Plumbing

I'm making a little progress on my goal to do water changes without having to lift a finger. The idea is to move water out of the tank and into the tank at the same time, and to do so in small amounts daily. From one of Randy Holmes-Farley's articles written years ago, he determined that there was just as much benefit changing 1% of the water daily as there was doing 25% once a month.

About two years ago, I bought this pump from a club member. It's a high end dual-head medical ...

Since October, my last update, I've been pretty busy...and I'm only going to get busier because the tank is wet! We're at the end of the cycle now, just letting things flow as we're not on any particular schedule here. Although amusingly enough Tibet is quieter then our grow out tank. I attribute it to the wide overflow, and the sump design.

I have a skimmer on order, an RLSS r10, which I'm dying to get my hands on. So far the tank has run completely skimmerless since it was filled. ...

My newest purchase for my reef tank was a new main circulation pump. The Rio Hyper Flow 32 was on its last legs. Surprising as it may, this pump last 7 years with very minimal maintenance. It finally got to the point when I would turn off the pump for feedings, I prayed it would turn on again. So I decided a replacement was necessary.

Now mind you, I am a cheap or rather as I call it "frugal" with my money. I wanted the pump to be energy efficient, yet powerful enough to meet ...

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So I came home, and found my return pump sucking air and blowing it into the DT.

Open the cabinet doors to find the water level in the return area was low....
now I know the water level didnt evaporate that much as I added like 2-3 gallons of top off yesterday.I adjusted the return pump flow down to allow the water to catch back up and then was able to open the valve completely open again and things stabilized and no issues....I added another gallon of top off just to be safe... ...

Well, I finally finished installing the snapper pump. I learned a few things along the way and I'll try to give you as unbiased account as I can here.

First thing - I'm going to take a quick tangent here and report some about my personal experience with reeflo quality. I opened up my brand new reeflo pump and found the dart impeller cracked right through the middle upon arrival. It was as if someone had tightened it too much or it was subjected to an extreme temperature difference ...