Retirement and forum shutdown (17 Jan 2022)

Hi,

John Howell who has managed the forum for years is getting on and wishes to retire from the role of managing it.
Over the years, he has managed the forum through good days and bad days and he has always been fair.
He has managed to bring his passion for fish keeping to the forum and keep it going for so long.

I wish to thank John for his hard work in keeping the forum going.

With John wishing to "retire" from the role of managing the forum and the forum receiving very little traffic, I think we must agree that forum has come to a natural conclusion and it's time to put it to rest.

I am proposing that the forum be made read-only from March 2022 onwards and that no new users or content be created. The website is still registered for several more years, so the content will still be accessible but no new topics or replies will be allowed.

If there is interest from the ITFS or other fish keeping clubs, we may redirect traffic to them or to a Facebook group but will not actively manage it.

I'd like to thank everyone over the years who helped with forum, posted a reply, started a new topic, ask a question and helped a newbie in fish keeping. And thank you to the sponsors who helped us along the away. Hopefully it made the hobby stronger.

I'd especially like to thank John Howell and Valerie Rousseau for all of their contributions, without them the forum would have never been has successful.

Thank you
Darragh Sherwin

DIY Live Rock

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Peter OB (Peter O'Brien)
Topic Author
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Senior Member

21 Dec 2007 16:11 #1 by Peter OB (Peter O'Brien)

DIY Live Rock was created by Peter OB (Peter O'Brien)

I was just on the PFK site browsing through some of the readers tanks, this one appeared. Craig Stuart is the name of the bloke who owns the tank. What i found wierd and never heard of before was his \"DIY Live Rock\", he describes the tank below.

Aquarium details
Completely natural system with no skimmer. Relies on mud filtration and DIY live rock and a deep sand bed to filter water. The mud filter is a 3 foot tank with a 8 inch bed of mud and full of macro algae. Return pump, heater, auto top up float valve are all housed in one corner. Main tank has a deep sand bed of 6 inches. The substrate is made up of marble dust and beach sand. The marble dust was first left to mature for six month before it was mixed with live beach sand. It contains lots of bugs and worms that constantly turn it over and mix it up. DIY rock was made using marble dust, beach sand, white concrete and pool filter salt. shapes were molded in a sand bucket and then once hard they were left to soak in the sea for seven weeks before being added to the aquarium. This allowed for calcium hydroxide to leach out and for bacteria to colonise the rock. The salt during this time disolves leaving the rock porous and full of holes. Main tank has two 1000l/ph power heads and one big 10000l/p/h pump pushing water through a very large spray bar. All water is directed at the surface of the aquarium to create a circular motion over the rocks. Lighting is not ideal as 400w halide is the only light source. This will be changed to 2 400W halides, one actinic and two LED.

Smoke me a Kipper, I’ll be back for breakfast.

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