Hi All,
My name is Bobby and I have been living in Hong Kong for the last 21 years, I have been keeping fish as long as I can remember. When I was young I used to breed Siamese Fighting Fish and Gourami, along with a host of the usual live bearers and sell them to the LFS, just did that as a hobby and to earn some extra pocket change, but that was a long time ago.
I moved into Saltwater fish about 15 years ago, then into reef set up, because of the challenge and I had a real tough time balancing my 70gal (freshwater) tank that I had converted to a Saltwater reef set up, I must say that I had a lot of success with the reef tank, the pride of this tank was a Majestic Angel fish that I got as a little fella and had him for 5 years until disaster struck, I also discovered a brilliant source of veg for the angel that he/she loved and it cost me less that 0.50 cents and lasted me a year, I was out on vacation and there was a power failure for three hours and the pumps and chiller stopped working, you can imagine what happened, it was the month of June/July.
When I got back I was so disappointed, that I threw the entire set-up away, tank/Stand, Skimmers, chiller and I have not kept any saltwater fish after that, this was about 4 years ago. I then got a Dwarf Flower-horn, because I thought they were interesting, the flower-horn grew up and passed away. I still had an empty 30 Gal cube with a Flluval canister filter, so 2 weeks ago I set up and Aqua-scape, something that I had never done, I had the die-off of the HC but it seems to be recovering now and carpeting well or so I think J. I hope I succeed with this.
The Ultimate goal is a 300 Gallon reef tank, but I need to put aside some money for that so that will be down the line.
Getting back to the aqua-scape, I have been reading up on various things on the net, something that I have an issue with now is surface film, I know there are several methods to take this out and a lot of valid theories on why this happens, I have never had a surface film problem in the past, it is only after I started injecting CO2 into the setup, I think the CO2 bubbles are a major contributing factor to the surface film (but in a good way), the reason I say this is that these fine bubbles act like what a skimmer would do in a reef-tank, where they trap protein matter onto them and take them to the surface and contribute in a big way to the surface film. Using a surface skimmer helps, but we need to think of a way to get rid of this gunk, a lot of automatic ways to get rid of the film do not really rid the film away, they just dissolve it back into the aquarium water, the manual ways of using paper towels or using a bottle seem to be the best way, I was wondering if that was a way to automatically skim the surface with one of the skimming devices available now, but find a means to take out this scum by some special filtration method.
Bobby
My name is Bobby and I have been living in Hong Kong for the last 21 years, I have been keeping fish as long as I can remember. When I was young I used to breed Siamese Fighting Fish and Gourami, along with a host of the usual live bearers and sell them to the LFS, just did that as a hobby and to earn some extra pocket change, but that was a long time ago.
I moved into Saltwater fish about 15 years ago, then into reef set up, because of the challenge and I had a real tough time balancing my 70gal (freshwater) tank that I had converted to a Saltwater reef set up, I must say that I had a lot of success with the reef tank, the pride of this tank was a Majestic Angel fish that I got as a little fella and had him for 5 years until disaster struck, I also discovered a brilliant source of veg for the angel that he/she loved and it cost me less that 0.50 cents and lasted me a year, I was out on vacation and there was a power failure for three hours and the pumps and chiller stopped working, you can imagine what happened, it was the month of June/July.
When I got back I was so disappointed, that I threw the entire set-up away, tank/Stand, Skimmers, chiller and I have not kept any saltwater fish after that, this was about 4 years ago. I then got a Dwarf Flower-horn, because I thought they were interesting, the flower-horn grew up and passed away. I still had an empty 30 Gal cube with a Flluval canister filter, so 2 weeks ago I set up and Aqua-scape, something that I had never done, I had the die-off of the HC but it seems to be recovering now and carpeting well or so I think J. I hope I succeed with this.
The Ultimate goal is a 300 Gallon reef tank, but I need to put aside some money for that so that will be down the line.
Getting back to the aqua-scape, I have been reading up on various things on the net, something that I have an issue with now is surface film, I know there are several methods to take this out and a lot of valid theories on why this happens, I have never had a surface film problem in the past, it is only after I started injecting CO2 into the setup, I think the CO2 bubbles are a major contributing factor to the surface film (but in a good way), the reason I say this is that these fine bubbles act like what a skimmer would do in a reef-tank, where they trap protein matter onto them and take them to the surface and contribute in a big way to the surface film. Using a surface skimmer helps, but we need to think of a way to get rid of this gunk, a lot of automatic ways to get rid of the film do not really rid the film away, they just dissolve it back into the aquarium water, the manual ways of using paper towels or using a bottle seem to be the best way, I was wondering if that was a way to automatically skim the surface with one of the skimming devices available now, but find a means to take out this scum by some special filtration method.
Bobby
very much for your response guys.