dasaltemelosguy

I forgot to mention the roots. They are bizarrely small, stringy and even after two years and 6+' in height, they are not even 2" long. I just wanted to mention anecdotally that my 120 has severums and the pothos in that tank grows significantly slower then the 125 because the severums keep eating pothos roots! I also added 4 stalks of bamboo but not buried, suspended from the top grid as I saw someone here do it and I thought it looked quite cool. In a day, the severums ate all the roots off and the stalks died! The stalks buried in the gravel of course are safe but I've actually had to add another pothos on their tank after about a year because they eat the roots so much!

That is a fast reaction. Ours took longer. At first all the plants drooped in shock and we didn't 'start the clock' until we saw any first growth. Yours must have been healthy out of the gate to get a reaction so quickly. You did something right we didn't! I know, the height is getting concerning. Right now, they seem to have stopped at about 6.5' but I can't really tell if they just stopped at the edge of the window where the light ceases or if that's about their maximum height. I did have to move a ceiling fan though! The 'trunk' if you will, never grows. It's the branches that extend and just keep rising. They are quite pliant though and I've seen people train them to spread sideways which seems to work. One I saw, and I wish I had the picture I'm sorry, but the leaves hit the celling so he spread them into a dome shape and they look like little Dragon Blood trees as in Madagascar, to which they are related. It was very pretty if you can find it.

I may be able to help you quantify what you would need insofar as emergent plants for nitrate reduction is concerned. It may help quantify the amount of say, pothos you'll need by comparing it to mine and scaling it down or up in size. For example, I have two typical, large sized pothos from Home Depot on a 125G, overstocked tank. In addition there are 10 stalks of lucky bamboo. The nitrates are consistently 75% lower than before the emergent plants were installed. I've not seen that tank ever reach 20PPM since the emergent's were installed. On the pothos toxicity, the toxin is calcium oxalate. It's actually not toxic but rather, has caustic crystals which can be an irritant. Infamous for irritating cats who chew them. However the crystals are only in the leaves. Calcium oxalate chemically, does exist throughout the plant but not as crystals and there's actually no chance for leaching because it is insoluble at a PH of 4.5 or greater. Even then, if somehow it could dissolve, it must take the form of oxalic acid to dissolve in water which is non-toxic and in most greens anyway. Also you can augment the nitrate uptake of the plants using grow lights. It can be quite significant. In addition, switching grow lights to red will drive them further to consume nitrates although they do need white light for the plants health. But I do know someone who switches to red when he needs more nitrate reduction. I was part of an informal team of scientists who performed a 1 year test on nitrate reduction via filter media to monitor anaerobic efficacy and with emergent plants. You may read the results here as well as a short on the toxicity. Hope it's of help.

I like them too. I think it's a very cool idea. Mine seem to clog often, usually just enough such that the 'randomness' becomes too predictable! I drop them, along with any small, mechanical filter parts encrusted with whatever gunk, in an ultrasonic jewelry cleaner with just water and it's like new in a few minutes.

South Park ...someone needs to tell Randy about bamboo😁

That's really fortuitous. 0.74PPM? You must have very clean water biologically. LA County states 4PPM! And it measures as 3PPM-4PPM out of the faucet! I too feel more secure adding Prime too. I'm sure you're right about gassing with that quality water. Would you ship me a few hundred gallons?! 😉

I think no one has started more 'think tanks' here than you have! It's seriously impressive. I remember those days and what still shocks me to this day is I never heard of the Nitrogen Cycle in the 70s and somehow, the fish survived! I'm guessing we had a much high mortality rate in those days but it's so long ago, I forget!

That is largely correct and the case in practice. However, how you get the energy to dissimilate chloramine can be chemical, time or that required energy can take another form. Chloramine is difficult because although it's considered a compound of ammonia and Chlorine, it's actually an umbrella term for several compounds that as you said, resemble Chlorine + Ammonia. But in truth, it's composed of 3 compounds only related to that combination and only molecularly so and not atomically. To that end it requires slightly different energy to be dissimilated than the Chlorine gas. I think the wavelengths required to dissimilate chloramine with UV light in the time on the charts are 220nm, 250nm and 280nm. This is done to force the chloramines to degrade linearly, with the change in the color temperature of the sun at different times of the day. I love great engineering! Each will dissimilate 5PPM of chloramine/compound which is why one of the lights is rated at removing 15PPM of chloramine in a single pass. But each wavelength dissimilates each form of the 3 chloramines better than the others so that's a summary of the total. In the time frame on the chart, I measured the chloramine portion as 2PPM and in 6 hours with UV, it dropped to 0.02PPM. It's really about the right form of energy, be it chemical, electrical or photolysis-based as in this case, the right type of light energy will break it down regardless of the form the energy takes.

Bad Gas Or How Long It Really Takes to Remove Chlorine and Chloramine After seeing @Odd Duck 's ingenious 'pre-mixing' rig that he created for automatically pre-mixing the dechlorinator for water changes, I thought about this data I've had for some time about chemical-free degassing. Though it was more useful 30 years ago than now! But hopefully some may still find it interesting. In the 1970s, I had 5 small marine tanks. Mixing salt and minerals in a bucket. I used to degass the water by simply waiting for 2-3 days. Others I knew set up a reservoir tank outside to allow the sun to assist and used it in 24 hours. A few years into it, a local pharmacist turned me on to Sodium Thiosulfate and sold me bottles of it to dechlorinate my fish tank water, making life substantially easier. With so many good dechlorinators available now, it seems dated to discuss this but for those of us old enough to remember degassing as the default dechlorination technique, it attaches some interesting numbers to dechlorination and perhaps some potential for automatic water changing setups. Most municipalities have their water parameters available online. You can check the chemical and mineral content in publicly available reports such as this one from LA County: LA County Water Quality and Content Most will use Chlorine + chloramine. Here in greater Los Angeles, the Chlorine + chloramine content is as high as 4PPM (the federal limit), which would be fatal to most fish. Both Chlorine and chloramine can be most quickly negated by boiling but that is rarely a practical approach! Aeration and agitation will accelerate this and while VERY effective on chlorine, it's still rather impractical for chloramine. However, UV light can GREATLY accelerate the breakdown and dissipation of both Chlorine and chloramine though, sometimes to its own detriment. In LA, with its 300+ sunny days a year, many public swimming pools are covered in part to prevent the UV from degrading the disinfecting action of the Chlorine/chloramine as the UV breaks it down within hours. Most use an additive, cyanuric acid to prevent UV light from breaking down Chlorine in pools. The addition of chloramine to Chlorine treatment by municipal water supplies is well thought out though. Partly gas, partly solid, but both are timed to continue their disinfection almost seamlessly over the life cycle of the two. This is the decay of the Chlorine + chloramine in a 29-gallon, rectangular, open top tank at 80* and PH=8. If you look at the red line, it is the normal water with no agitation nor treatment. Notice the slow decay of disinfectant level. At Hour 24, the Chlorine has actually dissipated (shown as a barely perceivable dip encircled on the red curve around Hour 24) but the chloramine maintains the level, almost perfectly linearly, as if it was just added at Hour 24. It slowly degasses, each hour about the same amount, until Hour 180 upon which it reads 0. That's some quality engineering. It's also a very long time to get rid of Chlorine! Notice the green line. The same exact rig but with aeration. Just mild aeration and it drops from 180 hours to 70 hours. Better. But still too long... Then the interesting one. The blue line represents the same setup again, with aeration plus a commonly available UV light sterilizer for fish tanks. This UV sterilizer had a 13w bulb and an output of about 200GPH. The UV added so much photochemical energy, it was completely devoid of both Chlorine and chloramine in under 6 hours! But next is the kind of thing that gets me excited (although I'm easily amused)! Notice the small, red circle on each of the curves. That encircles the "knee" of each curve. That 'knee' is where the Chlorine has been exhausted but the chloramine is still very much active. With aeration alone, the chlorine is gone in 6 hours, but the chloramine needs 70 hours to be removed. But look at the red circle on the blue curve. The UV light completely removed the chlorine in only 2 hours and totally removed the chloramine in 6 hours! Even fa$ter? UV dechlorination can be sped up with much stronger UV light. The UV sterilizer mentioned above is a “low pressure” lamp whereas high output dechlorination lamps are known as “medium pressure”. Should you have an extra $700 lying around, this UV light can be a conditional alternative to ROI, if your water’s mineral composition is desirable, at a reasonable size and cost: Mighty Pure UV Water Purifiers 3–20 GPM NSF - BuyUltraviolet By passing your faucet through this device, it will remove 100% of the Chlorine, chloramine and all microbes with UV light, without changing another single aspect of the water, all in a single pass (but the GPH depends on cost). This one disinfects at a rate of 180GPH, but it would need to run at about 1/10th the disinfection rate to dechlorinate as well, making the output about 15-20GPH. The more reasonably priced ones may be of value for automatic water changers if ROI isn't required or the lost minerals ROI removes are actually desired. No membranes nor filters will ever clog, no microbes will pass, and all the minerals will be retained, (if the latter is actually a good thing). Every 10,000 hours of use you'll need a new bulb and an occasional cleaning. But spending about $2000 or much more enables some 200GPH or more of dechlorinated and disinfected water to exit and these come in as large a scale as one can imagine or afford. These are industrial in size but are industry standards for chemical-free dechlorination and disinfection: UV Dechlorination, Chemical-Free These industrial UV dechlorinators are used in breweries and laboratories for extremely high purity water systems where no amount of Chlorine or especially, the inert byproducts of chemical dechlorinization may remain in the water. With this device, it is your water with no disinfectants or microbes at any flow rate you wish, all else unchanged. Personally, I just use Prime! If there's a reason to degass without using a dechlorinator, admittedly I don't actually know what that would be but perhaps others may. Nonetheless, I thought some might find the data interesting!

I can't say if it actually does anything, but I have used it. It was highly recommended by an ichthyologist who works at an LFS nearby. They seem to like it so much; they treat all 80 of their tanks with it and told me it reduced mortality at their store. I used 1 bottle, and I can't say if it did anything or not. But 1 bottle was hardly a good test. At least not in the long term. I know that's not of much help, but I do know it's something some professionals think very highly of. As @Guppysnail said, it bothers me too that no ingredients are listed!

Taylor Ham. On everything. Sandwiches, pizza, breakfast, everything. If you're from 'New Joisey', you grew up eating Taylor Ham.

Walk Hard is the story of Dewey Cox, a fictional Rock & Roll superstar and legend that the likes of Elvis and The Beatles idolized and used as their inspiration, played by John C Reilly. When The Beatles famously went to India to learn meditation, they went at the behest of their idol (in this version!), Dewey Cox. With Jack Black as McCartney and Paul Rudd as Lennon, the famous meditation session slowly descends into a chaos over who is the better song writer after John asks Paul: "I wonder if your songs will still be s@#! when I'm 64?" ...at which point they proceed to beat the crap out of each other! Amazing, original tunes with hysterically funny lyrics, visuals and subtle humor throughout as Dewey navigates every great era of Rock as it's hero and champion. This scene ends with an LSD trip in the style of the old Beatles cartoons. One of the funniest Rock & Roll films ever. A Judd Apatow masterpiece!

Absolutely. They'd have loved a Crockpot in 1898! But my wife does exactly what you suggested. After prep, it's all in the slow cooker.

I've been scouring this thread jealously as I consider myself an old NYC 'foodie', in the consumption sense. I envy people who can create great flavors and dishes. In this art, you people are creators, I'm a mere consumer. To that end, I'm little more than a tourist here, but I may have something to add of interest. It requires some explanation but I'll be mercifully brief! My grandparents were all from Italy. Two from Napoli and two from the Calabria area. All lived in NJ & NYC and none spoke any English (although I think one of my grandmothers knew more English than she chose to let on!). I spoke no Italian save a few curse words and I can read a mean menu 😋but that's about it! Family gatherings when I was growing up looked not unlike a scene from Goodfella's, minus the money and murders! I remember seeing them working feverishly on Sunday's ragu. They would literally begin around 4am as a real, Calabrian "sauce" is an all-day event. This classic Italian meat sauce recipe is from these people. As they 'came over' in the late 1800's, it's probably from the 19th century, but who really knows. It was scribbled down on paper in Italian, sandwiched inside of an old cookbook, literally covered in sauce stains, written by one of my grandmothers in the 1970's, and my father translated it for me. It is very simple but laborious and takes a minimum of 8 hours to make (my wife feels after 4 hours of cooking it is still considered "raw")! And indeed, the character changes with the hours, especially as the meat liquifies and blends with the tomatoes. The acid cooks off to create a smooth, almost drinkable "gravy" (commonly referred to as "gravy" in NJ, but as "sauce" in NY!). For most of you, it's probably dated and simplistic. It's at least 100 years old if not more and the references are all 'pots and flames'. We added modern references for substitutions and ingredients. While simple, it's a lot of work and literally takes an entire day to make, commercially impractical for most and difficult to find in restaurants. It is a rich marinara in 2 hours but by hour 8, it's a thick, rich, creamy, oily, smooth, almost drinkable elixir of glorious, liquified meat and tomato, that soon becomes deceptively decadent, dunk-able, debilitating, seductive, statin doubling, blood pressure raising, artery clogging perfection. This is but one small example of how they did it in the old country! Calabrian Style Sauce with Meatballs Ingredients for Sauce: 2 cans tomato paste (Amore, Cento, or Trader Joe’s). 1 large can San Marzano crushed tomatoes. 3 tablespoons garlic powder. 3 large dried bay leaves. 4 large cloves of fresh garlic. 1 cup water (use ½ at a time). 1 teaspoon basil (dried). 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil (to line the pot). Directions for Sauce: 1. In a medium-to-large pot, sauté the tomato paste in olive oil. 2. Add garlic powder, ½ cup water, and basil to the paste. 3. Simmer for 5 minutes. 4. Add 1 large can crushed tomatoes and ½ cup of water. 5. Bring to a boil on high heat. 6. Turn down heat to medium and simmer slowly for a minimum of 5 hours. 7. Remove skin from 4 large cloves of fresh garlic and slice the garlic as thinly as possible (use razor blade). 8. Fry garlic in a small pan with 2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil, watching carefully that it browns and is slightly crisp but does not burn. 9. Add garlic with all of the olive oil in the pan to the sauce. 10. While sauce is simmering, prepare the meat (as below) and add it to the sauce at the 5th hour and continue simmering for 3 additional hours. Ingredients for Meatballs: 1 ½ lbs. ground beef. 2 eggs. ½ cup Italian grated cheese (Locatelli Pecorino Romano is best but Trader Joe’s Romano is good too-avoid parmesan). 2 tablespoons Italian parsley (dried). 2 teaspoons garlic powder. 2 slices white bread soaked in water, pressed to remove excess water, broken into small pieces (soaked and wringed bread is better, avoid breadcrumbs). 3 tablespoons olive oil (for frying). ¼ lbs. Auricchio Provolone (or use the sharpest Provolone available - sub Parmesan cubes, or mozzarella cubes for a milder experience). Directions for Meatballs: 1. Mix all ingredients together including the bread pieces. 2. Mix very well and form into meatballs. 3. Cut Auricchio Provolone into about ½” cubes. It melts and flows into the meat and keeps the center moist. 5. Place in a large pan and brown the meatballs. 6. When meatballs are browned and slightly crisp on the outside, put them in the sauce. 7. Italian Sausage: 8. Use ½ lb. Italian sausage. Choose a sausage with a lot of fennels. 9. Brown in a pan with olive oil, and place in the sauce. (All of the meats should be fully covered and simmering in the sauce for 3 more hours while adding water for evaporation)

I believe you're both right. My cats also chew on the leaves occasionally and I've never had an incident. My severums eat the roots to no effect. I believe the oxalates are insoluble above a PH of 4 so they don't enter the water column. But the crystals are irritants if chewed. Also, even if the oxalates could enter solution, they would do so as oxalic acid which isn't toxic and is common to many greens. I've used urinalysis tests to test for oxalates but I haven't yet seen it leach into an aquarium. It does leach oxalates if you boil it, though, Potho's Tea!😝

I've lived in Newark, Dunellen, Flemington, Trenton and Middlesex. Welcome from an Ex-NJ-er!

Mine is literal, but in 3 languages, German, Greek and English: Das-Alte-Melos-Guy = "The Old HiFi Guy" as I'm a designer of electronic circuits for high fidelity music reproduction.

This is of little help as I don't know what this issue was but I had a severum with what appeared to be a very similar issue. I never took a picture of it but I found one online of a goldfish whose eye looked exactly as my severum's did: It appeared over a 2-day period and eventually had completely cleared up by itself. At the time I asked about it and it wasn't something anyone I knew had seen previously. However, for what it's worth, when I don't know what the issue is, I like to start treatment with salt. I went to Level 3 of AQC's salt treatment and it cleared up by itself in about a week. That's not much help as I never found out what it was! Just my 2c.

That would be seriously cool! That's a really haunting idea...I may steal!

I love the cypress root. Gorgeous!

That's a really good idea. I used large, heavy pieces of slate but your idea would be far more manageable. I'm not sure they are neodymium which are very strong but ceramics can be just as strong too so it should be fine. If for any reason those magnets are not strong enough, you can stack them for more grabbing power or at that price, use as many as you need! In truth, using more than 1 magnet keeps them in position better. A quick story (I promise) and I swear, this is too dumb to not be true. We had the desire to have rocks and wood entering from the top into the water with the rocks and wood held magnetically under the glass lid. Sounded like it would look cool and easy to break down and re-set up. I could not replicate what happened for a million $. I must have drilled directly in the center of the mass of the slate, unknowingly...definitely unknowingly, as I could not do it again if I wanted to! With a single magnet holding an 8" piece of slate, that magnet was so perfectly and accidentally centered, I turned the filters back on and the slate just spun along the top like a ceiling fan! You could barely pull it off but it spun with almost any current of water! I guess 2 magnets would have been a good idea here! Ultimately, we couldn't get a look we liked and we moved them and I took down "the fan"! 😖

I'm so glad this may prove helpful. I like to get them here because I can use the chart or their calculator to choose the size and strength needed for heavier rocks and such: kjmagnetics. They are on Amazon and in office supply stores and hardware stores but with those sources, you'll have to do some guesswork as to how strong they are but if it's to hang lighter objects, that strength is usually plenty. If you find any slippage, you can add another or change to a stronger one. Perhaps bring a 1/2" thick piece of wood or glass to feel how strong the pull is through that distance. The coated ones will never break down unless you physically crack the coating. They are rated for salinity, caustic chemicals and high temperatures so fish tanks are not nearly caustic enough to be a concern. They also make them in a form of stainless steel that is magnetic without a coating which is also safe (I like the rings because they give me a mounting hole). To give you an idea of the strength vs the glass thickness, this is a 1" N52 magnet (small but very strong) and how much weight it will securely hold when snapped together, through 0.25" glass and through 0.5" glass: Magnet Grade = N52 Magnet Diameter = 1" Magnet Thickness = 1" Glass Thickness = 0" 75.52 lbs. ---------------------- Magnet Grade = N52 Magnet Diameter = 1" Magnet Thickness = 1" Glass Thickness = 0.25" 27.06 lbs. ---------------------- Magnet Grade = N52 Magnet Diameter = 1" Magnet Thickness = 1" Glass Thickness = 0.5" 14.26 lbs. It's fairly linear. That is, it more or less loses half its lift power as the glass thickness doubles. So, 1" glass thickness would have only about 7lbs. of holding power whereas 1/2" has 14lbs. For most things, the N52 is overkill but there's so many smaller ones to choose from. I think (and please correct me if I'm wrong) that slate loses about 33% of its weight when submerged. This is obviously dependent upon the rock type so it's just a very generic guideline to how much effective weight for a submerged rock.

That's a good point. I didn't think of that as I was just considering mounting rocks but you raise a very valid concern. Mine have only been mounted this way for a few months so it's not a good test of if the wood will hold the glued magnets indefinitely in wood. In the rocks, it becomes inseparably 'fused' to the rock but you're right, the wood is a long-term concern. Maybe since driftwood is easily drilled and these magnets usually have a center hole, using small Nylon hardware to attach the magnets would circumvent the need for any gluing. If my driftwood magnets ever start loosening, maybe I'll replace them with Nylon screws. I made a mistake in only showing the high-power magnets which cost considerably more than the generic neodymium's available at office stores and hardware stores. The little ones usually have more than enough strength for hanging plants and such. The ones in the link range from 'refrigerator magnets' to industrial lifts so there's really no need to buy the expensive ones unless you need to hold heavy rocks in locked positions.

I'm not sure this would work for you but just in case it might, I've done this in tanks I want to be able to disassemble easily. I use neodymium magnets to hold ornaments and equipment to the glass, through the glass without a mount or gluing. I've used them to mount backgrounds to the rear of the tank without glue or hardware. It anchors it tightly but it can be snapped on and off. I've also drilled a hole in driftwood and glued a neodymium magnet into the wood and mounted the driftwood from the top. It's snaps on and off easily. I don't have any images of it in use as the magnets are behind the wood/rocks and the tank but essentially, it's not unlike in the images below. It works best with two magnets, one on the outside of the glass and the other on the piece you wish to secure. They are very inexpensive and are available with a waterproof coating and tolerate extreme temperatures and caustic chemicals. This is a typical pair of magnets: A saltwater/drinking water safe epoxy could be used to glue the neodymium magnet on the slate or wood, the magnet on the outside of the glass or lid will hold almost anything, and the rocks would just 'snap' into place when the two are aligned and be removable easily when needed. Or rocks could be stacked and 'attached' to each other via the magnets glued on each rock. Like a big, magnetic Lego. WATERWELD™ EPOXY PUTTY They work best by placing the inner magnet where you want it in the tank and sliding the outer one over it to "mount' it. These are seriously strong magnets so you'll want to slide them vs trying to place them by hand as they'll just yank themselves out of your hand! But they are available to hold almost any weight. This is a pair of neodymium's mounting an Aqueon HOB to a 29G tank side: I use them to hold HOB's, hoses, filters, heaters, anything I want to mount that needs to be easily removable. Naturally the thicker the glass, the weaker the mount but it's very much predictable and you can easily select the right magnet to hold a given weight: Glass Thickness vs Magnet Size For example; N52 is the magnet strength. Diameter and Thickness of the magnet here is 1" x 1", or the size of the magnet, Distance is the glass thickness and two of these magnets will mount over 14lbs through 1/2" thick glass: And of course, the weight is less under water so it'll hold even heavier rocks than 14lbs in this case. Not sure how useful this is but I thought I'd mention it just in case it would work for your situation!

This handsome guy is my buddy and loves being petted and hand fed. Wherever I am in the house, he's inevitably in the part of his tank that is nearest to me. HOWEVER, if I dare alter HIS house, he attacks me. He's very smart as well. When I vacuum, he never attacks the vacuum, he looks up and lunges out of the water to bite my arm! And he's been successful far too often! But just look at his beautiful faccia brutta !