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dmits41

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dmits41 last won the day on February 2 2019

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About dmits41

  • Birthday 06/09/1979

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    dmits41
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  • Gender
    Male
  • Location
    Indy South Side
  • Interests
    The tank (duh), home theater, colts football, xbox.
  • Tank
    30g rimless

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  1. Wow, it's been over another month. Not a whole lot going on with the current tank but a few things have progressed. First, I finished the theater room ceiling (short of building more acoustic absorbers.) I wanted everything to match the metal of my sliding door so I used black stainless metallic paint and painted my new can light trim rings and old vents. In the back of the room I added some canvas art: I've started my big decorative project for the wall behind the TV. Remember, I use Philips Hue rope lights behind my TV so I want something that will work with the light. My first though was a light stacked stone wall, but when I priced it out I realized that it is money better spent elsewhere. I then saw a site where someone faked it with wood, so I thought I'd give that a shot but I just couldn't see a way to not make it look fake. Then while messing around in the garage I decided to try a couple things. I took a block I made and painted it with the black stainless paint, then rounded the corners and repeated. I think I'm going to try a wall made like this. Here's an example with a few unpainted blocks: Here are two with the paint. The bottom one is the look I'm going with and the distortion on the bottom left corner of that one is from the camera, not on the block: It's going to take a lot of work but I think I'll like it. As far as tanks, I got a free 38 gallon bowfront, rock, sand and misc. equipment from a friend. I'm not sure what to do with the tank but I know that size isn't the best for another reef tank. I'm leaning toward keeping a pair of seahorses in it, what do you think?
  2. Tonight I ended the barebottom experiment. I found that I just love the look and some of the critters that do better with sand. I went with about a 3/4" layer, not too much so I can siphon regularly. I found that there was a lot of snail poop rolling around the bottom even when I got rid of it with weekly water changes. I'd post a pic but the tank's still cloudy. It appears that I've rocked my clowns' world, they're really exploring the space like it's a whole new tank. At least they're going everywhere together so at this point I think it's safe to say they've bonded.
  3. Not as fun as the other things I've been doing in here, but the ceiling on the living room side of the wall is finally trench free! I scraped, patched and re-textured it. The wire coming down is for a wireless access point we're putting in later.
  4. It's been a month and the room's coming along. I built most of the top section of the desk. It'll be used both for storage and work. I've only built the first of 4 cabinet doors and will wait to paint them and my shelves until it's warmer and I can use my sprayer. I also added a towel ring next to the tank so I can clean up small spills easily. I created a quick spreadsheet for my left monitor as a way to quickly check my most recent water change and results for Ca, Alk and Mg. The nice part is that I added conditional formatting so that as the days go by on my WC and tests the dates go from green to yellow to red. Same thing with my test results, I setup ranges for them that are color coded. The tank's going well too. I have a pair of ocellaris (1 snowflake) that have bonded and go everywhere together. There is also a red firefish, brittle star and 3 frags. I'm trying to accumulate more frags and need to add a cleanup crew.
  5. Since I restarted my tank after the crash and room build I thought I'd just roll along for a while without testing, but once I got a few frags I got back on track. I found my Alk was really low, the first test was 6.8. I am using the Hanna checker for testing but was using reagent that expired in July, so I decided to pick up a fresh bottle today because I was afraid that I was dosing too much and want to make sure the result is accurate. I was up to 9.24 dKh, then tested with both reagents today. Turns out my reading with the new kit was only 7.62. I tested again with both vials just to take that out of the equation and the results were the same within 1 ppm. It looks like my expired reagent was giving me a bad result, I am curious how low the Alk really was. I noticed that my frags opened up significantly after dosing so I bet it was pretty low. It goes to show that even though the test kits look fine you really should replace them when they expire.
  6. I most recently used the Elos kit and liked it.
  7. I'm building the top half of my desk with built-in shelving in my fish room and want clear shelves for lighting. Does anyone have some scrap acrylic they'd be willing to sell? I need 4-6 at about 16" square.
  8. Looks to me like another sponge. There are all kinds, shapes and colors of those things.
  9. The floor after reworking: New FTS after having to redo the aquascape (can't find white balance on phone, pic is really blue):
  10. I believe that it would've worked, but in all honesty I regretted ever putting the stuff down after I did the original top coat. I removed every bit of it and applied a new coat of the metallic epoxy and it looks much better. I just put the room back together this afternoon and couldn't get my aquascape back to what it was, but I still like it. I'll let it run with just water for a day or two just to make sure everything stabilizes a bit. During the breakdown I found the body of the missing clown, it had jumped and I couldn't see it until I removed the Apex wiring from the floor corner. I'm going to get another one to go with the snowflake, just not quite yet.
  11. So there's been a setback. There was cracking in the floor that I had patched, and the thought was that the rust oleum floor coating wasn't adhering to the patch. I found out that this wasn't the case. It turns out that the self leveling concrete didn't adhere to the original concrete floor...like at all. I'm going to disassemble everything and rip up the floor. I have 2 more boxes of floor coating ready to go. At least this happened now when the only tank I have is a 29. I really like my aquascape though, I think I'll get some epoxy putty to lock it in place before I move it for the floor redo.
  12. And yes, I moved the left monitor over after I put it up so that is spackle you see behind it.
  13. It's been almost a month and the room's mostly the same but I did add some techy stuff today. First, the bad news. It looks like my perc died some time overnight last night. I haven't seen him all day and even moved the rocks around during feeding. The snowflake has been chasing him around a lot but I thought they were just establishing dominance. Maybe she took it too far. The strange thing is that I can't find a body and there are no scavengers in the tank. Just the snowflake and 2 turbos. Both fish seemed in great health last night and ate very well. Anyway, on to the room. It's currently being used to store the kids' board games with the tree up, but I added a new laptop and 2 monitors. One is for the Apex Fusion page and the other is for other things like videos. I was originally going to download a bunch of beautiful coral macro pictures to play as my wallpaper in slideshow mode, but then I got a different idea. I went into Photobucket and downloaded almost every tank pic that I've uploaded for over a decade. I put in everything including decisions I wish I had back. It's a fun way to remember the journey since I started in the hobby. The desk is still less than halfway done, the upper section has been modeled in Sketchup and I need to build it. Eventually it will house the laptop up high, more storage, and a coral band saw that will slide out on a tray like the ones on the bottom. The top area all the way across will be open and show things that I want to display.
  14. Today was the day it became a working tank again. I went over to Modern and they had an interesting pair of clowns for sale, a snowflake ocellaris and an onyx percula. They just put them together recently and both look great. I added them with 2 turbos. No frags yet. They've each taken sides of the tank for now. The snowflake is in the back left corner and the onyx is out front on the right half.
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