stupid aquarium tricks...

[spieszak]

we all have them right? silly things we do to make things easier...
heres mine:
if you put a piece of air line tubing between the rim of two buckets you are stacking 'inside' each other, it leaves enough room for the air to dry the buckets and no vaccum forms. i have a piece tied to the handles on each of my buckets and just flip it in when i stack them.

what is your 'stupid aquarium trick'?

 

[NanaReefer]

I use RainX on the front glass. No salty drip marks left behind after a WC


Sent from my iPhone 4s via Tapatalk.

 

[Ichthys]

we all have them right? silly things we do to make things easier...
heres mine:
if you put a piece of air line tubing between the rim of two buckets you are stacking 'inside' each other, it leaves enough room for the air to dry the buckets and no vaccum forms. i have a piece tied to the handles on each of my buckets and just flip it in when i stack them.

what is your 'stupid aquarium trick'?

OH My word, you have increased the quality of my life and saved me years of aggravation, I cannot even begin to thank you enough. Why couldn't I have thought of something like this? No more rolling around on the floor with 2 buckets wedged between my knees as i feverishly pull and pull trying to free one from the other.

 

[Nemgurl]

This thread needs to be pinned! awesome ideas!

 

[panther_119]

wow that is a great idea...although i only have the two buckets so i never stack them; however, i will def keep this trick in mind

 

[kpiotrowski]

I use a soft cotton cloth between my algae magnet and glass ( acrylic). prolongs life of pad on magnet while buffs glass and also protects from scratches. also use semi-reuseable scratch pads ( aquarium specific) on the inside between magnet and glass also. I find its much more forgiving when you pick up a sharp piece of rock etc.

 

[panther_119]

wow that is also a great idea

 

[panther_119]

I will admit...I don't have an imagination, so i can never come up with neat tricks like these lol

 

[panther_119]

does anyone else have any neat ideas i can steal...I mean use lol

 

[kpiotrowski]

this is actually true and how I was ahead of the game when it came time to cycle my 300g build last year.

I kept a 32g rubbermaid, half full of large rock rubble circulating in the garage where most of the build proccess took place. On occasion.....when I did'nt have time to go in the house to take a pee ( this is the time saving part), that bucket served as dual purpose urinal and ammonia cylcling my rock. I eventually added that rock rubble in very high flow area in my sump where it served to seed my entire tank. I fed the tank fish food daily and after month or so of seeing no spikes at all I added about 20 fish from my prevous tank,and again no measure nitrogen cycle. took a few months before I had measuable nitrate.

forget the damsel......eat the shrimp.....save a trip to the drug store for ammonia! Its the original all natural method!

 

[panther_119]

lol eww but whatever works lol

 

[reefman069]

this is actually true and how I was ahead of the game when it came time to cycle my 300g build last year.

I kept a 32g rubbermaid, half full of large rock rubble circulating in the garage where most of the build proccess took place. On occasion.....when I did'nt have time to go in the house to take a pee ( this is the time saving part), that bucket served as dual purpose urinal and ammonia cylcling my rock. I eventually added that rock rubble in very high flow area in my sump where it served to seed my entire tank. I fed the tank fish food daily and after month or so of seeing no spikes at all I added about 20 fish from my prevous tank,and again no measure nitrogen cycle. took a few months before I had measuable nitrate.

forget the damsel......eat the shrimp.....save a trip to the drug store for ammonia! Its the original all natural method!

that sounds more like lazy then time saving part. kevin you crack me up. know i know why you have green hair growing in your tank. lol dirty pee.

 

[reefman069]

so my stupid trick. i drilled a hole in the side of the house. put a pvc pipe through the hole. sealed the wall. hooked up the pipe to a amp master 3000. that is hooked up to my sump. so when i want to do a water change. i turn a ball valve. turn on a switch. water change done. woooo hoooo

 

[Duffer]

Roughly that's what I do too. (thru the floor and out one of the foundation vent holes) Mine drains outside into my drain curtain along with my gutters.

A stupid trick? When Wifee & I go on vacation, I set up reef foods for our house sitter in those little plastic AM/PM condiment cups. Ya know the ones you squirt ketchup or mustard into? I dice up each days foods. Put the lids on and stack them in the freezer. House sitter instructions as follows: Once a day take one random cup (I will fill them with different things. Frozen, pellets, nori, etc) Fill with hot tap water & shake. Allow to thaw for a minute or 2, (drain the water out then if concerned or thaw with RODI) and dump it in! Then rinse the cup & lid.
No worries about overfeeding or food processing. Just thaw a cup and pour it in!

I'll add that for draining the thawed liquid, one can cut a few slits into the edge of the lid. Once thawed, invert the cup and squeeze the liquid out thru the slits while the food stays in the cup. This one I just started doing myself recently

 

[kpiotrowski]

Urine cycling your tank has the advantage of watching your friend face who thinks he can taste salinity levels "test" your tank. ( "so what did I have for breakfast" I asked him while lmao). He shall remain nameless)

 

[1guydude]

Lol. Ya, Know we know where all that funky algae came from

Really though, that's how I was taught to cycle a tank. Old guy at work, " just drink a six pack and piss in the thing". I left out some words.


Only thing I do, I'd take ro or rodi (not rainX) and wipe down the tanks with it. Just get a rag or paper towl and some ro or rodi. The water is so pure, it leaves no streaks and sucks everything up.
U may need to dry with another towel.

-duffer... u should add . Pour out water... unless its ro or rodi...
I empty my feed cups of water after thawing.

Idk if its a trick but the best tool I have in my arsenal is a turkey baster. All praise the baster!
-d

 

[dawguy]

One tool I use almost every day is a 30in long piece of thinwall rigid tubing.
1) Use it to move corals/stuff around the tank (a long poke stick).
2) cover the end of it with my finger and use it as a mini sucker to suck things up (pests, sand, small frags of coral)
3) my coral feeding stick, I have clear plastic cup that I have put epoxy adhesive around the rim and drilled a hole on the bottom to be used as my lps coral feeder, I put the cup upside down covering the coral and use the tubing to drop pellets through the end of the cup into the coral.

 

[reefman069]

you i have done something like that. if feeding coral and a fish always eats the food out of the coral. you can take a plastic pop bottle. cut off the bottom part. then you can place the bottle over the coral and target feed coral. fish can't get to the food. hehehe

 

[kpiotrowski]

sorry to kidnap thread a bit, but must clarify urine cylcle was only used to seed rock rubble in a bucket which was then transfered to the tank. none of the water from the buck was transfered. besides, if that was a problem for nutrient it would have showed up immediatley, not months later.

 

[spieszak]

sorry to kidnap thread a bit

As long as there's no ransom note... or weird packages in the mail with bottles of.. well, nevermind...

I use rigid tubing also as noted earlier also. If you deal with bubble algae at all, you can cut the rigid at an angle for 'prying', attach some flexible tubing, and start a siphon... so as you remove it, you are also siphoning off anything it releases if it breaks.