Send in the Clowns

Project Aquarium has reached a new stage, the addition of fish!  Now instead of looking at some rock and rapidly growing 'stuff', there are things swimming around.  To start of we went with the ever popular Clown Fish.  Mainly because the kids recognize them as the Nemo fish.

One of them is a bit of a jerk though, course I couldn't tell you which.  They just look too much alike.  Overall, they are pretty fun to watch and the kids love to feed them.  We will be getting more fish soon, but it is a build up process.  Handling algae growth is still a priority.

I also need to get some background paper to cover up the tubes and wires one of these days.  Next up, is some sort of algae rock which soaks up the nitrogen before the algae can get it.  Or something like that, most of this stuff is still a mystery to me.

I picked up a really neat glass cleaner over the weekend, since algae was growing on that too.  It's a two piece system, one on the inside, one on the outside both connected by a strong magnet.  Works very well.  This concludes another exciting fish tank related blog post.

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Rock On

We have entered the 2nd stage of Project Aquarium, the addition of water and live rock.  The rock is from Florida, and has been cured and scrubbed by someone much more knowledgeable than I am.  I was told it produced quite a smell.

Live Rock is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you're going to get.  Hopefully nothing bad hitched a ride and survived the scrubbing.  We'll see though.

This week we are letting everything settle, and hopefully in a few days the water measurements will allow us to add fish.  As we have 2 small children, we will be going with a couple of Clown Fish and a maybe Blue Tang ( Dory).  I saw maybe as my quick research shows they may not be the best neighbors or fit in my tank well as adults.

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Project Aquarium

Yes, an actual aquarium.  Clever title for a Monday morning.  That's the latest undertaking in the Werit household.  It was the wifes idea, which I am am not fully on board with.  We have too many other things to take care of, but I digress.  I figure if we are going to do this, we're going to do it right.

That means going saltwater.  It's a lot of extra work, but we have a local pet store that will take care of a lot of the mundane details.  First step:  Get Aquarium.

Check.  We went with a 60 gallon glass tank.  Nothing too fancy here. That's still just the paper insert you see. The cool part, to me at least, is what is sitting on the top of the tank.  It came with a couple of standard hood lights, which were just boring.  I tossed those aside and went with this:

It's an LED lighting system.  Specifically, the Marineland Reef Capable LED Lighting System.  It puts out around 3,340 lumens and since it is LED runs much cooler.  It also adds Geek cred to the tank at least until I get my remote controlled submarine with a camera.... some day.

Right now we are waiting for the Live Rock to get in.  It's being cleaned and cured prior, so we should be good to go to get water and rock in the tank this week.  Then, if we are lucky, we may be able to talk about fish next week.

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