Pepere

Great info @Cory. there are many ways to peel a potato…. Thinking about it ahead of time helps when faced with it especially if one acts on what they thought through. Don’t wait until the crises hits to go buy what you need. The shelves empty quickly once the crises hits… One of the reasons I like running ugf in my tank in addition to the canister filter is for beneficial bacteria redundancy. In a significant outage I would likely take the canister filter out of service and give it a deep clean and restart after the event if I hadnt got to the tanks soon enough after an outage to transfer media into the tank. The beneficial bacteria on the gravel would be more resilient… I have commercial property I need to keep warm in a winter outage so I have a few generators… And after surviving the Ice Storm of 98 and having waited in line for gas at one of the three stations that still could pump it, I buy 50 gallons of gas each fall and add stabilizer and cache them at a few different locations. I use up that gas between mowing the lawns and blowing snow over the course of a year…. That Ice Storm was a paradigm shift for me in terms of preparedness.

Yes, but, do you have the ability to keep that battery air pump running for 5 days? if it is a lithium ion battery air pump, how are you going to recharge it when it runs out? My son and daughter in law are going to wake up to the start of their 4th day without grid electricity in a few hours. I lived through the ice storm of 1998 which in my local area was much worse than this storm. Not as bad. For Central Maine Power as a whole as it was not as widespread, but locally much worse. We had portable generators, but on day two of the storm, there were only 3 gas stations in town that still had electricity on that could pump gas. A generator that burns 5 gallons of gas a day becomes useless once you run out of gas and can not replenish. All grocery stores were reopened with battery lighting and calculators at the check out by order of the governor… Cash only…. I walked through the store… the frozen food and refrigerated cases were all empty and the dumpsters were overflowing with spoiled items. There was not a single can on the shelf of ready to eat food as it was all sold out, no bottled water, not a battery to be had…. Crackers and cereal stripped bare. No candles… It was a post apocalyptic shopping scene… Thankfully this event pales in comparison locally. No problem buying gas, and stores open and well supplied. So many more people own generators now than in 1998…. having an 18 hour battery back up air pump is great, especially if it is attached to a well cycled sponge filter or ugf…But, how do you recharge it if the power stays out longer?

Monday we had a significant rain and windstorm in Southern Maine…. observed wind speeds of 60 mph experienced. I experienced momentary losses and grid circuit breakers reset… but By storms end, 60% pf my town had lost power, and 8 hours 30% are still without. my County as a whole saw 75% outage and currently is about 25% outage.. Best estimate is restoration by 10:00 pm Friday night… This has turned out to be the worst power outage in Central Maines History. much worse than the Ice Storm of 1998 as it is more widespread.. are you prepared for a 5 day outage? It can happen even if it is radically out of the normal yearly expectations…

Quite simply money is not worth what it was… as to co op vs competitors? I bought some java fern from a competitor in a plant order of plants the co op does not offer. Yes it was cheaper. But it was a single plant. I bought three more Java Fern from the co op. 2 plants per pot and all were noticeably bigger and more robust… If the co op has the plants I want to buy, (which unfortunately they dont carry most of the more difficult plants I want… and I do understand why they dont.) I will preferentially buy from the co op.

That would be me too. In fact I bought three Easy Flow kits and I made an adapter first for proof of concept for use in my Fish Bowl. I was so happy with the results I replicated on my 29 gallon to improve flow through those plates. I am waiting till after things slow down shipping wise with the holidays and will be placing another order at the co op for 8 more Easy Flow kits to adapt to remaining ugf tanks. Shippers get surcharged for shipments during peak holiday shipping period and I figure they wont mind spreading out a sale to when they are not so busy…

The air collar of the Easy Flow kit will fit decent on a medium sized Lee’s Triple flow filter. the large would need an adapter.

Well my Elodia is planted in maybe an inch of sand with no root tabs and I pull gobs of it out every week… Based on my experience I would not be suspecting the substrate is the limiting factor yours is experiencing… I built up the terrace on this tank as it was originally on top of a stand next to my recliner and it allowed me to look up the slope at it… but now it is on lower level of a 2 tier stand.

Well, it could mean you have extremely hard water…. Or it could mean the test chemical is defective. I have seachem equilibrium on hand so If I had thise results I would get some distilled water and test it with the api test kit, and then I would add a measured amount of equilibrium to give me an expected hardness and then use the api test kit to verify. ie distilled should change on the first drop. 15 ml of Equilibrium should raise 20 gallons of water 2.8 degrees of hardness. 1.5 ml would raise 2 gallons 2.8 degrees. 1.5 ml would raise 1 gallon 5.6 degrees. 1.5 ml would raise a quart 22.4 degrees… maybe 1.5 milligrams in a quart of distilled left to fully dissolve and do a 50 % dilution . Ie 1 cup of mixed with 1 cup distilled and mix and take 5 mls of that to do an api drop test to verify test drops are good… so, I am assuming this is your tap water.. do you have known hard water? Li e deposits on plumbing fixtures? Soap doesnt suds up and hard to rinse off? Shower head needs frequent servicing to clean out to get a decent shower?

During waterchange you can see the Easy Flow kit on my UGF gives about 5 inches of head. Plain air risers with Ziss airstones give about 1 1/2 inches of head.

Fish that develop difficulty swimming or maintaining orientation do not suffer with it long in the wild. They become prey very quickly. I have taken such fish and put them in hospital tanks to try to treat with aquarium salt and antibiotics to give it a chance at recovery. I havent had any success with that. I don’t feel I did those fish any favors.

I bought a ugf pennplax filter plate for a 15 gallon tank. I used 1 of the plates. i tried different plastic round container lids to find one about the right size of the flat round bottom of my sphere to use as a template. I laid it on top of a corner of the ugf and used a bandsaw to cut it out. This is the remainder. Yes there are two flat spots in the back corner and yes the plates are open around the cut out, but I doubt it interferes…

Well, I only have the aquasoil on that side of the tank. It is not the reason for the hill, but it worked out that way… on the lower level it is a sand substrate… The only thing growing on that low side is Elodia… the Pink Flamingo crypt certainly appears to appreciate the aquasoil…. I have retrenched that back several times…. It keeps coming back thick…

15 hours later… Before fitting the easy flow kit, the bubbles simply came out of the elbows on the air riser tube and popped on the surface. There was no flow velocity carrying them. photo above taken with canister filter unplugged and hence no flow coming out of the spray bar.

I thought some people might like to see how I retrofitted some Easy Flow kits to my UGF plates. The first step was going to the hardware store to find some fittings that might work. These 3/4 threaded adapter will fit just fine once the threads are filed down.. The air riser tube from the UGF is a loose fir. A little polyurethane sealant will take care of that one… The fittings are 69 cents each. with the fitting secured in the vice 5 or so minutes quickly files down the threads. rest fitting shows how much to trim down. snug but not overly tight fit. I used the vice to press fit the collar onto the adapter. It can come off by hand and the collar shows no sign of deformation. I cut off bit of the solvent fit edge as well. About 1/2 an inch of gluing surface. I cut two 1 1/2 inch section of air riser tube and deburred. You can see it will never work as friction fit. I applied a little 3M 4200 polyurethane sealant witha q tip and then fitted the air riser tubes and cleaned up squeeze out. I will let these sit overnight before fitting them in my tank tomorrow and fitting the easy flow kit on them. At most I may have spent a half hour on this.. the photos and typing of this post probably took longer.

I have bags of aquasoil capped with coarse sand or gravel over ugf. I will occasionally place root tabs on top of some of the bags with the thought of helping to replenish them…. I dont know that it hurts or helps.. I also use Easy Green holding my nitrates around 20 ppm with weekly 50% water changes and pressurized co2. regardless things seem to be growing well…

I have no doubt a lager diameter air collar that is made for the size of the UGF air risers would flow even better. Small increases in pipe lumen diameter significantly increases cross section percentages. But until that is available for sale, this simple cheap mod dramatically increases flow through the UGF.

I just installed an easy flow kit on to my Undergravel Filter plate in my 17 gallon fish bowl sphere. @Cory I used a 3/4 female solvent weld to 3/4 threaded adapter from Home depot for $2.00 and change. i cut all but 1/4 inch of the threaded section off the fitting and then used a file to file down the threads evenly around it to make a snug fit on the Easy Flow air collar. I then cut off all but 1/2 inch of the solvent weld side of the adapter to shorten it. I cut of an 1 1/2 of my original UGF riser tube. It fits loosely in the pvc fitting. I used 3M 4200 polyurethane sealant to glue the original ugf air riser stub in the fitting and used q tips to wipe up squeeze out and make sure it was smooth and neat looking and allowed the sealant to cure overnight. Next morning I removed the original air riser and replaced with my adapeter and Easy Flow kit. The increase in flow is astonishing… I will be buying several more kits to adapt all of my UGFs to them now that proof of concept has proven itself.