wrightme43 said:
Cause my acros love it. They look better, the clams look better, the anemone looks better. The tank looks better, everything looks better.
When you say things look better after a water change, I understand that to mean that before a water change things are looking worse. I belive thats how the word better works, compairs something against another lesser thing. In this case, I read the lesser thing to be the appearence of the tank before a water change. Maybe I'm way off here.
When I take a picture, not only am I way too lazy to go cleaning the tank (notice I dont even wipe the salt creep off the OUTSIDE of the tank for pictures), but I also think its bullsh%t to take pics with actinic lighting on the tank. Its like this, I could take a white piece of paper, stick it under actinics and take a photo and go wow, look at the pretty blue color in my paper! Or red paper would look purple and so on.
Krish- Didnt mean to leave your question unanswered, sorry I forgot about it. I have 2 sheets of acrilic over each side of the display. They fit snugly around the corners of the tank. Just as a side thing, they are drilled with about 20 small holes each with a pink, blue,or UV purplely LED in each hole. This makes for the best moonlight looking setup I've seen yet. Once I completely finish the super VHO ballast design/R and D work im doing, I am going to build a controler for the LED moon lights to have a proper lunar monthly cycle. But anyways, yes those pieces of acrilic over the tank and fuge really help with evaporation. Not haveing a skimmer is the biggest one though, keep in mind all the air you pump into your skimmer exits 100% saturated with water vapor. This is why I only need to top off every month or two when the level in the fuge/sump drops by about 10gal like Don W said. At this point the specific gravity is 1.026. After adding the 10gal, the specific gravity is 1.023, definately causes some osmotic pressure on the cells. After measureing the salinity on some reefs on the south side of maui, and on the north side of kawaii, I saw larger swings occuring with a daily tide cycle (I only have winter time data, I dont know about summer), so its not something Im worried about.
Don W- "Krish,
You have to take a close look at the system basicly FO w/LR. No hot lights and very little flow. No baffles or skimmer in the sump leave lots of room for extra water. He can let the water level fall what appears to be 10+ gallons before it to low. With little lighing to speak of and almost covered tops evap will be very slow. Although I would not recomend this, it is possible. The salinity swings would be crazy."
This tank actually has 4x110 watt VHO bulbs over driven by my own ballast design, receiveing over 600watts of tuned high frequency energy. Its enough to keep the crocea looking very good. The additional mount of natural phyto-plankton in the water from not skiming may also have an effect on his good health.
When I get home I will take a good pic or two of that whole tank with its regular lightinig on it (actinics off of course). The first pics I posted before were to show how detritus free the rocks and sand stay, not trying to highlight the life in the tanks.
I hope this clears some things up for you guys. Anyone is welcome to stop by and take a peek if you wish, Im sure we would have a good time talking. I'm sorry for comming off as hostile toward you guys, the other forums (engine design related) that I participate in are like war zones compaired to this one. I dont mean to bring that hostility back with me. I will make new efforts to avoid it occuring.
-Luke
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