Jump to content

Elbeau

Members
  • Posts

    33
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Profile Information

  • Tank Size
    6Gal/14Gal

Elbeau's Achievements

Reef Keeper

Reef Keeper (2/6)

0

Reputation

  1. I ordered online one time. I ordered a lot of livestock for a tank that had just finished it's cycle. There was only one casualty, a cleaner shrimp. Without even showing the pics to the store, they agreed to give us credit toward a later order. All the livestock was healthy...actually a little TOO healthy. I ordered a "medium" maroon clown. I got a clownfish that was at least 6" long. I could have made a full meal out of that thing. It was HUGE, meaty and fat. I put the clown in first, then I put in some shrimp. The clown ate the shrimp before they even got to the bottom. It was pretty traumatic to watch. Among other things I ordered I got some carbon for my filter. After I got all the livestock aclimated, I put the carbon in the filter and turned it on.....BIG OOPS - I forgot to rinse it out first!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I like to call the result the "Black Plague". To make a long story short, the black plague solved my problem with the huge clownfish, along with all my other livestock in VERY short order. In the end, the experience was bad, but not necessarily because of the online store. They could have sent me a smaller clownfish, but other than that I got a lot of good stuff that might have lived fine if it weren't for my little mistake. I'd order online again if I couldn't find it at a LFS.
  2. It's still available, but I'm not for a couple of days. I'm feeling sick...fun. When I join the land of the living again I can bring it to my work at Burnett/183 for you to pick up.
  3. The arrow crab in this picture is AWESOME...but...he has totally outgrown this little tank. He needs a new home. We have not had any problems with him acting bad in the tank, but he is so big he just dominates everything and he eats like a pig...really. His golden coloring is gorgeous. Trust me, the pic really doesn't do him justice...but it's the best I can do with a camera phone.
  4. I finally got my cameraphone paired with my home computer so I can download pics. Here are our two tanks, the smaller one is the 6-gallon Eclipse on my desk at work, the other is a NanoCube 14 that my wife takes care of at home:
  5. Elbeau

    1st Time

    Welcome, great to have you on the site!
  6. Wow...I'd never heard of red bugs. Are they mainly an SPS problem? or do they come in on other stuff?
  7. I a FAR from being a clam expert, but I do have a tank with two successful (so-far) clams in it. I had a similar problem on my first tank many years ago. There was a clam that I thought was getting enough light, but slowly over time, the purple in his mantle was replaced with this brownish-whitish stuff that was not nearly as beautiful as the mantle was to start with. It lived for several months like that, but eventually died. I asked around the LFS's in my area at the time and got a bunch of mixed responses. Some said it was natural and not related to the death, others said it was bleaching, but the response that made the most sense with what I observed was that when clams don't get enough light, a bacteria or algae blooms in the cells of their mantle causing the discoloration. Because of the bloom, the clam slowly starves to death. Now, that may just be the reef equivelent of an urban legend. I really don't know. I think that bleaching starts at the edge of the mantle and works its way in, which is different than what my clam went through. Anyways, now I keep my clams at the very top of the water column right under the lights and they are doing well. I wish you the best with yours.
  8. Cool...thx. I hadn't found Kingfish yet. I'll stop by today.
  9. Quite true. You have to isolate the water column and at some point drain from the top.
  10. yes...yes...yes...all true. BUT............it's only true because you qualified your leak as a "small" leak. Wouldn't it be wonderful to be able to predict the future like that jk. Anyhow...let me throw this out and see if we can find some common ground. In my first reply to this post I said that it is safer to either syphon or to have drain holes drilled high in the back instead of low or underneath. I'll drop the syphon argument (not because I'm ever wrong...but because some mortals just have a hard time understanding my reality) and I'll just make the point about having drain holes drilled high in the tank instead of low. That way, it is still gravity fed (whew to all syphon critics) and it won't completely drain your tank if you have a slow, medium, fast, gushing, bubbling, or gurgling leak in your outlet, hose, sump, brain, or return lines, etc, etc. (whew to me)
  11. Don't I wish....really. 2 1/2 months ago I moved here from Las Vegas. I vacated my Vegas home hoping it would sell even in the bad market there. What I didn't know is that I had a very slow water leak under my kitchen sink. My realtor found it two weeks later. My beautiful pergo floor was so wet some boards were curled 4" into the air :'( After extensive repairs to the drywall, counters, and floorboards of my entire downstairs...the flooring can finally get installed this week and I can try to salvage some money by renting out the place. The moral of this story is that a quick small leak would have been a million times more desirable than a slow undetected one (actually the moral of my sad story is to have someone checking on your home even when you think it's fine). But in any case. How much do you have invested in that tank? A little overflow from your sump is nothing compared to destroying your hard work and money that you have invested in your tank. And you don't really know how bad the leak would be. You can work with probabilities, but I'll still stick with the certainty that I don't have a way to drain my tank planned into my tank design. Anyways...enough rambling from me tonight...It's obvious that I'm way too tired for organized thinking right now. latre
  12. I dunno guys. If I spill some water from a sump overflow my tank a little, then worst case I have to replace a little flooring (realistically most of us don't put our tanks on expensive flooring and a mop would clean it up)...and I'd much rather replace a pump than loose most or all of the water in my tank. Also, when (and I do mean WHEN) your gasket or whatever goes bad...you will definitely have a lot of water to clean up, so the burnt out pump is really the only argument here to me. IMHO of course. Siphon - MUCH better.
  13. Predrilled holes are great...as long as they are predrilled high on the back of the tank. IMHO it is lunacy to assume that you will never in the future history of your tank have a leak as a result of the hole. If the hole is high in the back, you only loose the top portion of water when it happens. Because of this, I see no benefit to these pre-drilled holes compared to simply using an over-tank siphon hose. Sure, you will loose suction some day (still pretty rarely)...but when it happens, you won't wipe out your tank, you'll simply re-siphon. big deal.
×
×
  • Create New...