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AdamTill

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  1. AdamTill
    A small quart tin of black latex paint from the hardware store goes a long way. It’s water resistant, and only bubbles if you leave it wet for a number of hours, but can be easily and non offensively rolled on inside the house.
  2. AdamTill
    You want a decent amount of air, so maybe see if you can find a used pond air pump?
  3. AdamTill
    I’ve been admiring the Panta Rhei “Flow To Go” false bottom stream flow tanks for a long time, and I just got a new job for the first time in 12 years, so my wife and I treated ourselves to a new tank. Used larger tanks are rarer then hen’s teeth up here in good condition, so I picked up a new Marineland set. Not my fav stand, but it’ll do and I wouldn’t have been able to make something better until the spring. Also have a Co2art system coming soon, and I needed something I can make lockable against the prowlings of a toddler. Today I called a local glass shop for some of the bits to make the false bottom, and they whipped them up the same today. Just picked them up...muwahaha. When I got home my new puffer mug was here too, so all in all, a good day.
  4. AdamTill
    Keeping in mind this is hideously back of the napkin, I’d say maybe 50-60gph (air, not water) for the mediums and 30-40gph for the smalls. That depends on how fast you want to drive them (more air isn’t always better) and is based off how Fluval rates the Q series pumps. It also assumes that the pump isnt having to push through a ton of extra air line (ie, 6 feet below the tanks etc). The cheapest option is to make a pvc header and use one pump to drive the lot. Not likely to be the quietest option though, which might be using the little USB pumps or similar.
  5. AdamTill
    Couple of tips from my time playing with the general idea. First, I don’t love floating rafts. They make it easy to do water changes on the main tank, but I’ve also tipped trays by accident or had them get caught and tip as the tank refills. Next, I don’t love blocking openings with foam. I tried it, and I never got along with it. It might have been the flow rate I was using, but to have enough open area it needed a ton of cutout in the tray, or a coarse foam. Too much cutout of the tray made it floppy, too coarse of a foam had babies get stuck in the foam and die. Also foam accumulates debris quickly, and then your trays overflow when you’re at work and all the babies get out. Not fun. My later versions used a fine plastic coffee filter, but I still hated those too. At least they didn’t clog. I suspect Dean is FAR more picky about cleanliness than I could be, but I ultimately didn’t get along with the system all that well after playing for about six months. Too many dumped or flooded trays, and chasing babies in the big tank is a pain. Ultimately I changed to 5 gallon tanks, bottom drilled, with a sponge filter over the end of an overflow. Water goes in the tank, and overflows out the bottom through the sponge. Had a seperate mini sponge for actual filtration, the big ones are just overflow guards. I could pour as much water into the tank using an auto change system (or manually) that I wanted, and the tanks were easy to clean. With the auto change system they got 100% changes daily. Just as another option.
  6. AdamTill
    I ran a goldfish dominated fish room (20 tanks roughly) on all sponge filters, and forced myself to clean all the filters every week. Otherwise the fish would eventually have issues. I could be done in an hour, took longer to do the big changes on the big tanks. Goldfish are messy, sponges are easy to clean. It’s also super obvious when they aren’t, unlike hidden filters like canisters and HOBs to a lesser degree.
  7. AdamTill
    Don’t spend a bunch of money, Amazon etc is fine. The expensive ones don’t drill proportionally more tanks than the cheap ones, and you’ll be less likely to want to swap out expensive bits. When they dull they don’t really risk breaking tanks etc, it’ll just take noticeably longer to drill. I’ve used a couple WAY past when they should have been turfed, and you just need to be patient. 2 bits should be lots for 20 tanks. Technique wise my 2 cents is that I like to do something I can’t recommend from a safety perspective, but that works for me. I remove the battery on my drill, and use a zip tie to pull the trigger. Then I align the bit in my guide, and snap the battery in place to start. I do that so I can hold the drill only by the battery end, and only have the weight of the tool do the cutting. I get barely any breakouts that way, and I’ve never broken even a 5 gallon by pressing too hard. I think most breaks come from people wanting to force the tool to cut faster than they want using force, and holding the trigger gets really tiring after a while. At your own risk, but it works for me.
  8. AdamTill
    Honestly, that sounds like a pleco diet for the most part, not an oto diet. Other than the little aufwuchs they get grazing on rocks etc, they don’t need animal protein. Soilent Green Repashy and blanched veggies, combined with maybe a little Community Repashy, is all I’ve needed to raise my otos and their babies. A seasoned tank helps too.
  9. AdamTill
    Neat, good system. I may or may not have forgotten a few times and once had the neighbours phone me saying water was running out the side of the house. Now I have lots of water alarms and no RO system lol. Is that switch controlling a booster pump? Can’t quite make out what’s going on there.
  10. AdamTill
    It was always held up as the villain until more modern research came along. Really wish I could find that post now. The basic principle of EI though is that everything is in excess all the time. Ergo, non toxic levels of anything aren’t what causes algae, but poor plant health is what does it (via something else being the limiting factor per http://en.wikipedia.org//static/favicon/wikipedia.ico Liebig's law of the minimum - Wikipedia EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG )
  11. AdamTill
    Nice. I still hold this up as the thing that’s most scary in the hobby until 2.2 seconds into your first drill where it becomes instantly boring lol. I’ve drilled about 40 tanks at this point and only cracked a 5 gallon as I rushed to back the drill bit out after it was through. I like that guide too. I just use a chunk of plywood myself, but yours is clever.
  12. AdamTill
    I wish I could find a better link, but I remember him doing tests where he intentionally overdosed phosphates by order of magnitude with no algae issues. It was as he was working on what become EI dosing. Will poke around and see if I can find something better
  13. AdamTill
    Tom Barr sort of proved that phosphates themselves don’t cause algae, so don’t worry about them in an of themselves. It’s when something else becomes the limiting factor that you get issues. https://barrreport.com/threads/does-too-much-phosphate-cause-algae.3316/
  14. AdamTill
    Oh the dimmer is great, I meant the light on at sunrise each day. That means almost 9am in the winter and before 6am in the summer. That means a LOT more light in the summer etc, which is hard to balance.
  15. AdamTill
    Well, a couple of water changes later plus a cycled sponge filter and my ammonia tests are still coming back BRIGHT green, so I’m calling it a fail for the compost. No matter, the white rocks were driving me nuts anyway. So I’m going to break it down and make it back up again a different way.
  16. AdamTill
    No worries. I don’t really find the sunrise etc option on switches very useful, because to keep algae down you don’t wan the amount of light changing anyway.
  17. AdamTill
    So in the picture you sent, you have an “on” command at 59 mins before sunrise. Where I live in Canada, that’s 8:40am right now, minus 59 mins, so 7:41am. The switch will turn on 100% every day. You also have another on command at 8am, which will be ignored because it’s already on. Sunset is 4:40pm, plus 59 mins being 5:39pm. The switch will turn off at 3pm, however, so the 5:39 off will be ignored. The morning and evening times will drift as the days get shorter and longer, but there’s no “dimming” function.
  18. AdamTill
    Sorry, still not quite following. The Sunrise and Sunset function for Kasa will be just that...meteorological sunrise and sunset as a time, adjusted for both lat/Lon and time of year. You can have the light turn on or off at that exact time, or plus/minus an hour worth of minutes from that time. The Aquasky will dim on and off as its sunset or sunrise function. I don’t know if the current app can start that at metorlogical sunrise, but I used to do that by starting a “midnight” function at sunrise using a timer similar to the above. Ie, the program started at “midnight”, and I took advantage of the fact it forgets the time of day when power is cut to start using a timer whenever I wanted.
  19. AdamTill
    Sorry, you want to use it to turn the Aquasky on? Those timers aren’t dimmers to my knowledge, they’re just switches.
  20. AdamTill
    That might get dicey, true...
  21. AdamTill
    Howdy fellow horse person! First, how hard is hard? Do you know pH/KH/GH from your well? No worries if not, but it helps. Ours is Rocky Mountain runoff so very hard as well, but well can be even “worse” at time. Next, RO is totally an option, but is orders of magnitude more annoying. Emergency water changes etc are also harder if you notice a problem. Most fish prefer consistent water rather than “perfect” water.
  22. AdamTill
    Well be fair, they can do a LOT more than the old timers could. but to answer your question, these require a connection because they’re a wifi device as opposed to a Zigbee or ZWave device. Those are the three main communication protocols used in smart devices. With wifi you get the advantage of not needing a “hub”. The device connects directly to the internet, and not to a server you personally control. Saves the cost of a hub, has the disadvantage of requiring internet. Not having a local control button seems like a flaw with this particular device. With Zigbee and ZWave you need a hub, but it allows local control of all devices that talk to that hub. The hub itself talks to the web, but the devices don’t. It’s more secure, and has that element of local control. If you control the hub (ie, open source hub like Home Assistant) you have even more security, and you don’t need the web on a daily basis unless you want it (to talk to your house from outside the house etc).
  23. AdamTill
    Some are better than others lol. The Nest screen detects motion and turns the back light on when you walk by, and has local memory for internet outages.
  24. AdamTill
    This is why some people in the home automation community flash their devices to use local control. Then you’re internet independent when used in concert with Home Assistant or a similar hub. Not possible with the Kasa to my knowledge, but any TuyaSmart or Tuya clone will do it.I haven’t bothered because my internet is reliable, but the ones I use will at least function manually if the internet is down. I use Teckin plugs (which use Tuya software) and Tp-Link wall switches. Personally, I’ll never go back to manual timers. It’s too convenient to have a voice command to turn everything off to do a water change, not have to reach under cabinets to access plugs, never worry about time changes etc
  25. AdamTill
    Certainly won’t hurt anything, but I doubt you’ll see them any more frequently honestly. Pygmaeus use much more of the mid water column than habrosus do
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