narkosis

That's perfectly normal for a Beckett. Just make sure you dismantle and clean out the Beckett assembly completely during your regular maintenance, incl. the air intake part.

Hopefully you're going for the diving more than anything else .... cos there's not much else there to be had For dive sites, yup, Big Mount is great. Deep dive spot. The other good sites would be Terumbu Killi way at the southern tip - challenging site due to cross currents, but well worth it. If the dive operator knows it, ask him to bring you to Whale Mount too, near Tanjung Tokong. Deep dive here as well, where you might be able to see white-tip sharks. Lots of dendronepthya dropoff walls

Hopefully you're going for the diving more than anything else .... cos there's not much else there to be had For dive sites, yup, Big Mount is great. Deep dive spot. The other good sites would be Terumbu Killi way at the southern tip - challenging site due to cross currents, but well worth it. If the dive operator knows it, ask him to bring you to Whale Mount too, near Tanjung Tokong. Deep dive here as well, where you might be able to see white-tip sharks. Lots of dendronepthya dropoff walls

Bro, From the few hundred species of nudis, they feed on a wide variety of invertebrates like hydroids, zoanthids, star polyps, anemones, corals, Aiptasia, etc. It all differs from genera to genera. And even within 1 genus, feeding habits can be different. Like Berghia veruccicornis, sure it eats Aiptasia, but it also eats other forms of photosynthetic anemones. Do check out www.seaslugforum.net

IME, the only fish faster than tangs and less choosy are the rabbitfish/foxface. Most tangs will not even look at hair algae longer than 1cm, but these rabbitfish will still hantam them like there's no tomorrow.

Bro, I've encountered this before in a couple of SCWDs I've installed. In both cases, it was because our piping connectors were not air-tight (sealed with PVC glue). So you could do the same thing on yours. Make sure all joints are 100% sealed. Lowering the flow is not a solution.

Bro, VHOs produce more light than NO-T8s, but they're less efficient than the T8s in terms of lumens/watt consumed. In other words, a 4' VHO at 110W consumes almost 3X that of a 4' NO 40W. But the output is still less than twice as much as the NO tubes. They were very popular once in the US, cos they could have more intensity with the same no. of tubes. Over here, they never took off, I guess because we can't get VHO ballasts locally. Many years back, I bought an IceCap 660 (240V) to drive 3 pieces of 3' 95W Actinic blue tubes. Sure, the colour looks nice, but they still can't balance out the yellowness of Iwasaki 6500Ks. Nowadays, with HO-T5s around, there's absolutely no reason to even consider VHOs anymore. The T5s are MUCH brighter at a lower power consumption, and I believe, cost less than VHOs as well.

Bro, They are. Power backup units like the one Marineman is using come with a built-in 12V charger, and an inverter that converts DC to AC, and then is amplified back up to 220/240V, with our local frequency of 50Hz. This is the main reason why they're pretty expensive - it's not as easy as what most people think. And with models like this, you can connect multiple 12V car batteries in parallel, thus increasing the Ah rating, and thus the power-up period during a blackout. Of cos, the more batteries you have, the longer it will take all of them to charge up.

Does anyone know who supplies the above? Any contact info? Thx

But this way, will it ever start taking pellet or frozen food?

Clams eh? Hmmm, never thought of that. OK, will try some market clams at the LFS first. Cheers

Actually I don't have it yet. And will not, unless I can be sure it eats. But generally, we get mostly Indons over here.

Has anyone here been successful keeping the Regal Angel alive? What foods did you use? Thanks

KS, You can now fly directly from Subang airport on Berjaya to Redang. It doesn't matter if you're not staying at Berjaya. You can ask the resort you're staying at to arrange for transfers for you.

The back-siphon problem during a power failure is easily taken care of, by drilling a hole in the PVC pipe just under the surface. Once the water drops to the hole, air is sucked in, and the siphon breaks.

Untouchables, A friend of mine actually used the Phillips daylights before. They were intense, but even more yellow than the Iwasaki 6500Ks. It didn't matter that he used 6 actinic tubes to balance the colour out a bit, nothing seemed to be able to drown out the yellowness.

ozy, What you're doing is perfectly fine, even if we're taught never to touch our corals for fear of stressing them out. However, due to the nature of the foods used for sun corals, isolated feeding seems to be the only way to keep the tank water parameters in check. Especially if you feed so much that the coral is in the centre of a cloud of Cyclop-eeze

Frankie, Thanks a lot for the SD chart. Was looking for it high and low. From the chart, it appears that the other wavelengths are rather too subdued to be beneficial for photosynthesis. But as AT pointed out, it can still serve to bring out the fluorescence in corals, so in all likelihood, I will probably carry them. Roger

Gotcha boss. So this sort of implies that the blue tubes in the market can still be used, within reason, for certain corals, even with a much reduced PAR from the non-blue frequencies. The actual reason for my thread was to determine whether I should carry only bulbs with a balanced spectrum and a blue spike or those with a huge blue spike and minimal everything else. Thanks

Yeah, I know. I've seen them light up buildings and the colour is absolutely awesome. But aesthetics aside, how does the BLV "20KK" pit itself against something like the Radiums?

But if its monochromatic, I don't think the spectral charts are going to do much good. From what I gather about colours, the main reason a bulb's output appears blue is due to the relative high peaks of 420-440nm compared to the other colours. And if this is the case, PAR from the greens and yellows would be reduced, no?

Hi AT, Tanzy, other lighting-obsessed guys, I notice that in many online stores and even some LFSs, there's a bulb from BLV from 150W to 400W that's sold as a 20KK bulb. However, as far as I can tell, BLV never has and doesn't make a 20KK bulb. They do however, make coloured bulbs in red, green, blue and magenta. Unfortunately, these are largely monochromatic , and not full spectrum and thus not terribly beneficial for the photosynthetics that need the light. I think this is why these coloured bulbs are considerably cheaper than the Radiums or Saki 20KKs. Have any of you guys tried these bulbs and found them beneficial or somewhat lacking in some way? Cheers (deep_end) P.S. How come there is a Warn indicator below my name in the threads? Am I being too quiet?

hope it's not too late. .. just got back from Redang 1. Morgan 2. Achilles Tang 3. Danano 4. Robe 5. Bloop! 6. Foxface 7. Day 8. Bum 9. Kelstorm (PADI) 10.hoppinghippos 11.chrislwp (Padi) 12.Tango_Liverock 13. WLSS 14. Benz... (Padi) 15. Rycin (Padi) 16. yus (naui) 17. TanGo (Navy, NAUI Adv) 18. Alentino (Padi) 19. Tfrancis (Padi) 20. Angry (Padi) 21. Ian(PADI) 22. Supremo (Padi) 23. TTboy 24. dradttg 25. clammy (padi) 26. damsel-in-distress (Padi Adv.) 27.Calciumreef(Naui Adv.) 28. Guinness 29. Assillian (PADI) 30. ryz(Basic is SSI, Advanced is PADI.. screwed up eh? haha) 31. jd 32. narkosis (Naui DM)

hiya, I may get bashed for this, as I've never used Salifert's NO3- test before. But whichever brand you're using, do be aware of something. If 50ppm is the last colour on the comparison chart, what it means is actually 50ppm or more, and very seldom exactly 50.000 ppm. In cases like this, we do a 2-to-1 dilution test, say of 50% of the required test sample & another 50% of RO/DI water. If the new result is say, 40 ppm, this implies that your real NO3- level is 80ppm, and not 50ppm as originally thought. If however, in this test, the colour is still the last one, you need to do even further dilution, say 4-1, and multiply the end result by 4. You have to keep doing this until you hit a colour that's not the last one. Then, you'll have the real reading. At this point, say you had a real 150 ppm. If you change 1/2 the tank water (which you shouldn't), it'd drop to 75. But doing the test on full tank water concentration will still indicate that it's the last colour. Hope this helped, and I haven't totally lost you on this.

Loonz, Roger here. Welcome to our superb watery world !! As for your question of needlefish vs barras, usually needlefish refer to the halfbeaks or garfish, which are commonly seen at the jetties. They don't get half as big as the Great Barra, S. barracuda, but still quite fun to look at. The smallest barras I've seen while diving were those schooling yellow-tail ones at about 2' long. If you haven't done your Adv course yet, why not do it in Redang now? It's open season now, and I'll be there in April. Might be doing my Mas. Sc. Dvr course then - depends on how my funding goes