A
selection of useful tidbits of information for the aquarist.
Readers are encouraged to send their tips to
terry@advancedaquarist.com or to post them to our Hot
Tips sticky in the Reefs.org General Reefkeeping Discussion forum for possible
publication. Next month's Hot Tip theme will be "Sump
Tips".
Powerhead
Hiding Tips:
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A few things
I've used:
* Powerheads
inside overflows, with holes cut for the return.
* Closed loops
with hidden intakes and returns.
* Plumbing returns
through the canopy, and having them sit just above the water
surface but pointing at the corals. If done right you can't
see them. The drawback is that you get some bubbles.
* A lot of folks
like to see their water surface "rolling". An
easy way to do this is to point airline tubing from a powerful
air pump across the water surface from inside the canopy.
A strong fan will work too, but takes up a lot of space.
*
Under-sandbed plumbing. Never done this myself but it looks
fairly simple.
--
Matt Wandell
Behind
some liverock. When stacking your live rock, leave an area
for the power head to be placed in or behind it so that
it's blocked from the most common viewing side of the tank.
--
"Supaboy", "LordNikon", and "l98-z"
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sponsor of this column
* Take a small,
flat piece of lr, mebbe 4" across(or whatever size
is needed to hide the particular powerhead),and 1/2-3/4"
thick. Bore a hole in it's center, or thereabouts, just
a hair larger in diameter than the powerhead's output spout,
and fit the spout through the hole, so that you end up with
a 'plate' surrounding the spout, that lies perpendicular
to the spout's plane. The powerhead is now hidden behind
it's own mini 'rock face', independent of the rest of the
rockwork, so it can be moved easily, if necessary, while
retaining it's camouflage, and eliminating the need to rearrange
the existing lr structure of the tank
* Coating a
powerhead w/silicon glue and coating it in some smallish
shell pieces, and/or coral rubble also works well, as will
superglueing a star polyp colony onto the top
--
"Vitz"
You
can go to lowes or the ever popular home depot and get some
plastic painted pond rocks, snip them to size and silcone
them the the powerhead. Then get a small amount of mesh
screening to put over the outlet of the powerhead and paint
it with some marine enamel paint (if you are a pretty good
artists there are many tutorials online to painting rock
patterns). You could also camoflauge the powerhead itself
by priming and painting it with marine paint (again refer
to the online tutorials for rock painting) the only drawback
to this is you would have to breakup the outline of the
powerhead by stacking rocks upto it and around it. The best
idea however is just to epoxy live rock all over the sucker
it will all but vanish this way.
--
"Tackett"
Before
you put the powerheads in the tank scrub them with a fine
grade of sandpaper, algae will colonise it much faster and
make it look alot more natural.
--
"jackjackjack"
Use large (tall)
rockwork to hide pumps, use suction cups if it allows you
to attach to the back of the tank lower down, and not the
traditional sides and high. Here's a shot of my tank, with
3 seio 620's:
Can you see
the 3? There's one on the far right, one on the far left
(closer to the glass), and there's one directly behind that
rockwork on the right between the sump return pvc (haven't
found a way to hide that yet :-) ), and heater, you can
see the head just barely poking out.
(yes i realize
the rest of the tank isn't exactly the best looking, but
its a constant work in progress :-) )
--
"sfsuphysics"
Try
using a rubber band to attach some zoanthids to the powerhead.
The polyps also securely anchor the powerhead to the glass.
Just make sure you keep the intake clear! It
takes a few months, if they're growing well. It helps to
start with a good sized "sheet" of polyps. I kept
the bottom part clear, so when it needed cleaning I just
removed the nozzle and impeller and left the motor housing
in the tank. I used one of those little tube cleaner brushes
with the flexible stem to clean the impeller hole. Then
again, it never got jammed while I had the powerhead up.
