Electrical

A buddy of mine has a 72 gallon corner bowfront that he has had for about two and a half years. Like all of the corner aquariums, lighting them properly can be tricky. His is particularly difficult as this aquarium has a flat back making it rather long, skinny, and tall. There is not much room is place lights and yet it has to be bright enough to punch to the bottom of his aquarium.

What he had been using with some success was several T12-VHO lamps. He had two 3' 95 watt lamps in the ...

Recently, Ive started making changes to my reef to make it more energy efficient. I made the choice to remove my CL system and use powerheads. I opened up my aquascaping and thinned out some large acroporas to get away with less over all flow, and most recently I changed the lighting schedule on my MH's to help reduce the heat generated by three 400 watters over a seven hour period.
For years Ive ran my VHO's for 13 hours and my MH's for seven and have had great results. I have always had ...

With my recent blogs, you've read about how the power has been going out due to the snowfall in Fort Worth, Tx:

Snow - my favorite topic; & a power outage to deal with

No Power Again

Let me describe how I run the generator when an emergency strikes. If the power doesn't resume within one hour, the generator is used.

The generator is stored in the garage, safe from the environment. Gasoline is also stored, ...

Since 3:30am today, the power has been out to my home (as everyone else in the vicinity). As of now, it's been about 12 hours straight without juice. I was up until 6 a.m. waiting for it to come back on, then I finally fell asleep. I got up around noon, as my son brought back a hot chicken teriyaki subway sandwhich, which helped warm me up a bit. The house was 65F then. I'm glad I took a hot shower with the stored water in the water heater before I went to sleep.

I installed a ...

20k MH mounted over the tank now... I like enough I'm going to keep it - kind of. I'm going to drop down to a 14k and then add a couple 2' T5 actinics.



I restacked the rock, much better now as I have some great ledges for coral (might not be clear in the picture.) I also have plenty of room for the rock from the old tank that I'll start moving over in a week or two.