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One thing to take into account is cleaning the pipe work. Every couple of years/months/weeks you may want to be able to completely take out the pipe work for a yearly/monthly/weekly thorough cleaning. Thus having some way of getting all the water out of the pipework and getting the pipe work...

Before I built my PLC fish tank controller, that has a "holiday mode" I fed/fertilised manually. How to use a PLC to control your fish tank. Before going away I bought a large number of 15ml plastic bottles. www.ampulla.co.uk I labelled them Mon, Tues, Wed.... and placed a small portion of...

After I have messed around with substrate/plants and water stays cloudy, first insert a layer on fine floss in your filter then use this and next morning crystal clear water. Job done. (oh remove floss as get blocked easily and reduces flow).

To be honest not really needed and is really just an expensive gadget to go wrong and gas your fish, as well as having a reasonably high running cost in calibrating pH probes and their frequent replacement. You would be better off buying a decent controllable dual stage CO2 regulator...

I use a drop checker and setting CO2 injection rate just takes a few days. 1. Set tank up with drop checkers, filters, power heads, bubble counters, CO2 injection method, light on time, CO2 on times as you would be using when CO2 is sorted. 2. Set a suitable guess at bubble rate, my 180l tank...

Dose when convenient, I did that for years, every morning before going to work. Make it easier by getting loads of little 15ml bottles each with a ferts dose in and just empty into tank in the morning, so not messing around measuring things. With dosing pump I dosed 1 hour before lights on...

Quite a few issues with pumps like this: - Only 3 roller, so may suffer from backflow if pump is mounted below the outlet pipe. - You either place storage container at same level as pump and outlet to prevent back flow. - Or use a one way valve to prevent back flow. Then make...

What no PLC ?

Before I built my PLC, which has a holiday timer mode, I just turned everything down when I went away. I ran my tank over 5 weeks whilst on holday, with lights & CO2 starting 2 hours later and turning off an hour earlier. Basically had 2 T4 tubes on for 4 hours only. Also reduced fertiliser...

This is an excellent recipe for emptying your tank onto the lounge floor, not recommended at all. :confused: The bricks will crack and fail under the weight..

Mine are for sale. Make me an offer ? https://www.ukaps.org/forum/threads/ei-liquid-carbon-peristaltic-dosing-pumps.74232/post-749277

I did once use a short length of blue silicone air tube to connect my CO2 in tank diffuser from bubble counter. After not very long the tube just went hard and brittle (especially the bit in the water), unlike the proper CO2 tubing. CO2 will diffuse through/into silicone apparently, though I...

There have been experiments done using carbon 13 versions of glutaraldehyde based compounds and mass spectrometer of plant material reveals it contains carbon 13. Not sure if quantities taken up are meaningful but there is some science behind liquid carbon. The Seachem versions of liquid...

Try something like Seachem Clarity and putting a sheet of fine floss in the filter for a day or two. I have used this many times after a major plant re-arrange and water went cloudy, the floss after a day or two was covered in a fine slime !!!!

Should use silicone oil on the seals, not petroleum based products, Vaseline etc as this will degrade the seals. I used push fit plumbing silicone oil from Wickes.

I cut my Juwel lighting unit open after it stopped working. Reason was it had water in it after previous owner had left one end in water. I got it open, got it dried out and it worked again. However I was never able to 100% reseal it again, as the original units are plastic welded shut. Best I...

You really ought to have a 3rd empty (or little bit of water) catch bottle before the tank just incase bottle A or B overflows. Any of bottle A or B entering the tank will kill all in the tank.

Here if you want seriously more light for the Rio 240.... 4 Tube 120cm T5 Light – Juwel High Lite Compatible, Rio 240, Rio 300/350, Panorama 200 – iQuatics

See this on the ways to convert tube to LED. Swapping T5 to LED

Should be fine. My tank & filters went for a couple of days, one winter, after a sub station neutral fault tripped the RCD in the house, whilst I was away. Another reason I use a PLC to control the tank . I made the display flash red when the filter and heater are off, after having done exactly...

My surface scum only appeared for a couple of weeks when the tank setup was "new". Removed by floating a sheet of kitchen towel on the surface, when necessary, to pick up the scum. Best removal was an air curtain at the back of the tank, running after the CO2 had turned off, for an hour or two.

You cant use a solenoid with this type of setup as when the solenoid is off the pressure will continuously build up and either burst or leak the system. What you do is use the solenoid to vent the bottles ie solenoid on a night letting pressure out the system. You just have to cope with yeasty...

Some of the "marine boys" batch dechlorinate their water. Something like this (taken from my PLC project). It can actually be a bit simpler. Fill water container with HMA filtered water. Use a peristaltic pump to dose the water with Seachem Prime. Dose sufficient Prime assuming chloramine...

Or you have a leak on your piping after the meter. Turn stop cock off in house and see if meter is still moving.

Sometimes the scratches won't show when filled with water. or many people have used this type stuff. GLASS POLISH SHOP - Smart Restoration & Polishing Products

When my mate kept marine fish (in the early 1990's) , he stored the generated RODI water in an outside water tub, with a 50W aquarium heater in it (set to lowest thermostat setting) and never had issues with the water freezing.

Yes this has been done before with a solenoid valve. You must never put a solenoid on the output of yeast CO2 container as in best case pressure will build up and pop off tubes and worst case decorate your room with yeast and sugar mixture. The only issue reported was the smell in the room from...

Something left this over the weekend, whilst they were eating all my carefully grown lawn mushrooms....

...an auto water change system like you describe, failure modes are likely empty tank and flooded floor...all wonderfully observable remotely but b*gger all you could do about it. Some people do continuously do water changes BUT they have overflows to a drain, via a drilled tank. Also possibly...

Wanted something colourfull and "cow'ish" and "thought of the day'ish" for my daughters bathroom, as she likes cows. So my attempts with AI picture creation. I think it is really good, with a happy message.

What you do there is place the heater on the same plug as your filter, yes either bodge two lots of wires into plug (:mad:) or use an adapter, so that when you turn the filter off to do a water change the heater gets turned off as well. I am now using a JBL 200W heater (in 180l tank) for last...

These specimens I was carefully culturing, by emptying fish tank water over, have been scoffed this morning. Along with this one.

I too often have poo parked on my front lawn, usually after all the mushrooms popping up have been scoffed during the night. Not sure, but I think it is deer, certainly not cat or dog, as is very green inside, and not majorly stinky. Identify poo | The Wildlife Trusts

Hmmm. I have had two doser timer failures, both where dosing pump failed to shut off. First failure it dumped 1l of macro mix into the tank, as pump remained on when it should have turned off. Tank ran for many days with nitrate at over 350ppm., before I notice macro ferts container was empty...

Nice. Be careful as silicone does not actually stick to most plastics. Quite a few peeps have come a cropper with their tanks, especially with sump baffles being the favourite, where over time the silicone come away from the plastic. Silicone is fine for bonding glass any possibly sealing...

Other thing to consider is a booster pump, as most RO systems are rated at 8 bar inlet pressure and 25'C water. If your mains water pressure is considerably lower than 8bar then your RO flow rate will be considerably less than the quoted flow rate. Also some water boards/authorities require...

The ammonia in the water is from breakdown of chloramine into ammonia and chlorine and these not being absorbed by the carbon filter due to filter media exhaustion or water flow rate too high.

Remember test kits to test your RO water before use !!! This is one case where test kits are useful, as you shouldn't have test kit interfering ions present. This is necessary to check that the pre-filter/membrane hasn't failed. You need to check for free ammonia and free chlorine in you RO...

Dow Corning 785 sanitary sealant has 30 year warranty again UV degradation and loss of adhesion, so would expect aquarium sealant in its quite benign environment to last equally if not longer.

My mate got a 2nd hand 120 litre tank in 1990 (don't know the make, but was rimless with single tube lighting hood, might have be Eheim ?) and finally sold it on in 2019, after he had had it 29 years and showed no signs of silicone degradation.

Even though I wrote the article and would love to experiment finding c (calculated CO2 concentration) and p (calculated CO2 per second) for my tank, I think in my case, spending time fiddling with spray bars, bubble counters and drop checkers is time far more productive. After 12 years of CO2...

I posted this, years ago, about CO2 concentration in our tanks. CO2 concentration...the maths.

My CO2 leaks have always been at the bubble counter. First one in 2013 was a cheap Chinese bubble counter where the plastic bottle was attacked by the CO2 and cracked. I then moved onto JBL bubble counters. I had one crack at the pipe attachment but more recently the rubber O ring leak. I did...

Wooow you must have massive CO2 leak/loss somewhere. I get through 2Kg in about 100-150 days (4-5 months) in my 180l tank with a green heading to yellow drop checker. Below is a graph of number of days per 2Kg cylinder, 34 cylinders worth, I get through. Spot the cylinders where I had CO2 leaks...

Couple of things I would do: Put a short length of pipe, internally, from CO2 inlet to near the outflow of the inlet pipe so CO2 is going into the water flow. Maybe even use a ceramic CO2 diffuser, to get finer diffusion. Put another short length of pipe from top of reactor, where CO2 is...

Yes PO4 will react with Fe and precipitate out as plant inaccessible iron phosphate. This is why when using EI dosing, the macro and micro are dosed alternate days to keep the PO4 away from the Fe. In practice many people dose macro and micro together by using chelated Fe and keeping the pH...

This is one way of doing one filter and two tanks. Still has a failure mode of if connecting pipe gets blocked it will pump the 2nd tanks contents in to the first and onto the floor !!! Personally buy two smaller filters, one for each tank, then if pipes get blocked etc nothing will empty out...

Not ammonia, but urea was the first "organic" compound synthesised from inorganic starting points, thus ruining the prevalent theory of organic compounds were from living things and inorganic compounds from non living things.

I know someone who used one of these to keep their potted plants watered. I think you place a "drip head" on a spike in your plant pot and attach it to the pipe where the drip head makes a hole in the pipe to let the water out. Controller lets water flow as programmed. 20 Pot Watering Kit |...

All of the CO2 cylinder incidents I have seen, all involve incorrect use generally of beer gas CO2, usually large cylinders of 40-50Kg size. One, a cylinder was over 10 years old and had rusted inside burst whilst refilling, which considering they have their aged stamped on should never have...

Retro fit LED tubes are designed for magnetic ballasted fluorescent tube fixtures, rather than electronic ballasts. If you have electronic ballasts you will have to rewire the tube connections. Using BICPenCad, above are "tube" wiring diagrams. 1. Is conventional magnetic ballast (B) with...

One thing you should/must do with RO water BEFORE using is test it. This is why storing RO water before use is such a good idea. Many people have suffered "fish issues" where they thought they had 100% RO water when in fact they hadn't due to failed RO unit. I went to an "open day" in local...

No no. You can't run pumps like this in parallel. The failure mode for this is if the Eheim filter gets blocked or pump fails, the other pump may force water backwards through the filter, pushing all the debris/detritus etc out through the other pump and into the tank, defeating the purpose of...

No you can't put pumps in series, without causing issues to one or other of the pumps. One of the pumps may over power the other pump and damage it, this normally shows itself with the impellor being demagnetised on the pump that is being "forced" faster than it wants to run. Much better is a...

I wrote this about the maths behind CO2 levels. CO2 concentration versus time. The maths...

Couple of things: RO units require decent pressure input. They are typically rated for 8 bar input pressure @ 20'C. What is your water pressure ? You can get booster pumps that will dramatically improve the flow. pH is a ratio and as such a pH reading is irrelevant/inaccurate for RO water. Use...

Some people have put these reactors in a bucket of water with a heater to maintain a constant temperature and they manage to get much more reliable CO2 rate. You turn the heater off at night to reduce the CO2 rate if required. Heating tape wrapped around the container is probably a safer, but...

The DI resin will be exhausted and destroyed extremely quickly if exposed to tap water rather then RO water. The tap water will contain large amounts of ions that the resin will remove and be quickly exhausted. Also the resin will be damaged by chlorine in the water. So DI resin should only...

EKOMIXO Get one of these fish feeders, they have an airline connection that blows air through the food to keep it dry. Mine air runs 22:45 till 2am and every type of food is fine, no clumping and stays dry all the time.

All home user affordable pH probes use the same method to measure pH, a glass sensing sphere membrane electrode full of a reference solution. Putting the electrode in a liquid solution produces a voltage across the membrane proportional to the pH of the solution it is dipped into. Fantastic...

Not true. The amount of CO2 we use in the aquarium is so small their is no chance of the regulator freezing, I ran my FE laying down horizontal on a magazine rack beside the tank for years with no issue.

Looks fine. In majority of non USA world the CO2 connection is standard DIN 477 / BS 341, so UK bought regulators should fit. However due to the presence of the cylinder collar, you might have physical space issues in connecting. Solutions are, sometimes the collar can be unscrewed, some...

When records were a thing :rolleyes: it was marvelous when I moved from an upper floor rented room to a concrete floored house. I could now play a whole side of a record without it jumping due to me breathing/moving in the same room....:eek:

My mate had a tank upstairs, maybe only 100l odd, but had a few minor issues: He positioned the tank in not ideal to view or not in the place he originally wanted so that tank was at right angles to the floor joists, so that tank was resting on the floor joists where they were supported by the...

Generally with nano CO2 systems you can't use a solenoid, as they are not really regulators, technically they are flow valves. The "regulator" isn't a regulator but either a hole in a metal plate or a metal sponge that restricts the flow of gas, and in fact doesn't do any pressure regulation at...

This is to do with number of rollers in the peristaltic pump. A cheap 3 roller peristaltic pump, can allow liquid to reverse flow back through the pump, as there is a pump rotor position that when stationary still allows fluid to flow through, especially if you locate the pump below the fish...

My mate repaired a cracked bottom of his tank (placed tank on hard surface on a grain on sand which cracked the bottom pane in one corner), by siliconing a sheet of glass (from an Ikea picture frame, get the size you need !!) to the inside of the tank over the cracked corner. Lasted at least 15...

Make your own dosing system: DIY Project - DIY dual peristaltic dosing pump with alternate switching. Mine is over 10 years old and still doses fine.

Could be an electrical field issue as pH probes are very sensitive to small electric "leaks" from electrical in tank equipment. Unplug all your tank electrics from the mains socket and try pH readings again and see if there is any difference in reading.

If they are limescale marks just use Kilrock limescale remover, preferably outside as a bit wiffy. Wash thoroughly, hopefully job done.

Air stone running for an hour or two once a day removed all my surface film.

At work marketing, sales and web site have been using ChatGPT to elevate to a new level of complete and utter bollards. :rolleyes:. I have been passed stuff for techinical review, most start OK with a good starter paragraph and occasionally good ending paragraph but stuff in between is a load of...

Please read this on my experience of LED strips. Yours do look to be way away from the water, but even so condensation will be the killer. Wife approved a fish tank! 120L+70L sump+lots of DIY=my planted tank :) Obviously your mileage will be different, as they say.....

It will work for a while with dirty tank water, before gumming up, despite being on the filtered water side. Look how the spray bars & piping accumulate detritus despite being "filtered water".

Acetoxy silicone (the one that smells of vinegar) requires water/moisture to set, so will set under water, though is difficult to work as it quickly skins over underwater whilst "playing" with it Neutral cure does not release vinegar whilst setting. Be careful a lot of silicone has fungicide...

I once had my filter on a timer, that turned off 7pm till 11pm when we were in the lounge, where the tank is, so that the room was 100% quite for TV watching. However once or twice the timer came on but the filter pump did not start, just sat there and buzzed, no water flowing. I either heard...

There are a couple of problems with LED strips, some of which I have personal experience. I tried adding LED strips to increase light from my 2 T5 fluorescent tubes. 1. They are not particularly bright, mainly because they have a very wide beam angle and spread a lot of light out sideways...

Over Xmas we had no water to 3-4 days, starting 21st December. We were in Andorra skiing, so missed all the fun and games. Many peeps had no water or low pressure water Xmas day, which would make Xmas meal interesting. Many pubs cancelled their Xmas do's and meals as well, great news (NOT) if...

Some one on another fish keepers forum lost nearly £700 of fish due to chloramine being added to his tap water due to "emergency dechlorination" from a burst mains water pipe. Normally he just carbon filtered the water into large water butts and aerated & warmed for 24 hours before performing...

Yes it does limit the extent the floater can take over the surface. Obviously if doing weekly water changes, like one should be doing, it doesn't really get too dense as you pick some out each week. However in the real world, especially in the run up to Xmas and holidays, my tank is running much...

This is what I got to keep my floaters under control. Works well. Otherwise I end up with this....

Yes you can get LED drivers than take a 0-10V input, from a potentiometer to control the brightness. Some LED drivers have an inbuilt potentiometer, you twiddle with a screwdriver, to set the brighness.

Rather than raise the LEDs Put either darkened plastic sheet in front of LED's. Strips of foil across the LED's to say block 1/3 of them. Get a dimmable LED supply ?

In my experience you do actually need both a preservative and acidifying agent, or else, in my experience, either the iron un-chelates and liquid goes "rusty" and a precipitate forms, or the solution just goes mouldy. The acidifying agent, ascorbic acid normally, is needed usually potassium...

Westlab Pure Mineral Bathing Epsom Salt 1KG - Boots Just check it is only Magnesium Sulphate, Some "soaking products", from chemist have oils and perfumes added. I just get mine from some dodgy auction site type place, 2Kg at a time in a poly bag. Apparently my fish and plants won't get...

If you have 4G phone coverage, which a lot of fungi places don't eg New Forest, then this web site is good: Edible Mushrooms... It has photo's of cap, gills, stem, skirts (bit left on stem when cap opens), flesh (cut in half), spore prints, smell, taste (break the cap, taste the "milk"...

Destroying Angel, found by me on a "fungi identification" course in New Forest at the weekend. Course organiser took it away to prevent " fatal accidents". Rather large Porcelain Fungi. Panther cap. (Amanita pantherina). Don't eat. All know what this is. Used to be eaten quite a lot...

Me out yesterday, in the woods near my house.

What you need, if your battery pack/UPS doesn't support switch over is one of these. Automatic Power Transfer Switch These automatically switch to battery power if the mains in fails. More importantly they prevent back feeding of your battery fed mains back into the incoming supply which as...

Be careful about retro fitting LED tubes in place of fluorescent tubes. Most retro fit LED tubes are designed to be retro fitted to tube holders with magnetic tube ballasts, most aquatic ballasts are the considerably more efficient electronic (Juwel certainly is electronic) and retro LED tubes...

Because silicone tubing has quite a few issues: It is very very expensive compared to standard PVC/polyurethane tubing. Quality silicone is maybe 10 times more expensive. Silicone is hard to clamp and can suffer from creep if using standard jubilee type clips, especially if the wall is thick...

I wrote to Union Carbide (major gluteraldehyde supplier) about interactions of gulteraldehyde and EI salts (back in 2012 !!). Replies were: In presence of trace levels of iron salts it will decompose. So that's mixing with micro solution out. Will polymerise with high pH (10-12) and come out...

.../ 0.576kWh -> 16'th'ish). So @ 40W for a filter this battery will last 14hours, a 200W heater on 50% of the time 6 hours on this battery pack. So b*gger all. If you really insist on backup, petrol is the way to go, though starting at £200 odd (see machine mart) is suitable, but is manual...

This is because failure/wear out of their RO equipment can leave fish fatal levels of chlorine and or ammonia in the water. No effect for cleaning windows, but deadly for fish. So I think they are saying test their water for chlorine and ammonia before use.

Ignore the water report. This is for the water companies sampling point on a particular day, not your tap water on the day you use your water for your fish. Just dose your chosen fertliser dosing scheme, think very carefully before doing anything other than dosing EI (Estimative Index) and get...

This just shows you why you should never take into account your water parameters when working out ferts dosing levels. I have seen this many many times on this forum, peeps complaining the plants are suffering and you find out they are not dosing EI levels, but some funny version of dosing...

No experience. Just know that people use "dechlor" cartridges to remove chlorine and chloramine. I think you can actually used "plain olde activated carbon" to remove chlorine and chloramine, but flow rate has to be quite slow, to allow chloramine to be broken down and/or be absorbed...