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Hey hey everyone, I just wanted to share two "tricks" I did today. Please feel free to share some of your own if you have any. Issue 1: Trying to clean an old siphon tube that had algae in the tube. I don't have a "tube cleaner" and I don't have one that's long enough. The siphon is the first one I got years ago and it works very well! It's for my QT tank and very small tanks because it doesn't drain water extremely fast. It's a store brand one that's blue, but what is cool is that it's slightly narrower. Anyways, attempt 1 was to just see if the pipe cleaner used for drinking vessels I had would even fit in the tube. Check. Second issue was trying to get it to go through the entire 5-6 feet of tube. I had to use some pliers, but I bent the end of the pipe cleaner from a circle into an oval, worked well. Then I had to figure out how to push/pull the cleaned all the way through the entire tube. I grabbed some yarn I had for spawning mops and cut a length of that. I tied a good knot and then tried to feed it through the tube. It went fine through the places of the pipe I could clean, but as soon as I got towards the more algae'd parts of the tube it would stop. Hm. So I tied a knot into the end of the string to give it a little bit of weight. Still nothing. This is when I figured it out. I got the string in a portion of the way, fed in a bunch of string into the end so it balled up. Then, blow air into the tube and push the string further along. AWESOME. I got the string in there, pulled the pipe cleaner through in reverse (tied string to the oval in the handle) and then yanked it through. Worked like a charm. Issue 2: Pumphead doesn't mount well to the glass due to orientation, falls down when not secured. I installed my larger aquatop style pump, the one ACO used to stock before having their own. This one is attached to a spraybar kit which pushes CO2 into the tank instead of letting it float to the surface. Works really well, but after a day the pump started to flop down. The tube of the bar is held in place and the pump is just supported via the tube itself, attached via a 90 degree fitting. I tried adding more support (suction cups) to the heavier side, but that didn't work. Eventually you quit trying to be "fancy" and I used one of the large suction cups designed to hold the tube as a rest for the prefilter so that the pump can only drop so far down. I imagine you could make a support, 3d print it, and handle it that way as well. Not complicated, but some pretty fun ways to tackle problems was my day today. -
Starting off with, hey! I just joined because I thought this place might be able to help. I tried Google and FB to try and find this out to not much avail. But would real bird feathers work as aquarium decor? Plastic ornaments always make me nervous because they can be pretty sharp at times. I know feathers are part of the debris of aquatic nature and if they would be safe as more... homemade aquarium decor ideas. Obviously after enough inspection for things like mites and such. Thanks for any insight on this. :)
