Ideas on 6 Dec 09

As I lay here in bed, I've been having thoughts of either experiments or ways to set up a fish room and connect aquariums.

I have been told that you can use water from one aquarium to do a water change in another. I wonder if this is totally true, or do you have to add trace elements?

Another thought that I had is that pouring the waste water from my tank down the drain kinda bugs me. If you live close enough to an ocean, could you make salt from distilling equal parts ocean water and tank water? My theory is that the real ocean water should have enough trace elements that get tanken out of your tank water to be able to replace them when distilled down to just salt.

I know that distilling water takes a lot of energy, and these days, energy isn't cheap. Can you take the pure water from the distallaton process and use a solar pannel to split the hydrogen from the oxygen by electolosys, and the ignite the hydrogen gas as a pilot light to do a slow boil for the salt?

I read in Anthony Calfo's Book on Coral Propagation, that you can use aptasia as a kind of biological filter to take larger nutrient particals out of the water column. Most of us would shy away from that, since aptaisia is considered a pest and we don't want it in our display tanks. Could you connect a clam run directly after an aptasia tank to use the clams to filter out the baby aptasia? If not, how about a tank for pepperment shrimp after the clams to naturally keep the aptasia under controll?
- Chuck

Pictures

Below are pictures of the fish I am looking at right now. They are in the order listed in the previous post for today.

Got Goldfishes

Ok, most probably not in a saltwater tank, but made ya look!

I'm looking at fish so I can get an idea of what I want to put in the big tank. The list so far is as follows (not in any kind of order):

Firefish, purple - Nemateleotris decora
Jawfish, Yellowhead - Opistognathus aurifrons
Chalk Bass - Serranus tortugarum
Blue Reef Chromis - Chromis cyaneus
Blue Sapphire Damselfish - Chrysiptera springeri

I'll keep looking to see what I want, can host in my tank that won't out grow it in a year, or be too difficult.

- Chuck

Clarification of Purpose

Ok, just to clarify what this blog is all about. Here is where I am documenting the tanks that I have. The majority of posts will be about the 65g tank and the build process. I want to see how it all comes together especially on a tight budget with few interruptions and variances from the topic at hand. It is also so I can see how my tank matures over the course of its life. So please enjoy the posts and pictures that are yet to come.


- Chuck

Clean Tanks

So, I finally got the aquarium clean and found this guy in there. He was underfoot all day and I couldn't resist putting him in and taking pictures.

First couple of weeks

Well this build starts with a 65 gallon (gal or g) tank. I bought it from one of the guys in my aquarium club for $50. Not a bad price really. When I figure out how to add pictures correctly on here so that the entire picture can be seen, I'll start adding pictures. The first shot of the tank clean includes Fiyero, one of the most cute hitch hikers you have ever seen.


- Chuck