Tank turned 49 this year

Paul B

Well-Known Member
As I was doing this maintenance I noticed all the sponges I have. I love sponges.

Each sponge filters 20,000 gallons (I made up that number because I forgot the actual number) of seawater a day and are great at removing car wash soap from your tank.

I feed every day along with other things, clams. Clams come with clam juice that clouds the water. I like the fact that it clouds the water because clam juice is actually microscope particles of clam. Along with, I imagine, clam spit. My water clears in a very short while due to the sponges, some of which are 10" across and 10 years old. Most of them I didn't even buy and have no idea where they came from. Many of them, especially the white ones only grow in the dark. If you move one of those white sponges into the light, they grow algae and croak.

I think we should have as many sponges in our tanks as we can fit. Fantastic creatures.

All this blue stuff is a sponge. I keep cutting off pieces and giving it away so it doesn't encroach on my bed because my wife frowns on that.



 

DaveK

Well-Known Member
Just a though, that I can't back up with anything solid. With the sponges in there doing all that filtering, they might filter out any of the typical parasitic diseases, like SW ich or SW velvet. That would be food for the sponges.

This might go a long way to explaining why your system never has any disease issues. Also, your not a fan of SW angles, many of which would eat the sponges, so your sponges would tend to thrive.

I notice a lot of similar sponges in my reef system along with lots of small tube worms. So maybe my own tank is in a similar state. I might need to add more sponges, but mine came in mostly as hitchhikers.
 

Paul B

Well-Known Member
Dave, my tank has been immune for 40 years but I only have sponges in there maybe 15 years so I don't think that's it. It's more likely my good looks. :confused:

Florida Sunshine, thank you and enjoy the sunshine. It is raining here
 

Paul B

Well-Known Member
We have this door in our bathroom that is for a closet/medicine cabinet/laundry shoot. The thing is 7' high and rounded. I designed this bathroom many years ago and I don't like straight walls, doors or women. So the door weighs about 150lbs, give or take 100lbs. The outside of it is white laminate.


A few months ago the cabinet hinges started to croak as the door is very heavy. It also has shelves built into it which I think my wife stores bowling balls or rocks on. The hinges gradually sagged to where it was hitting the bottom of the cabinet and wouldn't close all the way.


I found four hinges in my workshop that were the same design, from the same manufacturer but these were much larger and I figured I would install them. (I could build a Space Shuttle with the stuff in my workshop, a really small cheap Space Shuttle.)


I remove one of the center hinges and try to fit in the larger hinge which fits into the hole in the door, but the holes in the back end of course don't line up because these are larger but being smart, I had a drill with me. I drill the holes in the cabinet to match the hinge and install the thing.


Now I try to close the door, but being this hinge is much larger, the door won't close because it has a larger swing so I have change all the hinges. No problem (I built many cabinets so this is simple)


I get my drill, screw drivers, pliers, screws and anything else I may need because after I start this, I can't let go of the door because if at least two of the hinges are not on, the door will crash on the floor breaking off a large piece of it. And this door probably cost $1,000.00 today. (about the same as a two gallon Nano tank) It would be real hard to duplicate being it is round.


The bathroom floor of course is tile, 12" white, very slippery tiles. So I take a kitchen chair which has wooden legs and bring it into the bathroom. A ladder wouldn't fit in there so I need the chair to stand on.


I gently remove the top hinge while I am holding the weight of the door with my right arm. Now I take the new hinge and stick it in and drill the holes with my bad arm (I had a shoulder operation and it is not 100% yet but good enough for this simple job)


I have to hold the hinge, drill the holes, put in the screw and screw it in, all with my left hand, and this has to be done with the door almost closed, so I have to reach about 3' in to the dark closet while I am on the chair holding the weight of the door. I can barely reach it. No problem.


As I push the drill to make the hole, the chair slips backward on the tiles forcing me to grab the shelf. The shelf with all the hardware on it. Most of the hardware bounces into the laundry shoot at the bottom of the cabinet. Luckily, I was still holding the weight of the door and the bowling balls, or barbells so it didn't break.


But now, I can't close the door so it is hanging on the bottom hinges, I can't get down because the chair is to far back and even though I am jumping to edge it closer, it keeps moving backward. I have no screws to temporarily secure the door and I have to pee.


Luckily for me, I also brought a tool with me that would allow me to remedy this situation, my cell phone. So I call my neighbor. His wife is my fish sitter so they know how to get into my house. Ring......Ring.....Ring....Ring...."The person you have called is not available". (Of course not)


OK, so I call his wife. Ring...Ring...Ring...She is also not available. Like Duh


So I gradually start inching down as I use my fingers to "walk" up the door and hold it's weight. This is when I realized I should have removed the bowling balls from the shelves.


I am almost down and my fingers are aching from the weight when my phone rings. It's my neighbor. I tell him real fast, "get over here".


He finds his wife who knows how to get in my house and comes over just in time to give me this horrified look and take the weight off the door.


Now with someone holding the weight, it is a snap.

The large spring near the top hinge is to "help" take the weight of the rocks and other heavy things my wife feels is necessary to store on a cabinet door.










 

DaveK

Well-Known Member
No project is easy, and it always takes longer than you think, and has more problems than you can imagine.
 

Paul B

Well-Known Member
My wife loves lobster and last night she taught a CCD class at the Catholic school so I made her a nice lobster dinner. On these forums most people call these a clean up crew, but here we call them dinner. I know how people feel about killing one of these for dinner but I didn't want to wait for him to die of old age, so I carefully brought him into my living room and put him on a chair. I put a piece of string next to him. Then I turned on Rap music and left the room. When I came back, he hung himself.

 

Paul B

Well-Known Member
I took my wife here for dinner last night https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oheka_Castle
Our daughter gave that to us for my wife's birthday. It is the second largest private residence in the US. (my house is the third :rolleyes:) It was on 443 acres (I have a few less) and was one of the first fireproof buildings in NY, maybe the country.
The place has 127 rooms but most of them do not have reef tanks. There are 32 guest rooms and I assume Supermodels rent there. Megyn Kelly was married there but not to me. There have been 100 attempts for arsonists to burn the place down while it was empty for 4 years, but that is what "Fire Proof" means, you can't burn it down. We met the owner, very nice guy. He was shot in the head in 2014 in the parking lot but obviously survived and seems fine.
The place is a historical residence as I assume the owner would need a really long vacuum hose to vacuum 127 rooms so he has help. Maybe one of two of the Supermodels help him out.
 

Paul B

Well-Known Member
Because of all the steampunk stuff I am building, and trying to do my taxes I have been severely neglecting my tank. It still has water in it and I can see through the glass but if I listen carefully I can hear the hermit crabs yelling at me. They are mad because I have been feeding them cake and doughnuts. The algae scrubber needs another weed whacking and one LED died so I had to jump it out so the rest of them would work, but that's not a big deal. If another one of them croaks, I will solder in both of them. The water cooled LED light is working well and I did use old LEDs to build it so it is normal for a couple of them to die. Everything looks great, still spawning so not much maintenance needed. I should add some calcium and alk though. I don't keep track of that and have no schedule. It doesn't seem to matter but I go by the look of the corals. They are smiling so I am not worried.
Tomorrow we are getting a foot of snow and my shoulder is healed enough that I can do my own snow blowing. As long as I don't have to lift the snow blower over my head, I will be fine.

My starter wife and I have ben married about 45 years and we were talking over dinner and I was telling her how, as a kid we would make linoleum guns with rubber bands and when we got a hole in our shoes, we put linoleum in there. (She didn't believe me so I made a linoleum gun in about 3 minutes and shot her with it.) I think most people in those days did that as we didn't have much money so we kept our shoes as long as we could. (My Dad died when I was 10) Of course, eventually the hole in our shoe would get to big so our foot would stick out and linoleum wouldn't work so you had to get shoes. For some reason shoes didn't last to long but we played and worked hard, not like today when the most destructive thing that happens to shoes is when you drop your cell phone on them. We rode bicycles or roller skated and we didn't have those Dorothy Hamill skates. We had the ones you clamp to your shoes. The soles on our shoes were rotten so the skates fell off, when the clamps didn't work we used string to tie them on.
We also collected daphnia, mosquito larvae and tadpoles in the swamps to feed our fish. We didn't have boots so we just went in with our shoes and the next day put them out in the sun to dry (and fall apart)
We also made rafts to get out in those swamps but we weren't good at making rafts so we would always sink.

When we were probably 6 we dug an underground fort in a lot. We covered it with tree limbs and plywood. When we got older, we forgot about it and trees grew over it. Eventually Contractors were building a Supermarket there and the guy backed up a bulldozer over it, the thing collapsed and the machine fell into the hole backwards. The shovel part was almost ticking straight up out of the ground. The guy climbed out cursing. They had to get a crane to get it out. The good old days. :rolleyes:
 

Blue Space

Well-Known Member
LOL! Too funny, Paul! I can just imagine what would happen nowadays... and since you were successful at finding a way to "build a better bulldozer trap", it's a good thing the statute of limitations is up since you're posting this online. :D
 

Paul B

Well-Known Member
We got back from Disneyworld last night and today as I was feeding the tank I noticed something moving in my old bio pellet reactor. I built and installed this silly thing a few years ago as an experiment and figured it was a stupid idea because the pellets made the tank run so much worse so I threw them out. I keep the reactor there with nothing in it only because I am to lazy to remove it as it is plumbed in series with the skimmer. It is filled with brittle stars who seem happy so I leave it alone and forget about it. I see now that it is filled with shrimp. I have not had any shrimp in the tank in many months or maybe years except a pair of pistol shrimp that I figured were mating so it must be from them. I don't know how long they have been in the reactor and I am surprised they are in there because water flows through it and into the skimmer. I can't get them out because if I shut off the skimmer, the water drains out of the thing and back to the tank. They seem happy so I will leave them there and see what happens. I doubt they will reach adult size in there but like everything else, it is an experiment.

It is the thing on the right.



 

deaclauderdale

Well-Known Member
Paul you feed store bought oysters to your fish corretc? I plan on rereading your entire to see exactly what your homemade food recipe is.

Reef keeping is life!
 
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