might be just a Christchurch supermarket). Most supermarkets should stock some sort of granule (not liquid) drain unblocker. Just make sure somewhere of the container it says 100% sodium hydroxide. 100% kill success. It's permanent. Layton

Sodium Hydroxide is king!

Garlic seems to do the trick.

I think they are used a lot in aquaculture (of fish, not coral) because of the high bioloads, they need capacity to oxidise a lot of ammonia.

Feel free to ignore the rest of that post. It's not important. It's just the reason why sand beds do what they do, and how they differ from rock. Anyone heard of the Smithsonian scrubber tank? or the GBR Aquarium? Ueno Aquarium? Adey?

It gets more dirty than rock because of gravity. It doesn't have to be more dirty to work, but just by the nature of where it is, it does get more dirty. It's hard to avoid the effects of gravity and have sand stay in one place. You can hear how Dr Ron thinks DSB's should be run now. Only US$175 for the course, then you'll also need his books dedicated to how to run a sand bed. I wonder what's changed since the days of "never touch it"? And then you can see what a few hundred other scientists have observed, and see that it is quite different to what Dr Ron says. That's true, but the fact is that sand can't shed the crap, away from itself. The same process which allows rock to shed (clean themselves), is the one which means sand fills up, to become more dirty than rock - gravity. Whether it needs to be more dirty than rock is irrelevant, the fact is, is that it WILL become more dirty by way of where it is located. Layton

Live rock or base rock will pretty much cycle a tank. There is usually some sort of die off on it which will provide the initial ammonia source to start the cycle, then add fish slowly after a few months. Mostly light. But also any fish food that floats by, and if you're unlucky, the odd fish.

They still have to be dirty to work. If you vacuum it regularly then it stops behaving like a sand bed in terms of filtration. It won't perform denitrification. It's difficult to run a sand bed so that it will perform denitrification, yet keep it clean enough not to accumulate too much crap. By trying to keep it cleanish (for example vacuuming portions after allowing a significant oxygen gradient to build up), you upset the oxygen gradient, which results in the release of nutrients tried up in the large biomass of bacteria living in the bed. I plan to run a shallow sand bed in my next tank, vaccumed regularly to avoid the oxygen gradients and dirt which cause the problems. (as well as strategically place closed loops under the rocks to avoid crap building up under them) I don't think phosphate chemically bonding to carbonate sand is too much of an issue, it's always going to happen on live rock and corals to some extent. It's the bacterial process which have the potential to cause the most trouble. Also silica sand is going to be harder to keep clean than carbonate sand because it is so fine, it doesn't look as nice either.

Yip, but only rock can get rid of it. Sand beds can't, they have to defy gravity to do that... or a shift oxygen concentrations, which is what you don't want to happen.

Nope, not equally dirty, gravity makes sure that the sand accumulates more and more dirt, and it stays there. Bacterial turgor makes sure rock is continually purged of it.

If you're like me, you'll break them wherever they are, and it ends up costing more in the long run than if you had have go the reflectometer in the first place.

Essentially yes.

They're crap. Spend the extra and get a refractometer.

Umm, it's not Bombers thoughts at all, it's the findings of literally hundreds of scientists. Up until a few years ago Bomber had a DSB in his personal tank (was even TOTM on reefkeeping). If you look on RC, you'll see how and why he converted it to BB. Layton

This is the issue which you haven't seemed to note yet. They don't magically make all the nutrients disappear. They are good for denitrification, ie they get rid of nitrate. But to perform that task they have to be dirty, and have an oxygen gradient. Denitrificaion goes hand in hand with phosphate storage. There is no substantial equivalent of denitrification for phosphorous. Phosphorous doesn't form a gas and bubble out. It's just accumulates and cycles between various forms, some of which are inert, other which are far from inert. In short they full up, it's a process called eutrophication, it occurs in nature in both oceans and lakes. Phosphorous is a trouble maker in aquariums. If there is one nutrient you don't want it's phosphorous. The reason I said that SPS and sandbeds don't mix, is because you require that the sand bed store phosphorous, and SPS are killed by phosphorous. So you're storing this stuff in your sand bed, and you have rock sitting in the sand absorbing it with corals on top. Eventually it's going to cause problems, it maybe not for a few years, but there is no avoiding the fact that the phosphorous is building up. But if you clean you sand bed, keep it free of detritus and oxygenated, you can avoid having to rip it out once it's full. Here's one for you Pies, Borneman has called BB tanks both sterile and unstable. Pays to check your sources, no matter who they are .

Urchins are cool. I had a black longspine just appear out of the rock one day. It's huge now. He helps control the coralline on the glass turns it into little sand balls.

You took 4 years to get you PhD Steve? You must be a slow writer.

It's not so much about the binding of phosphate to substrate, but the storing of phosphate in and around the substrate within bacteria. Again the myth that silica sand releases any significant silicate is false. If that was the case, then no one would be using glass tanks. It's essentially the same compound. Layton