suphew

Just saw it for the first time, classic. Still like the Phil Collins one better, but I'm sure this one will also go down in history

Hay, I didn't even go and got roped in! Sounds like a great weekend, I would have loved to have been there.

What job are you wanting to do with a UV? There are a few, and the type UV filter and effectiveness of will depend on what you are trying to achieve.

The floor will be fine.

Are you looking for general heating for you house, or just for a fish room? If it's a fish room is it just to take the chill off, or are you going to not have heaters in the tanks and keep the whole room at about 25°? The cheapest options would have to be either solar heating, like a DVS or similar, but this is only going to take the chill off the air. Or a fire box, which can be just about free to run if you don't mind doing a bit of work. But probably not much use in a fish room.

What sort of efficient are you looking for? Energy efficient, cost efficient, or environmentally efficient?

See if you can get some coral rubble from your LFS, it will work better

Do you have any water tests? I'm mostly interested in your kH if you are adding buffer every water change your balance of calcium, carbonic hardness, and magnesium, might be right out. This can cause the calcium to preticipate out of the water causing white cloudiness. As has been said you are better to buffer the water using shell grit or similar, measuring the pH and using this as a way to judge how much buffer to add is pretty hit and miss because the pH in a tank will change a lot during the day anyway. You would also be better to measure the pH of the tank if anything and adjust this rather than the change water, the tank should be far more stable and give you a better idea of how much needs to be added. I good tip is to measure the tank pH at the same time of day every time.

What are the 'beneficial bacteria'? What else have you been doing to your filter? Do you clean it, add anything to it? Also that is a very large water change, how much to you normally change and how do you do it? Straight from the tap, water conditioners, etc?

His last post was well over a year ago, I'd assume he just hasn't updated his details.

A temperature controller will cost you $130 and you will never need to worry about your heating again. What does a high end heater cost?? A little little extra outlay at the beginning and you'll never need to buy expensive heaters again, far cheaper in the long run. http://www.deepblueaquarium.co.nz/Controllers%20&%20Montitors.htm

First you need to work out if you have micro bubbles. Turning any pumps off for 30 minutes should be enough time for the bubbles to dissipate. If you do have micro bubbles you need to either stop them at the source, ie stop the air going into the pump. Or trap them before they go back into the tank, filter wool can work well for this. In a tank with a sump you would use baffles to force the micro bubbles to the surface before the return pump.

How long has the tank been setup?? Sounds like a bacterial bloom to me, maybe you need a bit more filtration. Another option is micro bubbles, some of those wet dry filters have an air feed into the pump, could it be tiny air bubbles making there way back into the tank?

If you invest in a temperature controller you wont ever need to worry about the dodgy heater controllers again. The one I have is a dual channel so will also turn on fans if things get to hot.

Overkill maybe, but you can't over filter so that's not really a problem. The only disadvantages I can think of are the extra space required outside the tank, and the initial outlay to buy. Some of the advantages are, far longer periods between cleaning, more stable water, can be used on upgraded tanks, very little to see inside the tank, flexibility in terms of media, often quieter, greater capacity for changing bio-loads.

IMO you can't go past a canister filter

You can't glue perspex or acrylic to glass. For my overflow I glued a couple of glass strips behind where the perspex is sitting and used a bit of silicon just to loosely hold the perspex in place. The water pushing on the perspex holds it in place since the water level on the inside of the overflow is always lower then the tank side.

I've just switched from AVG to Avast. I don't know if it's any better to picking up viruses but I like it better.

If you buy a lotto tick you also have a 100% chance of winning I smoked for about 15 years and read Allan Car's "Easy way to stop smoking". I highly recommend the book For me it made it easy to not smoke, which I did for a year, unfortunately I still wanted to smoke so started again. 5 years later and I was ready to give up, stopped cold turkey and haven't had one for about 15 months. My point is the same as the others, first you have to REALLY REALLY want to stop cause no matter what method you use you body is going to be constantly telling you to start again. 15 months down and when I see people smoke a small part of me still wants to bludge a ciggy

Personally I would still bolt them, or maybe just glue them with "No more nails". I'm guessing you would need to have a stack of 3-4 blocks to get the height you want? They wouldn't be that stable a decent push and they might topple over.

I have made a stand this way before and it worked really well, but there are some down sides. You need to be able to bolt the cinder blocks and shelves which means you'll need a hammer drill and masonry drill bits The stand will end up being very very heavy, really you will need to make it in place. The blocks are rough on your hands, sound silly but you'll be surprised how many times I took skin off getting stuff from under the tank. The blocks take up lots of space. If you do decide to go ahead put a shelf on the bottom as well, this will spread the load out over a bigger area and save the blocks from damaging whatever the tank is siting on.

Really you can use whatever you like for the stand, steel, wood, cinder blocks, etc. There important points to note are 1) the base the tank sits on needs to be flat (and strong enough to stay flat with the weight of the tank on it) and level. There lots of ways of doing this. The cheapest I have ever done was to pick up a second hand office desk, the modern type with a thick Formica covered particle board top. Very strong, very flat. But you could use a couple of layers of ply, some thick MDF (well sealed), etc etc 2) Legs need to be strong enough to hold the weight, but also but have to be able to take the sideways forces from people leaning on it or earthquakes etc. A lot can be done with a couple of diagonal bracing 3) The weight needs to be spread out over as big an area as possible, think about the damage ladies high heels do to wooden floors

I wouldn't worry about it. I have used CO2 for years, and 3 different regulators and never had this happen. If you consider where regulators are used commercially, like hospitals for air supplies, welders, etc if these commonly got a sudden dump of gas or even significant change in pressure, there would be trouble

I have used CO2 in both fresh water and salt water, and I have never heard of a CO2 dump? Sure your not talking about a tank crash caused by CO2? You can't really get beyond a curtain point for CO2 in your water, it will reach saturation point then just bubble off, and saturation point is what you would be aiming for anyway. You talk about "tank getting empy" is this just a back syphon when using a yeast reactor? A good quality one way valve would fix this.

Wish I had know that before I carried one over the hill and spent a day cleaning it! :lol: