Recent content by bertoni

Hello! Have you thawed out from your time in Buffalo yet? I wouldn't have... My name is Jonathan Bertoni, and I'm a reefkeeper... Well, I do software engineering to pay the bills. But enough of my dirty secrets. I live in Foster City, near San Francisco, and enjoy the complete lack of...

Don't know whether this applies to you, but if you have any microprocessor controllers in your system, you might want to have a small computer UPS for them; $80 or so for a small HP unit. This type of UPS will give a clean, constant power source. Digital circuits can do bad things with flaky...

>JustPhish wrote: > >But IMHO I think it's wrong to start fielding phone calls or whatever from >others wanting to know more about the guy. That's putting it mildly. No more AL for me. CSL or Teclima.

GFCI's are supposed to trip at about 5-10 milliamps. I measured one external one that tripped at 1 milliamp. A fluorescent light can put out that much leakage (my CSL Eclipse retrofit does). Your external GFCI might well just be very picky.

I grow xenia in a 29G with 2x55 PC lighting. It is growing and dividing.

Cotton cloth is fine if it's clean. If you're looking for easier solutions than micro-mesh you can also look at the Novus products. I get mine from Tap Plastics, not on-line.

You can buy micro-mesh online here. Micro-mesh is the sandpaper included in the aquarium kits I've seen, or at least very close. They also sell a kit that includes the sanding block you'll need. [ April 17, 2002: Message edited by: Jonathan Bertoni ]</p>

It looks as though it should work. The cost might be rather high. I'm in the process of buying some Hanna eqipment. So far, they've been quite helpful in answering questions via e-mail.

About GFCI's: They trip on a number of conditions: 1) power-to-ground fault 2) neutral-to-ground fault 3) current leakage (a current mismatch between power and neutral) For example, a fault from a device to a ground, but not the ground wire. So if your broken powerhead were...

Okay, I thought I remembered testing with both ranges on the Salifert and getting them to agree, but I tried them again anyway. The tests worked as documented for me. They both gave me (sigh) 2.0 ppm nitrate. Looking down through the top, they weren't the same color at all. This isn't to say...

Aqualine (ab-aqualine.de) sells a phytoplankton and a zooplankton farm. You might look at their web page to see whether it has any useful info.

Okay, so I took at look at businesslights.com. For aquarium bulbs, they list the double-ended metal-halide and the mogul-base bulbs. Are the double-ended the HQI bulbs? The 150-watt double-ended bulbs and the 175-watt mogul-based bulbs are both rated at 80 lumens per watt. If this data is...

The Salifert instructions have worked for me, too.

Well, the countdown timer has arrived. It's expensive ($56 delivered), but it will do the job. It can time an interval up to almost 24 hours, and turn the line off or on at the end of the period. It also seems to have the standard 14-program daily-weekly-etc on-off capabilities. Once...

If you're still reading the same ammonia, you might have the problem I did. Switch to a different test kit. I use SeaTest (or FasTest, same company). If they both agree, well, you'll probably need the chemicals anyway. I went from 2 ppm ammonia to zero in a heartbeat.