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So I've been reading this thread for a while now, and I decided I want fish. I ended up getting a thirty gallon glass tank from my co-worker's mom. She had saltwater fish for a few years, but then couldn't really keep up with the maintenance, it crashed, she dumped everything, and it's been dry for a while. It smells kinda weird, like a not-good, but not rank aquarium odor. Anyway, it's obviously gonna need cleaned out and prepped before I get live rock/sand and begin a cycle, and I was wondering if anyone had a link or a guide for the best practices of getting it ready. Do I need to test the silicone somehow? It seems kinda pliable and very slightly tacky still, but at some points it is a bit discolored. Best ways to clean it? The bottom is scratched to gently caress, is this gonna be an issue? The substrate that was in there is just small rocks, I can't really think of a use for it and was thinking that I should just pitch it. I suppose I should just fill it with water and see if it leaks first, what's the point of cleaning it if it's boned anyway? I'm pretty sure someone asked this exact question about prep before, but I can't seem to find it.
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Mar 9, 2011 02:20
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 09:28 |
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fanaglethebagle posted:If you're going to start a tank you might find yourself happier buying a new tank when your local petco has a dollar-a-gallon sale. It's not worth having something go wrong when you've already started. Whaaat. Man for some reason I never thought to buy a new one, I just figured it'd be too much. I actually never looked into it. Well, I bought this one, so why not ride it out? She gave a bunch of other stuff with it too, what I think I'm gonna do is post pictures of stuff, and then we can kind of figure out what's worthwhile. My guess: everyone vetos everything.
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Mar 9, 2011 03:29
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Welp, looks like this was a bonejob. The inventory: Theres a pair of Second Nature Whisper™ PowerFilters with a poo poo ton of carts,  The filters themselves are disassembled/broke.  A (yes, one) lovely light,  What appears to have been an airator, before I stepped on it,  lovely and gross hang on back heater,     some ph tests,  algae wafers,  A LOT of Ick Clear, like another full box,  Blurry pic of "Clear Water (for established aquariums),"  Ammonia clhloramine eliminator,  and hilariously, "Stress Coat" with the healing power of Aloe Vera. Features include:
Treats 360 Gallons of Fresh or Salt Water
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Mar 9, 2011 05:54
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I want to start off fish only with live rock and sand. I'd like to try and completely use biological filters if I could, just because it seems cooler and a bit more natural than skimmers, etc. Maybe if I can keep it running well for a while I'd put in a little easy to care for coral. E: yep, I read a lot of these. As far as establishing the sand bed, is it really fine to get no live sand at all? I thought it would be like with rock, mostly dry but with a scoop of live in there too. I plan on going slow with this. I have no desire to dump in some moray or something and have it die. SniperWoreConverse fucked around with this message at 06:26 on Mar 9, 2011 |
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Mar 9, 2011 06:18
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Yeah, I was planning on setting up a sump as well. The main thing is taking the proper amount of time to weigh all the options. I think I should actually just make up a list of every possible thing I'll need, then I can start getting it in stages. Plan everything out.
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Mar 9, 2011 06:37
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So I was looking at RO/DI systems yesterday, and while cooking just now I had a thought: why don't people distill their own water and use that? I remember a guide I had read talking about how you can buy distilled instead of RO but it'd never be worth the money. The only thing I can come up with other than the cost of heat is that some contamination might still make it through, like if someone used copper parts to do it, or if some compound is in there that evaporates close enough to 100c.
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Mar 31, 2011 01:03
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Ah, yeah I never thought about the time sink. RO is the way to go for sure. What's the deal with LEDs? Aquarium grade is supposed to be in the 10,000K range? I was trying to look for a few for DIY, but can't seem to find anything other than premade arrays. I was actually hoping to find some with the correct specs from digikey, even if they aren't made specifically for aquariums. I'm gonna be getting a lot from them soon and figured why not do two birds with one stone. I tried going on reefcentral to look at their stuff, but a day after I registered I couldn't log in anymore. I tried to recover my password, but they don't have any such email registered. Weird. They have a ton of good stuff, but a lot of poo poo posting.
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Mar 31, 2011 18:25
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ludnix posted:Here is my LED build thread: Yep, they only have blue (that I saw), and minimum order is 1k for the type you used. So unless someone wanted to experiment with the weird little ones, or the entire forum did a ridiculous group buy... Actually yes, everyone give me four hundred bucks and I will mail you your leds. Think of the savings! Why does everyone seem to like Cree anyway? Why not whatever other guys? e: Does anyone know why these colors of light are good for aquaria? Anybody got a link on hand? SniperWoreConverse fucked around with this message at 03:59 on Apr 1, 2011 |
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Apr 1, 2011 03:56
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ludnix posted:CREE etc Yeah, best bet is to get them premounted on a star. I was looking at their (Cree's) site and figured the star system would be a waste. But after reading some of the pdfs they have I realized that the star is exactly what they recommend to use, as in they give you the exact dimensions on it for best results. I suppose you could try and make an alternate system, but why bother? If you mess up you just blew out critical equipment. I suppose you could bond the led directly to like copper tubing and run some fluid through a radiator for silent running, but It'd never be worth the work unless you know your surface mounts, and have the patience of a saint. What would be cool is if you could take the heat from the lights and use it to warm the water. I mean, it wouldn't go up even 1°, but it would still be kind of cool. More likely even if you had some kind of safe heat exchange between the lights and water, the water would warm the lights too much and you'd lose product life. One thing that could actually work is to set up a system with a computer that monitors temp, ph, nitrates, everything, and is able to graph it. Set it up so the lights can be controlled and powered as well. You could replace the air cooling with oil (but leave the dumb case thing out). Once the computer gets up to temp you can put a salt-safe radiator in the tank. It should keep heating the water until it hits equilibrium. Now, depending on the computer's load this temp can be very high. As most corals aren't native to death valley, It will be important to manage convection and all that. The larger mass of the tank should distribute the heat well, and the max heat can be kept within normal range with a combination of load management and evaporation. It'd be super important to minimize any leaks. The tank would (hopefully) be fine because the oil would just float to the top and is pretty nontoxic, but if any water got in the computer you would be immediately hosed. If the computer fails or loses power, the oil will actually stay hot for hours, so if the pump still worked everything could still be ok. It might be an actual advantage in an emergency situation. It's kind of a dumb sperg idea, but I'm wondering if such a thing is possible. I think I'm going to set up that tank I have and run it like this with no stock for a few weeks as a feasibility study, purely for information.
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Apr 1, 2011 18:54
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Yeah, is there really some spore or something that might still remain?
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Jul 12, 2011 22:35
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But the site says it'll handle $400 worth of livestock no problem!
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Aug 15, 2011 15:51
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another loser posted:Well... this is new. So has anyone heard about the so called "dymico" "filter?" I read an article about it, and apparently it's going to revolutionize aquarium keeping by somehow making all filters, skimmers, and reactors obsolete? "Dymico" stands for "dynamic mineral control" supposedly it completely removes harmful nutrients while buffering water parameters and allowing you to keep robust plankton populations in-tank. At the same time it's supposed to be far cheaper and less expensive to run than standard gear. So far these systems appear to be installed mostly in huge Aquariums, not home aquariums. I guess it pumps tank water into a chamber with bacteria in the substrate, and it adds CO2 and organic carbon. I assume this carbon source is some alcohol, the idea reminds me of denitrification reactors like in sewage treatment. All this chemical injection and and water intake is mystically controlled via science numbers. I dunno if this is big news in the aquarium world or not, a bit of googling indicates that a LOT of research is being put into this idea of using a reactor and ditching mechanical filtration altogether. The concept seems semi-plausible to me (but I'm no pro) and I'm psyched to think that everything could become cheaper to get into equipment-wise, as well as easier to take care of livestock-wise. Right now I'm extremely poor so I have to live vicariously through others. (ps post more pics)
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Feb 14, 2012 20:14
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So just a bunch of water changes or what?
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Feb 14, 2012 20:50
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Would they clean under your fingernails? That may be helpful for the gentlemen of goonish hygiene.
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Feb 11, 2013 07:13
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cculos posted:They do actually. It's really funny to watch. They go after any dead skin on your hand, too. This one has literally run across the span of my tank to jump onto my hand. I have a theory. Someone who has cleaner shrimp needs stop brushing their teeth for a week. Instead, they should just dunk their open mouth into a tank with cleaner shrimp, and then compare how clean the shrimp can keep them versus how clean brushing can. If you don't have a tank with one, just do it at your local shop.
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Feb 12, 2013 21:24
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api call girl posted:Probably a bad idea overall to let that much food particles and oils from your mouth/skin into the water. Depending on size of system. If I were the storekeeper I'd probably go ahead and throw you out. Nah I was just messing around, I thought everyone would realize I was joking because that's nasty as hell and you'd probably get flatworms or stung in the eye by an anemone or something. The real question is wither or not you can stop buying toilet paper and just dunk your rear end in the tank.
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Feb 15, 2013 08:01
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A bullshit post: Has anyone heard of someone doing some crazy poo poo like dumping a hundred pounds of salt in a swimming pool and running it as a tank? I was talking with someone about that guy who made his own x thousand gallon aquarium and they tried saying it would be totally cheaper and cooler to just use an in ground swimming pool. Wouldn't it seep saltwater into the aquifer eventually because liners wear out? Or just generally be a bad idea? Or will the new wave of dedicated aquarists start acting like grade-D level supervillains with their deadly pool of catsharks?
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Apr 23, 2013 06:31
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api call girl posted:You absolutely could make a saltwater tank out of fiberglass, which I understand is used in swimming pools. I've thought-experimented building large fiberglass setups but indoors. You know, I just completely assumed pool = vinyl liner for some reason. So I guess it could actually be pulled off. I'd throw a conservatory/greenhouse kind of structure over it, that should keep out raw rain and depending on the glazing it could be translucent instead of transparent, so you don't have to have the sun beaming directly in unless you wanted to. It'd do a little towards keeping the temps up, but you'd want a good source of heat. With a big enough reservoir and set of collectors solar thermal could be a solid choice, but maybe some kind of geothermal heat pump would have to be in the loop; it may actually need to be cooled at some point in summer. That's a lot of gallons and a lot of heat energy to move. You might have to do something weird to keep the current up, I dunno. If you've come this far power heads and such would seem boring. Maybe have it divided into more than one part and stagger pumps to mimic some sort of tide. I'm assuming this person is already crazy and/or rich, so you might want to have some mangroves in there and have them grow huge. More practically, does anyone have any links or advice on how they would set up a small, cheap, easy kind of tank? I've been thinking I might be able to con my boss into letting me set something up on my desk, but he'd be pissed if he notices me loving around with all kinds of water changes and poo poo. Also I don't want it to break my desk. Or have everything die if some fucker jacks around with the thermostat over the weekend. I'd like to have a few corals or anemonies, more even than fish, but I guess I should focus on cheap and hardy stocking for this. Maybe all invertebrates? A few little fish? I want to keep it as simple as possible, how should I filter? What would you guys do with this blank slate?
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Apr 26, 2013 04:30
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I got banned for I guess not posting quickly enough  I registered, looked around, and like one or two days later went to post and found out I was banned. Guess SA style lurking is not always sound postin' technique.
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May 8, 2013 03:26
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I was going to suggest you do a golden rectangle tank, just remove a similar segment from the corner. I even went to try and diagram it out to make sure it looked good and give you some concrete numbers, but it seems like I've completely forgotten all forms of math  I'm wondering if you guys have opinions on a hypothetical concept, the marine Walstad tank. Would macroalgae absorb enough nutrients to work? Would you have to use seagrass? Would the whole thing just spontaneously combust?
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May 31, 2013 03:18
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So I've been lurking this thread for a while, but now I might have the chance to finally set up a tank. Basically this is going to be in an office setting, so lower maintenance and hardier creatures would be better. Also I like cheap, but that's somewhat less important. Any advice? This would be my first salt tank. I haven't really done a ton of research yet, because I might get shot down. Probably going to be limited to like 30 gallons with no refugium.
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Apr 5, 2014 23:39
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Anyone know where or how to get seagrass? Every forums I found with people talking about it was from like 5 years ago and it's a list of dead links. Had one place that I found that actually still ships, but they're out of stock. Is it safe to assume that it just comes into stock seasonally?
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Apr 13, 2014 22:41
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Thanks. What's LA-DD? Anyone have opinions about Gulf Coast Ecosystems (live-plants.com)? Those are like the only two I was able to see that still have any form of seagrass.
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Apr 13, 2014 22:53
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Any opinions or general recommendations for reverse osmosis?
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Apr 24, 2014 18:30
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Is it really necessary to get the DI stage? I had heard some bullshit somewhere where you can get away with jus RO unless you have something particularly sensitive.
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Apr 24, 2014 20:25
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Any advice on heaters?
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May 8, 2014 23:28
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so what about titaniums? Worth it? Waste? Should I get a separate controller? Are inlines dumb?
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May 9, 2014 00:08
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Sounds good to me. Now, I suppose I should hook all this poo poo up to GFCI. But this is at work, so while I can probably get away with rewiring a socket when no one's looking, it's not something I want to do at all. So should I get one of those extension cords that have it? Just say gently caress it and spray the breaker box down with salt mix?
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May 9, 2014 00:34
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Haha, dude not in this dump. At least they don't have visible test buttons or anything like that. E: Actually now that I'm back in this tread and remember: I still cannot find poo poo for getting shoal grass, but I was reading up on the requirements. Everything I saw indicates either "old as poo poo 'mature' substrate" or "enriching" the substrate with either mineralized soil or some other kind of fertilizer. Obviously this is a new tank with new substrate, and I strongly doubt the wisdom of pouring miracle grow in there, and I didn't really plan ahead enough to mineralize any soil, so would it be insane to pump the huge amount of mulm I have in my freshwater system? This was from an experimental aquaponics setup I had. My goal with that was to break down vegetable food scraps (more corn husks and uncooked stuff like that) and have it provide nutrients to actively growing plants. Because of some bullshit that came up I was never able to set up the plants part of the system to my liking, and I won't be able to for the foreseeable future. I basically have a good amount of mineralized snail poo poo I could work into the sand if I wanted to. I figure the salt shock would kill any pathogens in there. Too radical? I was hoping to go for a heavily planted tank. It's not something I've really seen that much of in the saltwater world. And on sand: I was thinking a mix of silica and aragonite. I already have this very fine sand laying around doing nothing. I'd save some $$ using it.
SniperWoreConverse fucked around with this message at 00:55 on May 9, 2014 |
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May 9, 2014 00:43
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uuuh so I mixed some aragonite with ro/di water and I think it was a big mistake, It's completely chalky and kind of foamy almost like the water is dissolving the sand or something. Was I supposed to do the salt first? If I add salt will it fix itself? Do I just need to filter the hell out of it?
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May 11, 2014 23:36
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hey thanks for the advice everyone, it's working out great so far what do you all do for live rock? I don't really have good fish stores around me, if I order some won't it cost like $30,000 and be dead when it shows up?
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May 14, 2014 01:22
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NE Ohio
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May 14, 2014 01:25
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Castaign posted:I've regularly had this happen when I add water to aragonite. The cloudiness will fade after a few days. Yeah this is what happened, I don't know why I was freaking out over it. I set up this bullshit hang on back filter I happened to have laying around. Apparently it got completely clogged with silt/sediment/whatever, and it was running for a while just dumping water all over the office. Luckily the place didn't burn down and there's no damage to anything. Those fuckers were there for hours and somehow never realized what was happening. As soon as I walked in the door I knew something was up. Anyway if I get a real rear end canister filter, can I be fairly sure that it'll just stop working instead of dumping the water out the back like that?
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May 16, 2014 19:06
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api call girl posted:I would never use an actual canister filter with packed media for a saltwater tank. Fluidized media, yes. Packed, no. Also I would probably run it at water level, so only out of a sump, not the sole filtration system running on a shelf under the tank. Why?
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May 16, 2014 23:40
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How are you guys measuring this?
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May 26, 2014 17:56
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No, I mean are you dunking one end in the water and one in a ground socket or something?
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May 27, 2014 00:58
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Yeah but at the same time a fish isn't going to have one fin in the ground plug and one fin in the water. So wouldn't they just be exposed to whatever electricity is traveling through the water itself?
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May 27, 2014 16:17
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I tried metering my tank for voltage too, but I might have done it wrong, I was only able to get like .002v - .008v Couldn't pick up any detectable amps.
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May 29, 2014 21:23
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I think high amps / low volts applications are for magnetic field generators and electrolysis and stuff like that, but I don't really know. For something like that I guess it doesn't matter? I thought "it's the amps that kill" was a myth. Total power I thought was what causes harm and high amps or volts can be dangerous.
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May 30, 2014 02:41
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 09:28 |
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How're you gonna get robust healthy livestock if you don't feed em? Growing young corals need to eat so they can get big and strong!
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May 31, 2014 16:13
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