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jestep

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Everything posted by jestep

  1. Wow, terrible to hear. Some of the first corals I got a decade or so ago when I went from FW to full reef addiction were from Brooks.
  2. Not saying it's completely gone, but facebook has sucked the life out of many discussion forums, for the worse IMO as well.
  3. The live live rock has always amazed me. Stuff is always interesting without even adding anything to it. I think I remember seeing a thread where someone had an octopus hitchhiker with some even.
  4. That's awesome, reminds me of the Julian Sprung mangrove refugium.
  5. FB groups have quickly and unfortunately taken over many local clubs. It's really a shame as well, since there is no posterity and no accountability for content, it's almost impossible to search them as well because Facebook's goal is interaction, not quality, which results in so much bad information out there and then it's gone, then regurgitated again on the same question a few weeks later. I've brought a thread up about this in the past, I got out of the hobby for some time due to personal reasons, but it was really sad seeing this club lose so much attention. It's really an incomparable resource for the hobby. Big forums of many different topics are suffering similar losses in interest as well.
  6. The simple and relatively cheap answer is just get a generator. I have nothing against battery based systems, cost aside, but IME, nothing is going to be easier than a generator with a good engine. A good 4 stroke fuel injected engine is crucial though since ethanol in gasoline makes small carbureted engines almost unusable if any storage is involved. I went all electric with my push and riding lawn mowers because I got sick of rebuilding briggs and honda engines. Unfortunately many of us have PEC for electricity, about 30% of Austin total, who offers exactly zero rebates or incentives on solar. I believe their buyback rate is close to or at zero now as well, they did have a promo period about 10 years ago where they offered decent terms on solar buyback, comparable to COA, but now I think it's less than wholesale even, which is like $.02 / kWh. I've got about 2500 sq ft of south facing roof, I would be all over solar if the break even time / cost wasn't about 25 years for me.
  7. For freshwater, the classic eheims are unbeatable IME. They can last decades, I've run one in the past for like 10 years without even changing filter pads and it was fine. For SW, definitely wouldn't recommend one either. Most of the denitrification is done in the tank itself. Canisters just make a good way to create a large nutrient storage container.
  8. Check the Austin Reefers FB group, there were a bunch of really nice ones posted today or yesterday.
  9. Just found this by accident, but Ryobi makes this 300W inverter for their 40V lawnmower batteries, which I have since I got a battery powered mower a while back. They also have a smaller 150W one for their smaller batteries. https://www.homedepot.com/p/RYOBI-300-Watt-Powered-Inverter-Generator-for-40-Volt-Battery-RYi300BG/308736685 The cool thing about this is you can run emergency tank equipment for a really long time since lithium batteries are so much better than the lead acid ones in normal UPS's at running low power drawing equipment. With minimal equipment you could be good for more than a day on a single battery which beats any normal UPS and you don't have to deal with a generator. For example a Vortech MP40 on a lower setting could do as much as 80 hours on one 6Ah battery, anyone who has dealt with a UPS on their tank can attest how crazy that is. Some of the other brands may have them as well but a super useful product for aquarium emergencies and general power backup without dealing with gas, especially if you already have a mower using the batteries.
  10. Didn't realize it was you who posted this on FB, but this is handedly the oldest one I've ever heard of in captivity, and fromias aren't far behind. I don't think most make it even a year.
  11. Due to a whole load of personal stuff, I don't get on the forum frequently. But, I wanted to suggest to the mods / admin, maybe combining the subtopics back into the main ones at this point. I know there was a bunch of splitting about 4 or 5 years ago because it got overly complicated to keep track of everything in one forum. Was just looking at the general lack of activity these days and it's depressing for sure. I know facebook has sucked up a lot of the daily what/how/where posts, which is really unfortunate because it's a god awful platform for something as complex as reef keeping, or aquarium keeping in general, but just wanted to make this suggestion to maybe make it a little less difficult to see all the posts without having to click through a bunch of individual forums. I try to push people to this forum as often as possible. Facebook is just one and done, never see a topic again, so you get the same questions all the time, with weird incomplete responses and what I can only describe as some sort of fanboy up-votes frequently on incorrect advice. There's no accountability or posterity in using facebook for advice that can cost people hundreds to thousands of dollars as well as significant emotional stress when someone accepts s*** advice from someone. I also think the theme or platform change from the past hasn't helped. I don't use a phone, most forum software has much more user friendly ways to track topics that a user subscribes to, which this one used to, but that's been gone for years now. For an example, vBulletin forums have a settings page which shows all personal recent topics, it's absolutely the best page on the forum with all subscribed threads and subscribed forums, and this one used to have the exact same page, but no longer does. I can see my own activity, but it's not organized in a way that allows me to see threads with new replies at the top. Anyway, just wanted to throw that out there. I'm trying to get more involved again, but this has been one of the best resources I've ever seen including the huge reef forums, for quality advice that sticks around. Is a shame to see the activity down so much.
  12. jestep

    EB8

    Looking for an Apex Energy Bar 8, preferably lightly used, if anyone has one they are wanting to sell. I have one freaking out on me.
  13. My hometown has the current most snow in the US. Even they don't know what to do with it. More than 90 inches in a week if anyone is interested: http://www.denverpost.com/2017/01/11/snow-crested-butte-colorado-snowiest-town/

  14. I was getting pretty significant bouncing when I was changing it every 4 weeks. I actually tried just increasing the frequency of changing it out, and had trouble with dropping it too low. Then tried adding less on subsequent doses and didn't drop it enough, it was like I was always too low or too high with a single reactor. The multi setup just made it a lot easier all around for me. Did you have a calculation for the concentration of KNO3 you used for your dosing? Trying to get this all on paper so I can accurately plan a dosing schedule. I calculated I need for my 380 liters of total volume, .62g of KNO3 to increase concentration by 1ppm. This is compensated for molarity. I'm not sure what the maximum amount I can dissolve in water is going to be, but if I can add 62g to 1L of water, and then dose 100ml per day, it would add 1ppm NO3. If I can get away with dissolving double that, 50ml per day would increase NO3 by 1ppm. If the brief research I've done on bacteria uptake is close to correct, the N:P uptake ratio is 6:1, meaning I need to increase NO3 by a factor of 6 to facilitate the consumption of 1 factor of PO4. That's something like 300ml of fairly concentrated solution, which is basically why you are able to dump this in your tank without serious chemistry issues. I've never calculated the total mass of PO4 my tank is producing, so going to figure that out to get a baseline of what I'm actually needing to deal with per month here.
  15. Actually a net of 2/3 cup a week, but a lot. I've gone down to a 3 reactor GFO regimen, and doing incrementally 1 cup per week, with the 4th week idle. The idle week allows me to readjust the estimated amount up or down. I started a 4 reactor one to minimize bouncing phosphate, but the 3 reactor method has actually been more stable and less prone to overdoing it.
  16. That's really my thinking. I have upped my feeding to about 3 times per day on average, at least once per day is with a frozen which tend to be significant PO4 sources. But, even GFO reduction would be beneficial, I think maybe even desirable for control purposes, but I'm currently at 1 cup per week right now... I never thought I would intentionally dose nitrates on a reef tank, but a light bulb more or less went off and at least in theory it can solve a lot of High PO4 and NO3/PO4 imbalance issues. I'm glad someone else has at least tried it though but I definitely see potential risks in overdoing it. I did get an extremely accurate doser recently, so might start slow dosing to see where it goes. The effects should be almost immediate, correct (as in days)? I imagine PO4 uptake is going to be quickly apparent with a moderately accurate baseline and minimal other changes that would affect it.
  17. Revisiting this. Is anyone still playing with KNO3 dosing of any sort? Short backstory, I have extremely efficient NO3 export and have been dealing with PO4 through the use of GFO. I start getting cyano around .06 - .08ppm PO4. However, my NO3 is completely undetectable. It's undetectable using a Salifert NO3 doubling the reagent on the same volume of water, which translates to a resolution of 20 ppb. It's low. So my thinking here, is that by dosing KNO3 it would allow a more controlled uptake of PO4 possibly eliminating the necessity to use GFO at all. Obviously this has to be carefully planned and controlled, but presuming the redfield ratio holds true and I don't somehow lose the bacteria necessary to process my NO3 and PO4, the addition of nitrate will allow the system to process the excess PO4. I suspect this comes at a risk of overdoing nitrate and stripping the system of PO4 entirely, but someone correct me if I'm completely off here at least in theory.
  18. I do not like that road, can't imagine it in the rain. The exposure is just way too much and sliding 10 - 15 ft just thinking of braking doesn't even qualify as unnerving when sitting above a 2000 ft cliff. I'd mountain bike it..., but not going to jeep it again.
  19. Here's a few of ours from the punch bowl: They had a massive rock slide last spring, so it got a lot gnarlier. It was completely impassable for a while but the forest service and some volunteers got it cleared up enough to get over it. Last time I was on it, we had to stop a family from Texas ( no offense anyone) down at crystal mill from trying to drive up it in an Excursion. I'm not sure if we succeeded, but hopefully they got stuck or turned around before it got too dangerous. Up until about 6 or 7 years ago, there were still a bunch of jeeps and trucks down in the river. Looks a lot nicer now, but I almost wish they kept them down there as a reminder.
  20. Derailing... Do you do any jeeping around here? We left our jeep at our family's house up in Colorado because we never found anywhere nearby to go. Figured there some stuff towards Fredericksburg or Kerrville, but really never had much use for the jeep down here. I have only been once, but there is an "off road adventure park" in Marble Falls. It's called Hidden Falls. It's a very nice place and the Austin jeep community is always doing things out there. My family vacation most years is a trip to Colorado. Nothing like doing all the jeep trails up in the mountains. We are usually in the Silverton area. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk Pro Nice, is that one at the top of Hurricane? We're from about 2.5 hours East of Ouray, further from Silverton, but have done a ton in that area, engineer, ophir, imogene, blackbear once (never again under any circumstance ever...), and more East of this area, Crested Butte, Salida, Buena Vista, etc. I think the ones in the San Juans are the best for views by far, even the ones more like dirt roads are just amazing.
  21. Derailing... Do you do any jeeping around here? We left our jeep at our family's house up in Colorado because we never found anywhere nearby to go. Figured there some stuff towards Fredericksburg or Kerrville, but really never had much use for the jeep down here.
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