Midas

Did you end up finding some levamisole?

Thanks for your replys I got things sorted in the end and got some Silaflex RTV from Placemakers (about 3 or 4 tubes in the end) and fixed up the tank. Double butted the tank all the way around the bottom too with 10mm glass. Its been full for the last six months and seems to be sweet so far.

Another thing that I find is quite useful to test for is carbonate hardness (or KH). Lets me know how stable the pH is going to remain in the future. The water is quite soft here (~40ppm CaCO3) out of the tap so it pays to keep an eye on it and either buffer it up with sodium bicarbonate or with some sort of form of calcium carbonate that will slowly dissolve keeping the KH (and pH) up (I use bird grit in a stocking).

To be fair the AP tap water purifier comes with 2 cartridges, therefore would give 400L of water for the initial $150 outlay. Although I got significantly more litres than this from my cartridge and it was still going strong, however the tap water being de-ionised was quite soft at around 40-50 ppm CaCO3. New cartridges are $30, so each additional 200L would only cost $30 not $150. However Warren is right, if you are using a decent amount of water you would be better off going with RO as the initial extra capital outlay of buying the RO would soon be surpassed by buying additional ion exchange cartridges. Using 2.5L/day it would only take approx 1.5-2 years for the cost of replacement cartridges to outstrip the extra initial outlay of buying the RO. Here's an idea: If you were to buy the AP tap water purifier you could use both cartridges supplied then throw away the old resin (as the beads are mixed as mentioned by Warren and can't be recharged) and carbon insides when spent. Then get some new carbon and source some new anion and cation resin beads (seperately). One of the spent cartridges could then be filled with anion exchange resin and the other with cation and the two units placed in series to filter the water. Then the two resins would be kept seperate and could be recharged as often as you like when spent, with the only expense being the chemicals required to recharge the resins. What do you reckon Warren? Wouldn't be too bad if you were dealing with small quantities of water required.

What about those 'tap water purifiers' some pet shops sell that are based on ion-exchange? These give de-ionised water too. They have cylindrical cartrigdes with a small section of carbon and ion-exchange resin. The water flows through the bottom of the cartrigde past the carbon and then fluidises the ion-exchange beads, with the de-ionised water coming out the top. I had one of these but ended up selling it not long ago for $40 as it was surplus to my requirements. Cost me about $100 new on special, but I think they are normally around $150. It used to take about 1/2 and hour to fill a 10 litre bucket, so doesn't sound too bad compared to the alternatives you are currently looking at with RO. I think they are marketed by Aquarium Pharmaceuticals, I've seen them in several pet shops since I brought mine. New cartriges cost around $30 and I'm not sure excatly how long they each would last, but I used one for about six months on and off and it was still working ok by the end of it. Longetivity I guess would depend on how many ions were in the tap water to start with.

In theory it should pump close to the 0ft rating. The extra suction head provided by imersion in the water can be subtracted from the head provided by the height of water the pump is pushing against. e.g. If a pump is being used to return water from a sump to a tank, the height of water that the pump has to push against is the difference between the water level of the sump and of the tank. Not the distance between where the pump is located to the water level in the tank.

You said you had a Tronic heater, in that case these work differently to most other heaters. They are actually electronically controlled and don't use bi-metallic strip technology. Instead they use a thermal sensor that sits on the inside glass and monitors the water temperature. This feeds back to the electronics which regulates the flow of electricity to the heating coils. Theorectically, because they're electronically controlled, they should be less likely to fail as there's no bi-metallic strip to stick in the on or off position. The thermal sensor also shuts the heater off if it is lefted out of the water and the temperature of the glass rises rapidly, thus reducing the likelihood that the heater will shatter if you remove it from the tank while switched on. I've had one of these heaters for a couple of years and have had no problems with it. If it is on the blink you may have some sort of electronic problem? What temperature is the tank? are you sure that the heater is not coming on until it is turned up simply because the temperature of the water it is submersed in is high? What happens if you leave it in the tank for a long period of time, does it control the water temperature reasonably close to its set point? If not it may just be drift in the original calibration of the thermal sensor (all temperature sensors have a tendency to drift like this). If it has drifted you only have to really worry when the temperature you want has drifted outside the range of set points available on the dial. Just keep an eye on it.

where abouts is your bird grit? Is it in one of your canister filters? Do you turn your canister off then back on again when you do your water change? Or is the cloudyness when it first appears not coming out of the filter but just appearing at random locations? Just trying to see if we can rule out the bird grit as a direct source. I know if I disturb the bags of bird grit I have it tends to send a cloud of calcium carbonate through the water. Could be the water you are using. Have you checked your water in your rainwater tank for cloudiness? Something maybe growing in it (ie bacterial etc bloom) or just contaminating it (some kind of chemical/debris)? Also, a while back when I was in Palmy whenever I did a water change I had some kind of preciptate form. It seemed quite sticky and coagulated and stuck to plants, fish etc. Some of the fish even ate it. Didn't seem to do any harm. Eventually it stopped happening and but I never did find out what was happening. Always thought it was abit odd. I read an article by the editor in the October 2001 edition of Practicle fish keeping some time later and it talked about a similar problem, however that case involved fish deaths. They also did not know what has caused it. Anyone else had a similar experience?

same here, I use lots of them, broken and whole.

Do they make high density polystyrene? as opposed to the normal stuff

I have had one of the millenium 2000 filters for about six months. Mine is still running with the original carbon/mechanical filter cartridge, I just rinse it every week. If you wanted to put other media in it would have to be quite rigid and fit into the slot provided otherwise the filter will not work properly. It doesn't really matter (to me anyway) that the carbon is spent by now, I just have it in there for the mechanical filtration and it seems to work fine. On the tank that I have it on it is in combination with u/g filtration.

what is the hose made of that the water was heated up in? If it was ordinary garden hose and if the water was sitting in it for a while it may have picked up sufficent toxins from the plastic to cause a problem. I know if I haven't used our garden hose for a day or so, the water that comes out of it has a strong plastic odour.

I've used that plastic shade cloth stuff before too. I just used two pieces of aluminium wire as poles down the sides of the tank. These were threaded through the shade cloth to hold it in place. It kind of looked like a tennis net across the tank. Seemed to work quite well. Another thing I have used is old undergravel filter plates turned over on their sides and held in place with rocks and gravel on the bottom. On the sides to stop it from falling over I used some rubber suction cups (normally for holding tubes/ heaters in place) either side. This worked quite well and was strong enough to keep two red devils apart. However small fish would have been able to swim past the gap on the side between the filter plate and the glass. I also didn't have any problems with temperature variation between sides that did or didn't have heaters. The water circulation through the divider was still sufficient to have an even temperature profile with just one heater.

Welcome to the forum What central americans do you have? You guys over there are able to get many more species than we can get here due to import regulations etc.

Go and have a look at the Hollywood Fish Farm. Last time I was talking to them they had one. Other places will probably have them too, they seem reasonably common. Fee at Tirau Tropical Blues had some, Living Waters in Taurangi have had some and Wet Pets in Palmerston Nth still has several. However you may not end up with a pure breed Amphilophus citrinellum, it may have some of the very closely related A. labiatum in it as well. These two can be very difficult to distinguish between and they may have been imported as one another and interbred too. However they are still cool fish. I have one A. citrinellum and another that I think has at least a little A. labiatum in it as it looks a bit different (slightly bigger lips, more pionted snout etc).

Was there any more detailed info about the results obtained with these silk filters? It is difficult to assess their potential without more detailed info. What specifically were they talking about when they said 'pollution' and 'harmful bacteria'? By pollution were they just meaning suspended solids? If so this is nothing special. Leaving the water to settle for extended periods of time would probably work just as well. On the other hand if it were removing some dissolved compounds, e'g. heavy metals etc, this would be more impressive, but I think this is very unlikely to occur. A 50% reduction in bacterial load is not what I would call good in terms of water treatment. If you have high bacterial numbers initially you will still have high numbers after a 50% reduction e.g. 50% of 100000 cfu/ml is still 50000 cfu/ml. Normally something like 99% reduction would be better i.e. down to 1000 from 100000. Even thats still a lot of bacteria, especially if we are talking about high numbers of faecal coliforms. It would still be unsafe to drink.

Nope, I'm afraid not. Black objects radiate heat less than other colours, thats how they absorb heat faster than other colours. Likewise white objects radiate more than other colours so they absorb heat slower.

Welcome Frank, always good to have plenty of people around that like big fish.

does the alarm go off if the temperature gets too high as well as too low?

Don't forget another important variable in biological filtration, the amount of filter volume (the amount of volume the media occupys), or probably more importantly the amount of surface area provided for bacterial colonisation. This controls how many bacteria you have available to convert wastes. If you only have a small bacterial population, it doesn't matter how many times you turn the tank volume over, the bacteria won't be able to process the wastes fast enough. Bacteria can only convert watses at a certain rate, if you use a high turn over rate you may just be supplying them with wastes faster than they can convert them. Beyond this point any extra turnover is just improving the mechanical filtration, helping to clear the water of debris faster. There are rules of thumb out there for the amount of filter volume that you should provide for a given tank volume, but I can't remember what they are off the top of my head.

Sixbar distichodus ? http://www.fishbase.org/Summary/SpeciesSummary.cfm?ID=10787 You sound like you've been on quite a tour around the country. Did you stop at many other fish shops?

I doubt it somehow. I think they just decided to get enough brackish fish in the shop that it would be worth while setting up a specialist tank.

As far as I know pumice is inert and it should not increase the pH at all. Also even if there were wood pieces left in the pumice they would be more likely to decrease the pH (but probably not very much) rather than increase it. I have some aquarium gravel that has quite a lot of pumice mixed in with it and it does nothing to the pH. I have actually put a small amount of bird grit in a 'hang on the back' type filter on this tank to keep the pH up and unlike pumice it has a very noticeable effect.

I am sure that my landlord would love that

Sorry to hear that Rob, they were a really beautiful pair of fish.