August Meeting

[halmus]

August 18th from 1:00-4:00 PM

The August meeting will be held at my house in DuPont. For those of you not familiar with the small town, we're south of Tacoma right outside of Fort Lewis. I'll post up address details when the time comes.

The main topic of the meeting with be DIY auto top-off systems. We're going to order at least one DIY kit from bulk reef supply to put together as a club at the meeting. This is the auto top-off kit we'll be working with:

DIY Top-it-Off Kit Premium - aquahub
http://www.bulkreefsupply.com/store/pro ... emium.html
$39.99

At the meeting we can cover some alternatives to this automated system. If you would like help assembling your own kit, feel free to order one ahead of time and we can all assemble them together. We'll be giving away one kit to one lucky member. At the meeting, we can also take a few minutes to talk about some basic electrical safety tips which are good to know when mixing electricity and aquariums. Hopefully, we'll have the new membership cards in our hands by then, and we have a bunch of free issues of the latest Reef Hobbyist Magazine to give away.

I'll grill out some good grub and we can hopefully enjoy a beautiful day, good food, and see some new faces!

 

[user 26995]

I am looking forward to this meeting. Anyone on the kitsap peninsula wants to go I have room for one passenger.

 

[halmus]

Thanks IPieces. I'm looking forward to the new club year. (although it doesn't actually start until Sep).

Here's a little teaser of my personal aquarium. I'll post some new pictures of the club tank soon. I finally picked up the club corals from Tom. I've got a few corals of my own in the club tank now growing out for the Bob Moore give-aways.

 

[halmus]

Here are some of the mounts we came up with to replace the rather cheep mount that comes with the top-off kit.

 

[halmus]

At the meeting, first we ate some food and caught up with everyone's news from the summer. We had a new member come all the way down from Shoreline. We also had members make the trip from way out on the peninsula and the backwoods of Orting. Thanks everyone for making the trip!

When we got down to business, we talked about some basic electrical safety techniques. Then, we covered some alternatives to an automated electrical solution to topping off your fresh water. These included float valves that can be sourced from your local hardware store...

and float valves that are engineered specifically for aquarium use....

Then we started on the kit. Here is the schematic we worked off of to assemble the kit:

The rest of the meeting was spent finishing up the kit.

 

[halmus]

We also presented our former President with a little token of our appreciation for his hard work on behalf of the club for the last two years.