suphew

But a little careful increasing the CO2 flow because it will also change your pH and also the balance of CO2/light/nutrient which could have undesired effects.

The rule of thumb of sump flow is 3-5 x the volume of the display tank per hour, you don't need any other water movement in there.

Any cyclinder tester should sell them.

NSW has a slightly higher salinity than what you would use for tropical marine (watering down by 10% fixes this) other than that there is no difference chemically. For local marine, you can't get much better than local water. NSW = Natural sea water ASW = Artificial sea water RO/DI water is very pure water, for very small tanks you can just buy it from the super market, otherwise it's worth investing in an RO/DI filter. As the tank water evaporates it leaves behind impurities, if you top up this evaporation with dirty (tap) water the impurities will build up. Having an accurate way to test salinity is even more important for a small tank, a refractometer should be near the top of you purchase list. You need to do some research on how you want to run the tank, it is quite possible to run a small tank without a skimmer, but a skimmer does make the job a lot easier. As you suggest regular large water changes can remove the need for a skimmer, but you'll get sick of it pretty quickly. HTH

A refugium is simply a refuge. A place safe from (usually) fish. Depending on what you are wanting to protect will change what you have in there, normally it will just be live rock. But often people combine the refugium with deep sand beds and macro algae filters. There are pluses and minus's to all these things (DSB's, Refugiums, Algae filters, etc) and it's worth doing a lot of research and working out if you need these things before you add them. I'm a big fan of starting with a very basic, simple, sump, nothing in it other than the hardware you need (heater, skimmer, return pump, ato. No baffles, bubble traps, dividers, fuge, DSB, etc etc. All these can be added later if you actually need them. Take a DSB for example, it does one job, removes ntrate, but if add one at the start how do you ever know if you actually need one. And good luck trying to remove all that dirty sand. If on the other hand you wait to see if you have a nitrate problem that you can't control via skimming and live rock it's very easy to fill a bucket with sand and put it into the sump (or even external to the sump). People love to add baffles, dividers, bubble traps, they remove so much flexibility from your sump are really hard to remove once in place and most of the time not needed at all.

http://www.consumerbuild.org.nz/publish/maintenance/interior-pets.php Really unlikely that they are they termites, are they actually eating the wood? It's far more likely they are just some stray bugs that hatched in your cabinet. But what ever they are they wont eat though your cabinet overnight, it takes 10's of years for borer to structurally weaken wood, not so long for termites, but still years rather than days.

This thread has run it's course and is starting to cross the line toward religion so I have locked it.

Your pump should be big enough to turn your display over 3-5 times an hour, I little bit more if your running a trickle filter tower. So 4000-6000lph into your tank. The box your pump came in should have a flow curve printed on the side, work out the distance from the normal water level in your sump to the normal water level in your display and add 1/4-1/2 to allow for the resistance on the pipe work this is your total head height, use this number on the flow curve of your box to work out if the pump is correctly sized.

Maybe you didn't look carefully enough? The Pet Centre has the 3 different common sizes of T5 light hood (24w, 39w, and 54w) and at least 2 of each (I was in looking at them in the Porirua shop on Saturday and the Hutt shop on Sunday). They also have at least 1 each of the ballast units. Tube wise they have all sizes and minimum 2 of each, life-glo, Power-glo and Marine-glo, and reflectors for each size. Anything they don't have can be ordered in at the same discount if it's Glo brand, you just need to ask one of the staff members. Shops don't usually stock more than one brand cause of the large over head and small amount they sell, but anything can be ordered in if its available.

an old 150w Mh bulb I can have? Not the spade fitting type, the one held in by the pointy things (RS7). I was kindly given a couple of fittings but the bulbs are dead and I want to do some playing before I invest in expensive new bulbs.

The Pet Centre in Porirua and Lower Hutt has 30% off Glo T5 lights till the end of the month

More to the point, why would you want to add it to your tank? Magnesium Stearate makes "soap scum" in baths

20x is your minimum flow, it's not unheard of to go 100x, more is almost aways better. I also assume you know that wave pumps are different from a standard pond style pump? If your not sure what they look like google "tunze nano" and you'll see how they have a big wide flow rather than a high pressure jet of water.

Do you really want me to multiply 186 liters by 20 for you?

It also depends on what you plan on having in the tank, most of the MH rules are based on marine tanks. Fresh water bulbs are brighter (because they are lower kelvin), and the light requirements don't tend to be as high. So you can put the bulbs a lot higher giving far better coverage.

The rule of thumb is MINIMUM 20x the volume of the tank. My first 3 foot marine tank was about 300liters so telling us the length doesn't really help.

I skimmer wouldn't hurt because there will be some hitchiker critters, plus I'm sure some are likely to be added, but you are correct if he's not needing to add food to the tank he wont need to skim the waste back out.

Not sure if you read my post? The LFS doesn't make an informed judgement with other animals. Either the breeder passes on what the parents were and the LFS assumes they are correct and telling the truth. Or a vet takes a punt at it.

Yep and the only way tell a dogs breed(s) is to get a DNA test, I'm not sure if this can be done in NZ yet, as far as I know you still need to send the DNA sample to Aussie, cost is about $200. Dog breeds in Pet shops are stated either because the parents breed is "known" or because the VET that does the first check takes their best guess when they fill out the vaccination card. I'd call adding $200+admin costs for the pet shop a major.

I'm not sure if the iron in iron sand is bad but ore sands tend to also be full of lots of other heavy metals. I'm guessing they would be reasonably stable in salt water (as GFO is) but the pH tends to be stable and up round 8, fresh water tanks often tend down to 6pH or so which is low enough to dissolve some substrates. I have no idea if this is actually an issue, but given that it doesn't seem to be commonly used I'd hazard a guess that it is a problem.

Yeah it is a major to ask because most retailers aren't hardcore fish keepers, and as you have shown even amongst fish keepers a lot would have trouble correctly identifying them. The SAE can be ID'ed by the black body line going right through the tail, they will school in the LFS's tank (when younger), and they don't have the brown/gold line on top of the black.

Crossocheilus atrilimes Garra cambodgiensis

The black sand sold by LFS's looks more like man made sand to me, maybe from glass or similar. Iron sand is black, and Lava sand is also black, I don't think either of these would be good in a tank.

Sound like Asterina starfish, not usually a problem. Your snails going missing is might be crab you don't know about? I had one that must have been in my tank for a number of years before I saw him.