Melev's new 280g Starfire tank thread

[selgado]

So let me get this straight. With the VorTech pump there are zero wires inside the tank? How does it work, by magnetics? That is some smooth engineering there!

Oh one more thing. I was just looking at my thread subscriptions and your thread is listed as being started by gregt. Was up with that? You gonna let him get away with that?

[thewuf]

That Vortech is very cool. Found this...

Link to Story

The team has designed the propeller pump to attach magnetically on either side of the tank glass, allowing the electric motor to reside outside the tank, while the propeller can be set to create a variety of surge types. Competitors’ pumps generally produce jet-stream water flows, as opposed to VorTech’s wave-like surges. The team has created a proof of concept VorTech propeller pump and protected the intellectual property in the form of a provisional patent..

Also, I think that ORA tank is what is known as Zero Edge Tank

Zero Edge Tank

[mcdonaldtj]

If it works as advertized that is going to sell like hotcakes, no more tank drilling minimum stuff in the tank with lots of flow. A whole lot less heat too cant wait to see it in action.

V/Tim

[WAGERJA]

yah that thing looks sweet!
but how much are going to have to fork of for all that sweetness... $$$$



-Jay

[original-reefland]

Originally posted by selgado
So let me get this straight. With the VorTech pump there are zero wires inside the tank? How does it work, by magnetics? That is some smooth engineering there!

Oh one more thing. I was just looking at my thread subscriptions and your thread is listed as being started by gregt. Was up with that? You gonna let him get away with that?

It is very cool stuff. I've been friends with Tim & Justin at EcoTech for many years. It's been so hard not to talk about this. They've been waiting to save it for this MACNA release.

They do use super powerful magnets to do the magic. More powerful than my magnavores. If you allow the magnets to come together you effectively destroyed your unit. It is impossible to get them apart without destroying the unit trying to get leverage.

Care is needed installing the units. They always need something like 3 inches between the magnets. They'll come with spacers to keep that distance. I don't see the spacers in Melev's pictures, so perhaps they worked out something different.

No more wires inside the tank, they are outside now. Can be good or bad depending on the traffic around the sides of your tank. They'll have clips included for routing the wires out of the way.

I couldn't get them to leak the prices to me. And now they have been so busy since MACNA I haven't talked to them. If they can keep the price inline or cheaper than tunze and manufacture them so you don't have a month waiting list like the tunze they'll really make a dent in the market.

[melev]

If you'll go to the IceCap forum, you'll find some current threads discussing the VorTech there.

[melev]

Originally posted by selgado
Oh one more thing. I was just looking at my thread subscriptions and your thread is listed as being started by gregt. Was up with that? You gonna let him get away with that?

Each time a thread is split, GregT's name becomes the author of the next segment. This is his third time in my thread. I think we are approaching 190 pages...

[Travis]

Marc, thank you so much for putting all of those pictures together for us. It gives some of us a chance to experience a little bit of what we missed.

[melev]

You are quite welcome. I was watching the statistics last night, to get an idea of how many times the pages were viewed, and the numbers had to be off. It was really strange.

For example, the main index page was viewed 105 times, but the individual sub-pages were viewed 300+, 500+ and even 800+ times. Now how would that be possible if you have to enter the main index in the first place? Even with a few refreshes mix in, the front page number should have been higher.

It doesn't matter all that much to me, but that kind of stuff makes me curious, that's all.

[AJP]

email links mean we don't have to go to the main index

[melev]

True, and if people post links to the individual pages, it does skew the numbers.

[melev]

Tonight, I finally got around to moving all 9 frags into the reef. I should have done it sooner, but I've been busy all week. The water quality was good because all 9 looked good, but lighting was pretty bleak over the propagation section. I have a new fixture in Dallas that needs to be picked up, so for the past few days I've been using one of my 5100K 29w (75w output) refugium bulbs to give them some light. Although not ideal, all but one seem to be just as happy as the day I placed them in the sump.

The one frag that wasn't doing so well was from Dr Mac, and it may just RTN overnight. I'm not sure yet. The milleporas are very hairy, extending well. I'll post some pictures in a few minutes. I decided to try out the new food Boyd Enterprises gave me. I mixed up 1 tsp of the food with a jar of RO water, then pour it into the tank. I had the skimmer off for about one hour. I hope the SPS got a snack; the LPS surely did.

[melev]

There has to be some irony in the odd things we take the most pleasure in. My tank is 72" x 30" x 30", and yet I'm focused on a little frag I got last March that is not even 1" long yet.

This is a Steve Tyree A. valida (LE - Limited Edition, only because it isn't in every person's tank) During the daytime:



Check it out at night. It was moved and glued to a new spot tonight. The bright white part of the picture is where putty was used. What was nice was to see bright green polyps extended in the current.



How about some suncoral pictures?





And its been a while since I posted any mandarin pictures.

[melev]

Here's an unusual hitchhiker. That is a Peppermint Snail perched on the top of the Tigertail Cucumber!



This coral had sweepers out. I've not noticed these before, and they were emanating from all over the surface of this coral.



Anyone have any idea if Diadema Urchin quills are somewhat poisonous? I was trying to adjust a frag this evening, and one of the quills lanced my knuckle. OW! It doesn't bother me now, but I did see a small dark bruise under the surface of the skin. My guess is that it was my own blood and not urchin toxin. Talk about sharp!



Some other corals at night...

[melev]

And from my Pico tank, I wanted to show you my potty-trained seahorse.

[GregM779]

Originally posted by melev
Anyone have any idea if Diadema Urchin quills are somewhat poisonous? I was trying to adjust a frag this evening, and one of the quills lanced my knuckle. OW! It doesn't bother me now, but I did see a small dark bruise under the surface of the skin. My guess is that it was my own blood and not urchin toxin. Talk about sharp!

They are poinonous actually, not enough to kill you that I know of, unless you're alergic but they definitely don't fell good.

Great pics and nice additions.

[original-reefland]

Originally posted by melev
You are quite welcome. I was watching the statistics last night, to get an idea of how many times the pages were viewed, and the numbers had to be off. It was really strange.

For example, the main index page was viewed 105 times, but the individual sub-pages were viewed 300+, 500+ and even 800+ times. Now how would that be possible if you have to enter the main index in the first place? Even with a few refreshes mix in, the front page number should have been higher.

It doesn't matter all that much to me, but that kind of stuff makes me curious, that's all.

Are you viewing stats for "hits" or actual page loads? An actual page load is really many hits to the server. Every object on the page that needs to be retrieved is a "hit". Every style sheet, include file, EVERY graphic image, background image, etc. So if your main page is made of 5 objects that would be five "hits" per page load.

The subpages were loaded with graphics and each graphic would be an additional hit. So it could easily have been 20 to 30 hits per page load.

This would explain the difference you see in hits between the main page and sub pages.

For example, my personal web sites gets about 1.2 million page loads a year but the "hits" is around 5 million a year (very few objects per page).

I have a javascript routine that registers a true page load in read time to a CGI process. So my custom counter will register true page loads, even if a framed layout requires 3 pages (menu, header, body) which might actually be 25 to 40 hits, it registered to my routine as a single page load. I have a java applet that polls the back-end CGI counter every 10 seconds. You can watch the numbers creep up every 10 seconds (if there is activity).

http://www.rl180reef.com/hitcount.htm

[original-reefland]

Originally posted by GregM779
They are poinonous actually, not enough to kill you that I know of, unless you're alergic but they definitely don't fell good.

According to Modern Coral Reef Aquarium, Vol 4, page 340.:

Although a specific venomous substance has never been isolated from these urchins, the reactions in humans to stings from these urchins, suggest that there must be a substance that causes poisoning. This could possibly involve a neurotoxin, contained in the thin skin that covers the spines of the sea urchins.

Because of the rough surface area and brittle structure of the spines it is almost impossible to remove them from a flesh wound...... Usually such a sting does not cause a severe medical emergency, unless there is an allergic response...... Spine fragments remaining in the wound are usually dissolved and absorbed by the human body without complications. Larger fragments are usually pushed out through the skin surface by tissue rejection reaction.

Also watch out for dropped spines. The tank becomes littered with them over time. They'll be under rocks, in the sand, etc. They will have no problem puncturing gloves, they'll even puncture right through a sneaker if you step on one reef walking.

[melev]

Thanks for the information, Greg and Rich. While I was mounting frags, I could see the small bruise under the flesh of my knuckle, but there didn't appear to be anything left to press out of the wound. A few hours later, when I checked again, that dark spot was gone.

I have seen the spines in other parts of the tank, but never gave it a lot of thought. One day I'm going to have to clean up the clutter on the substrate. I really don't like all the bits of shell, coral, and rocks scattered everywhere, but at the same time I know for a fact that my fish forage through that shrapnel in search of pods and other tasty snacks. Even the tangs will nip at those items eating any algae accumulations.

Rich, I think the numbers I was listing were page visits, not hits. Because Melev's Reef uses so much bandwidth, I had to use my company site instead to host the MACNA stuff. Next month, I'll move it over to melevsreef, as traffic to that part of my site should be light again. However, with MACNA just behind us, I figured there would be a lot more interest and resulting traffic. The statistics page on melevsreef is far better than the one on my company site, even though it is the same hosting company.

On 9/23, those images were viewed enough times to use up almost 5gigs of bandwidth. Which makes sense, since the images and the two videos add up to about 20 megs per person. It appears it has been visited 384 times so far.

[melev]

Hungry Tangs - 2 megs

[Hop]

Whats the music on that video melev? Kind of sounds like cusco, but with an aquatic flair.

[Randall_James]

The best indicator of actual hits is "Unique Visitor" count. Most page loads generate dozens of "page hits" as mentioned.

I have a number of top 10,000 sites on my servers and they generate about 250K unique visitors a week and about 4-10 million hits, The logs on a site like that can saw up about 200megs of disk space a month if left unchecked. (this is a plain text file no less, figure how much text that would be)

[melev]

The song is called "Freestyler" by Bombfunk MCs.

I've not put nori in the tank in two weeks. I couldn't even clip it to the glass before the tangs swooped in to get some. So I grabbed the camera before it was all gone.

[DerekW]

Wow, you should be standing there with a net to catch those unwanted hippo's

[melev]

Originally posted by DerekW
Wow, you should be standing there with a net to catch those unwanted hippo's

They're hungry, not stupid. They know how to warp out-a-sight at a hint of looming potential danger.

Plus I'd probably only catch Spock.