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 State of the Tank: (cont.) |
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from the old sump, we figured (roughly) we’d need to hold a total of a couple hundred gallons. And being the great planners that we were, we long since had the containers to store it in…the question was just WHERE would we store it. I mean, it would only be for a couple days and surely the containers aren’t THAT much of an eyesore. So we went with the Family Room  . You know, women are never happy. Some interior decorator can hand them a boatload of feng shui crap and say their spouse’s recliner has unleashed untold negative energies around the room because of its sharp edges and they’ll buy it. But put a couple of nice round water tanks in the same room and guess where those negative energies come from NOW.
Well, fortunately they didn’t have to stay there long because the less than 48 hours later, swap day had finally arrived. The first thing we had to do was clear out the fishroom . It’s for things like this why God made beer…not that we drank any BEFORE the job. We just promised ourselves a virtual bath in the stuff after we finished it. So, properly motivated, the work took two of us just a couple hours to complete . You also may notice that since the flex tubing to the tank is now cut. This means we are now officially ‘on the clock’ in terms of the tank being turned off. We had pretty much estimated that the system could be completely down for 4-6 hours without any major problems. But better was the fact |
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that the only ‘closed loop’ circuit we have (meaning that it doesn’t go through the sump and therefore could be left running) just happens to run through the chiller. Rising temperatures therefore weren’t going to be a problem, which was especially good since it was expected to reach the high 80s that day.
One thing we DID overlook however was where we were going to store the old stuff we’d removed until it could be recycled. Recalling the wife’s rather chilly attitude in regards to the mixing tanks, we immediately eliminated the family room. Then, I had a thought: Why not just ask her? So I tried but, unfortunately, she wasn’t home. This, of course, meant we had to go on what we THOUGHT she would’ve said. I won with ‘screened in porch’ , although ‘won’ became somewhat of a relative term when she got back. However, we had no time to argue. Plumbing and gluing work had to be done . By the way, there were warnings all over the can about the brain damage that can be caused by using this glue in tight, enclosed spaces but we all did it for a really long time and we obviously came out it k.o.
Anyway, by the time we’d finished this part, the tank had been off for almost three hours but a check of the fish and corals seemed to indicate they were still doing well . In case you’re wondering, that object at your extreme left is a large airstone. |
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