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Well, I think I have to call it. My jungle style of tank keeping, and the shade that it naturally brings, has caused the death of my single stem of Ludwigia guinea, single plant of Downoi, and probably my last remaining Erio of the two. I tried to float them in a last ditch effort, but they just melted away.

I really do need to get in there and clean things up, but it’s sort of one of those things where I don’t know where to start. It’s like a cluttered room that only becomes more cluttered. The only realistic option I think I have is to just tear everything out, but the amount of effort required for that is beyond the level I’m willing to give.

Oh, I may have to also add Glosso to the list of killed plants, not that I care much about that anymore, but the little bit I was keeping around has also vanished.

My computer is rarely turned off, in fact it’s rarely even rebooted, but some time back I had shut it down as I was going away for a longer period than usual, saving power and all that. It was difficult to get up and running again, wouldn’t POST. I dismissed it, but unfortunately that happened again today.

I had shut down the computer to give it a good de-dusting outside, now that I finally have my air compressor back. To my horror, it again wouldn’t POST. This is the first time the computer has been shutdown since the last difficulty.

In September of 2007 the memory went bad, had to RMA for a new set. Because of the extended period without it I had purchased a small stick of cheapie memory to make do for the interim.

After unplugging everything critical, resetting the BIOS, reseating everything else, still no luck. I swapped memory stick positions, tried each one individually, still no luck. In a vain attempt at one last thing I even reseated the CPU. Finally after everything else had failed, and perhaps I should have done this sooner, I remembered that 512MB stick of DDR2 in the drawer. To my surprise the computer actually booted up!

It’s a bit of a bittersweet diagnostic victory, I need to check these memory sticks in another computer before I RMA them (yay for lifetime warranty), as it may be the board and not the memory. It seems unlikely, but it’s really been about forever since I’ve had to diagnose a computer problem.

I do have to give a hardy round of laughter to my “really expensive” memory now costing basically thirty dollars. It’s almost not even worth the trouble of the RMA, waiting, etc. $5 for return shipping is still better than $30 plus shipping though.

The plus side is that the system is running substantially cooler now that it has had the dust blown out of it!

So my RKL arrived on Tuesday and I’m quite pleased with it.

Aside from the weirdness with the temperature comparisons I wrote about yesterday, the RKL is generally holding the reef tank within .1°F of the setpoint. I noticed that it was running the 25 watt heater what seemed like an excessive amount just trying to maintain the setpoint so I swapped that out for a 50 watt. The RKL with a 50 watt heater is doing a much better job at holding the temperature. I like that I can set alarms for if the temperature increases past a setpoint, I even have it set to turn the light off if it reaches that alarm point.

The other functions are basically just timers, having the display light come on, having the refugium light come on, and then there’s the standby function that’ll turn off the heater, Koralia Nano, and the AC70 filter for either feeding or water changes.

I’m leaning heavily toward getting one for both my 75 gallon and my 10 gallon shrimp tank. The shrimp tank is pretty simple, but having temperature control would still be quite nice.

The convenience of programming while holding the computer is worth the entry price, it would be great to not having to sit down with a flash light and try to program the timers underneath the 75 gallon.

The thing that turns me off a bit, as mentioned earlier, about getting one for the 75 gallon is that I need basically only five controllable outlets. I could certainly fill up two of the PC4 strips, but half the devices are on the same timers now, so just splitting the outlet is a lot less expensive. Unfortunately it’s that fifth outlet that makes the system more than just a set of glorified timers, since it’d be used for the heater. The previous four would be used to control the lights, autodosers, and CO2 distribution. The manual bypass feature is a bit of a pain to use as compared to flipping the switch to do maintenance on the filters.

I think I’ll get two more RKL level 1 kits, basically just keep the second controller for eventual use on the shrimp tank, and use the second’s power strip for the 75 gallon. Since, due to the summer sale pricing, the power strip is only $10 less than both the controller and power strip.

I’m going to think about it a bit more, see how the RKL works out for the reef, but I definitely think this is something that falls into the “must have” category when priced at $100.

I have half a dozen thermometers and none of them agree with each other consistently.

I accidentally ran my digital thermometer through a washing machine cycle a couple weeks ago and just the other day finally got an acceptable replacement. The first replacement, trying to save money, was a failure, it read 38 degrees in an ice bath and couldn’t be calibrated. I sent that back and got one that is both waterproof and can be calibrated.

In an ice bath it reads a steady 32°F. Enough ice was crushed into tiny pieces with a hammer to fill a styrofoam cup and I then filled it with water and allowed it to stabilize. I feel confident that the temperature reading is correct. The cheapo $1.50 aquarium thermometer also read exactly 32°F in the ice bath.

I placed the two $1 from Hong Kong digital thermometers into the bath and they both read 1.4°F lower than the new thermometer. This is the same deviation as observed previously in the aquariums.

My Reef Keeper Lite arrived yesterday and it reads consistently 1°F lower than the new thermometer.

Here’s the twist, the cheapo $1.50 thermometer reads the same as the RKL when in the tank. The new digital thermometer is still reading exactly 1°F more though.

Unfortunately my digital “fever” thermometer needs a new battery so I can’t check against that. I’ve been thinking of buying a lab grade thermometer or perhaps an old school alcohol “fever” thermometer because I don’t know which to trust. I think I might just split the difference on the RKL and set the temperature control to 77.5°F.

I started my reef tank on the small end simply because I wasn’t really sure if I’d be successful, and of course that is still yet to be seen. I’d personally rather start out on the difficult side of things, requires one to pay much more attention and therefore learn much more. Also, the cost of catastrophic error is much less in a five gallon tank than one significantly larger.

In any case I’ve been thinking of an upgrade path that would utilize the most equipment while still being a significant improvement.

I was initially turned off by the ADA tank offerings when considering which to go with, but I had only really looked at the 5.5 gallon, known as the Mini M, but its dimensions weren’t very compatible with my light choice. I didn’t even look at the larger tanks, unfortunately. I realized the other night though that the 45P is 18″ long, perfect for the light fixture that I have on the 5.5 gallon.

The water volume almost doubles, the tank is 1.5″ taller, 2″ longer, and 2.5″ wider.

Now, I did have a concern as to whether that light would have enough oomph on a bigger tank, but the reality is that with only being 1.5″ taller all I need to do is just add a bit more sand and the difference is significantly reduced. The length increase is no problem at all, nor should the width. I think there’d still be plenty of spread, and even then it’d be basically like giving a sand border around the rock and coral anyway. The important point being that the light intensity really should change all that much from whatever it is on the 5.5 gallon.

I was thinking of doing a very small HOB overflow to have a sump and refugium out of sight, probably using a 10 gallon, so total water volume would be about 15 gallons probably.

I think it would be amazing with one of the new Vortech MP10 pumps.

It’s something that’ll keep kicking around in my mind for a good while. I want it to be a well deserved upgrade in the future, not a “oh, I changed my mind” type thing done in a month or two.

I’m really itching to get a coral, but I still have this hair algae situation going on. It’s getting better, the Astrea snails seem to be doing a good job, but two (not counting the spiky one) seem a little outnumbered. I think another one may be in order. If the crab wasn’t so shy it might be more helpful, the little hermits seem pretty close to useless. I guess they’re just completely dwarfed by the problem.

Right now there’s a vendor that has a fairly nice deal going on for the weekend, but I still don’t really feel all that ready to add coral. I guess I’m just afraid of spending so much money ($50) as all of my purchases thus far have been quite small, the Emerald crab being the most expensive at $8.

My parameters, though I don’t test fanatically, have been stable. Temperature doesn’t swing too wildly, but the RKL will help more with that I hope, but as it stands it’s about two or so degrees.

It doesn’t seem like I’ve had the tank running for that long, I guess because I haven’t, but I did have the rock curing for several weeks. I think that counts, so almost two months since I got the rock.

So we’ll see, I’m leaning toward the conservative approach and allowing the algae bloom to finish up, get the rock arranged how I like it, and then finally add a coral or two.