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.

Update: Another Corydoyas bit the bullet. I guess he fought for two days but couldn't fight the poison out of his system. He was just lying on his back this morning when I saw him gasping for air. I made a couple of braces and bought a sheet of glass for the top of the tank. Anyone have any ideas where I can get the rubber/plastic hinge peice that goes in between two sheets of glass to open the one sheet up and down for feeding and stuff? I need hinges about 20" in legth each. Any one with any ideas SAFE lighting ideas for my fish tank? I'm deffinately not going with overdriven flourescent again. Anyone with used compact flourescent fixtures or ballasts they want to sell?

Thank you for everyone's comments. It's time to pick up the peices and move on, I'll see how the survivors are doing after work. When I'm ready to restock my fish tank - I'll be sure to ask for the assistance of the members of this forum.

Around 12:15 - 12:45 this morning - Oct 20 one of my ODNO bulbs over heated and started a fire on the top of my fishtank. Everyone was sleeping and when the smoke alarm started going off it was too late. My canopy had burned through the lights, the glass top on the aquarium had melted and caved into the tank. There was smoke and ash everywhere in the room. The fish were all poisoned and gasping for air. Two aquaclear 500s were melted as well as an Optima air pump. After putting out the fire and clearing the smoke out of the house, I netted all the fish out of the tank and rinsed them off and placed all in a bucket. Initially, it looked like they might have made it.. but the poison eventually got to them. Out of the fish I had in the tank, only 7 survived. The lost - a group of 5 Danios, 2 leopards + 3 zebra. - on dwarf flame gourami - 4 threadfin rainbows - just bought these from riverfront last weekend, beautiful little fish... - my paired Blue Rams - my breeding pair Kribensis and their fry.... :cry: - all 15 neon tetras The lucky ones - a pair of gold gouramis - a dwarf gourami - a clown pleco - a spotted sail-fin pleco - a pair of corydoyas I had to uproot all of the plants that had settled into the substrate and now I'm worried they'll all wilt and melt. I'm not sure what to do right now... I have no one but myself to blame for overdriving my lights from some instructions I found from the internet. I've just lost about 100 dollars worth of fish and 500 dollars worth of equipment but atleast it was not worse. This had the potential to be so much worse. I've changed the water in the tank to new water and placed the surviving fish back into the tank, they have calmed down a bit and I think they'll live through this ordeal. My throat's still sore from inhaling all the smoke and the entire house stinks. I don't think I would ever want to risk my family and my pets' lives ever again. No more "ghetto-rigging" that has the potential to be a fire hazard.

Thanks to Smokey's advice with the flash. I took this picture of my Kribensis and her babies this morning. It's not up to par with some of the pictures on here but it's my personal best so far.

How does everyone take such beautiful pictures of their tanks. If I turn the flash on I get nasty reflection in the picture. And when I don't the picture turns out blurry. Could someone maybe point me out to the right kinds of settings and method to take a couple of nice pictures? Here's a couple of samples of the picture I've taken. They're pretty crappy. I am using a Pentax Optio S4.

I have awesome news!!! The parents didn't actually eat the eggs but rather movied them to another location. They hatched yesterday and are swimming around with the parents. They are adorable!!! There's gotta be atleast 50+. But now what the heck am I supposed to do with them all when they get bigger? I have to learn how to take aquarium pictures. KV

Thank you very much. Now I know.

I thought I was going to have some Krib babies to share with you guys but all the eggs dissapeared this morning, I first noticed the eggs on Saturday night, been checking up every day. All off a sudden this morning they all dissapear. If I had known I would have removed the eggs from the tank. Does any one have any idea why they might go and cannibalize on their own eggs.

A pressurized Co2 injection system will be coming in the next couple of weeks, no time this weekend to peice it together. I will try to get pics of everything this weekend.

Well, if you guys have been following up with my Co2 thread, I discovered my problem isn't really Co2 but rather more so lighting(probably Co2 as well). Over the weekend I invested some money into 3 electrical ballasts and ghetto rigged my canopy to power 3 - 48" flourescent tubes, all over driven, at 1.7x the light out put on each of those 40W bulbs I'm estimating about ~200W total on my tank. I did notice an improvement in my java ferns and banana plants this morning, the leaves are deffinately greener and I can see another leaf sprouting from my banana plant. I hope the two swords I have will recover - one is barely alive and the other one has holes in all of the leaves. I also purchases som Seachem Iron and will be removing the carbon from my filter and dosing the tank with some iron suplement. Wish me luck again. BTW. The DIY Co2 generator smells like a drunk hobo from the Cecil, I think I might throw it away.