KTV

Just wanted to say hello! I guess I'm not really new, but coming from a hiatus from the hobby and the site. Been out of the hobby for almost 2 years since work's kept me away from Calgary for the better part of 06 and 07. Back to town for a semi permanent basis now so I figure I'd start my 130 gallon back up. Glad to see I still recognize a few names from back when I visited the site on a daily basis at work. :thumbs:

You can use the windows Microsoft Imaging software to reduce the size of your pictures. Saving the pictures as a Jpeg will help.

I'm not using Co2 right now.. It looks like that'll be the next step. I think my first post in this forum was about CO2. Complete circle..

I appoligize, I actually live in Calgary. Maybe I'll give Wayne at riverfront a call and ask him if he has any amano shrimp.

So now that the lighting is controlled and I see that my plants are actually growing, I'm noticing a bit of i guess it would be hair algae. I have a few bristle nose plecos in there and a clown pleco, unfortunately they're pretty useless and only good for chewing wood. I want to put some shrimp inthe tank. I've heard some are really good hair algae eaters. Does anyone know what kind and where intown might have some?

Out of the request of Smokey I'm going to write up a bit about my experience with DIY ODNO(overdrive normal output) flourescents. While you might have read elsewhere on the internet that Overdriving your lights is the solution to cheap lighting, if you have read my disaster story, this was not the case for me. I built the unit using instructions I found on the net. While they were right that it did produce more lighting, there was a substancial amount of heat produced by the bulb. While I doubt this was the cause of the fire, I believe the actual cause was the melting and burning of the endcaps from this heat. There might have been other factors like the fact that I did not use a reflector to disperse the light/heat from the enclosure. I simply painted the enclosure white inside because it was proposed that this is good enough, once again from online sources. Looking back at what I've done, I think that certain precausions should be taken by everyone when doing some DIY. Before you try something out, make sure you only absorb about 50% of what people say and use common sense, get some expert experience, and do your own research on material compatibility before you do go ahead. I've since then built another enclosure, a combination of power compact flourescents and t12 flourescents with actual reflectors. While a little more expensive than 4 over driven T12 bulbs, I feel much safer. The lights are designed to do what they're supposed to do. I'm surprised I was so careless this time as I am usually a very risk adverse person. Fear electricity, and especially around water. If you must do something, do it right the first time. You might not a second time. The same reason you wouldn't want to crawl under a car without jackstands, because if that car comes down, you don't have a second chance.

So buddy my dwarf gourami.. That's officially his name now. Decides to swim into a little crevice, unfortunately, he doesn't realize his head's smaller than his body. This is the result.. I helped him get free, he wasn't in there that long, maybe 20 minutes tops so he's ok.

The right side of the tank... I built a nice little wall out of peices of flat rock I found in the Rockies about 2 months ago.

The middle of the tank.. A couple of peices of bog wood and lavarock.

The left Middle.. This is where most of my plants that survived are planted.. It's the sanctuary. They are starting to grow back the leaves that melted.. I'm happy again. Doing much better under 110 watts of PC light directly over top of them. 6500k.

So.. two weeks after the great fire of October the 20... everything's back.. Here's what it looks like now.

I just wanted to mention that Petsmart on Sunridge way next to the Best Buy has a whole bunch of Crowtails for 10 dollars ea.

That is a gorgeous fish.... I remember drooling over those halfmoons when I was down there last time.. A little too pricey for me... I remember a male halfmoon was $45. I can't imagine what that delta must have costed.

Despite the house still smelling like a barbeque pit, I've managed to peice together everything to get the tank going again. Spent 300 dollars on a full 200 watt Compact Flourescent/NO flouresent Lighting setup w/ reflectors. Was fortunate enough to meet a very nice dude who provided me with a number of corycats/australian rainbows/a couple of bristle nose plecos, and a bag full of java fern and moss.

Thank you for everyone's concerns. We're all ok. Just a little bit shocked. Thanks to the smoke alarm. Most of my clothes still smell like smoke though. My co-worker though I was having bacon one day.