Monthly Archives: August 2010

It took only 4 days for the Bysen/bsled LED’s to arrive from China.

How they sit on my stand.

The timers were impossible to figure out but with the help from this forum I’ve set them up nicely (blue lights on in the morning, white blue then white white blue then white blue and blue again at night, very nice).

They’re crazy bright, so much so that I’m not sure we can handle them (we had dinner last night with all house lights off and just the LED’s running!).

A few things: The timers look so dodgey. One of them even uses different screws to the other two. Each light has 3 manual on/off buttons on top and one of the buttons on one unit doesn’t work (but the light still works). My stand is bowing a little at the middle which was to be expected (dodgey!).

EDIT: The glare from hanging them was just too bright and I didn’t trust my stand, nor the thin cabling used to hang the lights with so I decided to whip out the jigsaw and hack up my old hood. Here’s the result:

No glare, units stay cool and away from salt water which is great considering they’re not made for this harsh environment (they are originally designed to grow plants!) and it’s a safer set-up for Mia (imagine coming home to a dead kitten in your tank?!).

Mia’s getting really good at jumping. She can now jump up onto the kitchen bench and dinner table too. Here she is about to jump up onto the box Christina’s new iMac came in.

And on top of the box, checking out the garden.

PS: Yes she’s getting bigger every day!

Algae bloom.

I did a huge 120litre water change the other day, tested my nitrates and they were still sitting at about 50ppm. Over it I decided to take some more drastic measures. I’ve read a lot into carbon dosing, basically, if you add something carbon based (such as sugar or vodka), bacteria will feed on it and their number will increase. The bacteria will be consuming more and more nitrate to build their cells and the excess bacteria in turn will be skimmed out by my skimmer, resulting in lowering my nitrate reading.

I decided to try putting one teaspoon of sugar into the tank. The next morning the entire tank was cloudy, this was a good thing as it was most likely an algae bloom and too right my skimmer went nuts and was pulling out more crap than usual. I’ve tested for nitrates again this morning and the reading is looking a little better. Sad thing is I lost my clam. Everything else is doing fine though.

I’m so over this crappy tank. I’m starting to seriously think about doing it right straight off the bat. IE: A custom tank made to my dimensions (I’d like a deeper, not taller tank), a proper weir + sump and plumbing set-up and with some serious tech equipment to boot.