suphew

boil both rocks and wood if you are worried about, personally I dont bother, bit of a scrub to get rid of the worst and put in the tank. if you have problems cleaning the coraline algae (pink stuff) or tube works etc off the sea rock, soak them in white vinigar over night it will help break down the calcium. (brown vinigar works but not as fast).

This stuff is easy to figure out. You just don't bother and buy monster pumps, 500-1000lph here or there makes very little difference. The way I have done it is to say I want about 20 times turn over in the tank, tanks about 1000l, return pump (UP7) rated at 7000lph or something, say 6000lph allowing for headloss etc, so want another 14000lph out of loops, power heads etc.

Those taps slappers has are the ones. Again strongly suggest you use these and don't try and save a couple of $ here I use laguna UP7 and Ehiem pumps neither are completely quiet, but IMHO both are pretty good. Quiet pumps depend as much on how well you can mount them as much as anything. Pies has his closed loops timed to not be running during the hours in the evening he is sitting in the room with his tank.

How thick is the glass? if you use 10mm or thicker it would be fine. bracing roung the edges is a good idea to.

These are what I use, and from other tanks I have seen are pretty commonly used by others. There has been a bit of discussion on how to install them, I removed the rubber seal from mine and used a bead of silicon on the inside of each side, as the fitting is tightened up the silicon spreads out and makes a really solid seal. Others do the same but leave the rubber in and silicon all 4 contact surfaces. Either way is fine really. Because you are using these fittings I assume your going to use pressure plumbing, which is a good move. Be careful which taps you use, the best seem to be the black ones with blue handles, sorry I have no idea what the brand is but they aren't hansen. Other cheaper taps can jam, usually off, I have a white one with red handle that you commonly see in shops and it is a pain in the @#$. You can get all these bits from Mico, in Wlg atleast they are by far the best.

Excellent they will be fine at that size

really wonder if you actually read what you post Thankyou wasp. Sorry Bill, point taken (MY first warning by the way )

do you know how small they are? they often dont move tanks well if under a couple of cm long. good luck, they are great fish and you should be able to breed your own with out too much trouble. keep an eye on any food you feed them as they usually have plently of food in the tank anyway so might not eat added food which will rot after a while

there are so many ways I could reply to the misinformation from layton, but as is usual he driven a tread to death with a lack of fact and logic, contridictions and then when proved incorrect by sound reasoning lowering it to personal insults. I still stand by what I said at the start, chose to do what almost every other reefer in the world does or take Laytons word for that using his system will be ok. Pretty simple choice really. My last word.

Feel like I'm banging my head against a wall. Because I dont have a half turned off tap in the middle of my standpipe waiting for an object to get stuck on or for crap to build up. My down flow is 40mm of smooth unresticted pipe, i would happily send a golf ball down it. You seem to keep missing the point, I have never said the siphon system wont work and isnt "safe", what I have said is the tap adds flaw to the design which could be a problem, the durso doesn't have this flaw and is therefore safer. see above, I have no need to add 'extras' to my durso to allow for a flawed design bingo!! features like not having a half turned off tap contolling the system. I understand what your saying now, so FUD is to my posts what BS is to yours?? How about trying to clearly argue you case instead of using pointless generic phrases that add nothing. And I have explained why I disagree, not going to bother again, but am still waiting for you to explain why you think a system relying on a half turn off tap is as safe? Again if you can't add anything useful, why do you even bother?? I dont know why two, I'm just using the only working siphon system that I remember has been posted here as an example (crackers). I assume he has two because he knows the half turned off tap idea could be risky and has added a work around. Quote from www.dursostandpipes.com "The End-Cap is held on with teflon tape. A very small, as small as I could make it (thickness of a toothpick), hole is drilled in the top of the End-Cap fitting." This is the one and only way Richard says to make the holes. To go back to my point before, the reason durso's fail is because people can't read and follow instructions, you posting just confirms you are one of these people. Your just contradicing your self here And again.

It's about time you came and saw my new tank anyway Steve, give me a ring some time and pop over.

yep theres a 60% probability of at 3% likely hood. I have some monstor snails, tube worms, etc that live in my over flow, just because they have to be small to get in doesn't mean they wont grow large in there. Sorry must have missed the part where you listed standpipe covers in your design, hmmm seems to be missing from your pictures Mine? Never because I use durso's Fear? thats taking it a bit far isn't it? I was just pointing out what I see as a major flaw, you have yet to convince me that this isn't the case. I dont disagree that there are ways around this, like Creaker has done by adding a second backup siphon, but this just seems like adding complication and expense to make a poor system work. What is the rest of your point, most people do use durso because they are tried and tested, this is fact. I have never said there aren't other options that work (in fact I have said the opposite a few times, aka SteveA's setup), but why advise newby's to try re-inventing the wheel, risking their live stock. I have to disagree with this, durso's do exacty what they are designed to do, provide a safe and quite over flow. So would it be cheaper to have two siphon pipes, two holes, two taps, as creaker has done to try and work around the flaws of the siphon system? I don't think so. The extra parts in a durso, 1 'T', 1 90, 1 end cap, thats less than the cost of 1 extra tap. Firstly this just show that you don't understand how durso work, reason being that you dont use air valves because they block up with salt etc. I do agree that it takes time fine tuning, but once it is done, thats it. I havn't used a siphon system but I can't see how you wouldn't need to constantly retune it as algae builds up, pump output changes, etc etc. I would rather spend a week setting a durso once than a life time of adjusting taps to have to the correct level of water in my over flow.

Damn, then maybe I should get rid of my durso's

I'm sure this works fine until a snail/fish/stone/etc gets stuck in the ball valve. The point is you are restricting the flow, which has two affects, first you are increasing the likely hood that something will get caught at the restrictor, yes this could happen with a durso but is far less likely because there its far more likely that an object will get caught by a ball valve than a pipe reduction. And second you are reducing the margin of error if something does go wrong, the maximum amount of flow you can get is dictated by the smallest part of the plumbing. Rather than just making unquailifed statements can you please explain what is incorrect about what I said? I'm always willing to take on board correct information and learn from it. I run two setups both with durso's, the DURSO's on both are very quite (nb: I didn't say silent), the noise I get is from the water going over the comb and the water exiting the down flow pipe, both of these you will still get with any other system. The reason some people have problems with durso's is because they cant read and follow instructions, they don't make them up correctly ie reduce the pipe size between the standpipe and the down flow, and they don't spend the time tuning them before they give up.

Would be good for running phos resin, carbon, zeolite etc, but seems an expensive way to get a little extra flow, you could buy a steam without a controller for the same money and get tons more flow. As long as the water stays in the tank you can't have too much flow, there are people with 100x turnover in their tanks.

I have found the fluval tronic's to be fine but no heaters seem to be 100% fool proof. I use an external temp controller now with cheap heaters turned up to full and have never looked back. However my temp controller cost over a hundred $ and turns on fan/chiller as well so I don't know what the cheaper ones are like.

So far........ :lol: :lol: KP 95% of people use durso's, there are other ways, but theres good reasons why most people stick to the tried and tested.

This looks a bit like and external durso, don't see why it wouldn't work (surface skimmiing might be a problem) but I would make sure you apply the durso rules, ie reduce the pipe size at some point to get some back pressure. Check out www.dursostandpipes.com if you haven't already.

If anyone in Wlg is looking for soft corals I have a number of frags at the moment, leathers, 4-5 diff mushies, xenia, tree coral. PM me if your interested.

The hutt pet shop will order in marine dry goods if you ask. they also often stock, food, and coral sand. Raymus at the pet house is in the process of setting up a coral tank, he was using a silly little 30l or so. Shame its still an hour+ drive away from Wlg.

might be cyno? i have seen this on the surface if there isn't enough water movement there

I should also add that unless you have high light and CO2 you shouldnt need to add any fertiliser, its all about balance if you increase the fertiliser without doing the light and CO2 you will just grow algae

if you are putting iron/fert tablets in the substrate you shouldnt need to add it to the water, plants aborb most stuff via there roots not the leaves. fert in the water column will feed algae as much as it will the plants. the only time you need to worry about adding stuff to the water is if you are short on a particular chemical, the plants will tell you if you are missing something, there are plently of charts on the web that tell you what symptom equals wht shortage

pies got a MEGA scraper from somewhere that will remove coralline algae, there was a warning on it that if you put the two halfs together without glass in between it has to go back to the manufactures to be seperated, lol, prob just marketing hype but still very nice cleaner. wooden finish to. Janes should be able to tell you where he got it from since hes been banned. personally i use a paint scraper. I have a couple of different length plastic pipes that i jam on the handle to get to the difficult spots.

Make sure you get a few different masonary drill sizes. I put a hole in some of my rocks and a plasic pipe down the middle to make a bommy, found that the hole ended up about half again the size of the drill bit.