The Cassandra Blog

So, it's been a few days now.

I had the car yesterday, so ran over to Neptune Aquatics to pick up a few basics, not the least of which was a Magnesium test kit (I grabbed the Salifert one).

I also grabbed a moonlight for the saltwater tank, two little Amano shrimp for the freshwater tank (they are teeeny!), and the beginnings of the CUC (clean up crew) for the saltwater tank as it's numbers are running zeros on the cycle numbers.

I also wound up adding a tiny overflow system, it seems to work, but it's really slow, so we'll just have to see, I may wind up pulling it and writing it off.

Anyhow, new saltwater tank pictures

This little thing was hanging to the wall.

Day Four Full Tank Shot

Okay, so more piccies, later in the evening, once the tank settled a little.

Tomorrow I should be able to get some really nice shots as the water should be very clear then.

Clearer picture of the new setup.

Closeup of the new base rock.

Another closeup of the new base rock.

And yet another closeup...

Okay, so hauled the Saltwater tank down to bare tank, cleared the filter out, and copper readings at zero one refilled. I left the tank overnight, and still zero on the readings (even left the readings going as some of the copper tests show slightly different results the longer let).

Anyhow, figured this morning it was time to actually rebuild, so we went up to visit Natural Life Aquarium (In South San Francisco), smaller store than some, but very nice looking tank setups, clean floor, no smell (like some places), and all in all another nice store. Of the two store people there, one of them appears to have a weirder sense of humor (So any Aussies in the area will probably find him easy to get along with *grin*). They had the rock I needed to get the tank rebuild underway.

So, this time, we built a small grid (using egg-crate diffuser), and some cable-ties to lift it a few millimeters off the tank bottom, we cable tied the main tank rock in place so it should not move around too much. I've got a few other little pieces, might wind up attaching those via putty, we'll see, but for now there's only one other piece in the tank, in the rear corner. Lastly added the live sand to the tank, and so far it's looking good...





Anyhow, waiting for the sediment to settle before anything else happens, will need to decide what I am doing with the other few bits of rock we picked up, probably will wind up puttying them in place on main centerpiece rock.

Once everything settles will most likely grab a few layout pics of the new tank placement, as it's rather neat, and it turns out IKEA comes in handy once again....

Okay, so the freshwater aquarium is chugging along nicely once more. We picked up a bargain this weekend, an older-model AI Sol, for $100 off! Anyhow, hooked that up to the Apex and the fish and plants are now looking even better than before.

The saltwater tank isn't so lucky, I stripped it right down to a bare tank and I'm still getting copper readings, even after effectively draining it dry... I've got Cuprisorb in the filter, so we'll have to see how that goes, so far it looks promising, but I might need to replace the filter pads and the standard media in the filter... Well, have spare now so we'll just have to see.

We did re-arrange the saltwater setup, will grab some new piccies, and I also found (and have ordered) a new heater, the old one was 5/8" tubing, and the filter is 1/2", so we had to use weird fittings, they're all PVC fittings, but still, we could do much neater and nicer, and less leak possibilities with the 1/2" heater.

I also have the Seachem copper test kit coming in tomorrow, we'll have to see how that goes, I hope it to show an easier to read output than the API test kit.

Lastly, I've been working on my aquarium stats/notes program, so far it's looking reasonable. I have a few last things to shift from the config file to the database, and need to generate a small config modification script, once that's done, and I've had a few others test the install process to see if they can get it to work for them without me needing to prompt I'll be releasing it, probably via Sourceforge, but will figure that out when the time comes.

Okay, so earlier today I was doing water tests in the new pico, and figured I hadn't done the copper in a while, and well... panic time... the copper reading was 4ppm!

So, yeah, rush, run, try to figure things out... I've done a tank overhaul, pulled the heater and run the filter direct through the tank. I've replaced the heater with the little 10watt heater I had for brine shrimp. I put additional filtration media in the canister, and so far it appears to have been pulling the copper levels down.

I had also added Prime and Stability to the tank in an attempt to bind the copper, Prime claims to be able to bind the copper into a form that isn't deadly to the tank, and with the new filter media apparently dropping the numbers, we'll just have to sit tight and see how things look tomorrow....