January 19, 2008

January 2008 Meeting

The tenth meeting of the NJAGC was held on Saturday,
January 19, 2008.

Walter Reed and his family hosted it at their home in Hawthorne, NJ.

As has become the format, the meeting started with a bit of the business of the club, forum membership and participation, etc… Walter gave a quick status of the treasury.

Mike’s opening remarks with Joy(the Dog), Ingo, Jerry and Glenn

Walter put out an assortment of eats and drinks, all properly labeled.

Wraps, chips, dips and more…

 We then began a discussion of Walter’s 125g tank.

Walter’s 125g tank

We discussed all sorts of aspects of tackling multi-various algae, including daily Excel overdosing that Mike and a few others do, including myself. Mike asked that we keep notes on how the overdosing of Excel plays out.

Walter then described his Hydrogen Peroxide treatments and even did a live demo of how it works.

Walter dosing some hydorgen peroxide with his SBSDA (syringe balloon straw dosing aparatus) with Jerry looking on

(you should patent and sell that thing Walter)

Normally, he would shut off the filters, dose the hydrogen peroxide, let it sit for 30 minutes and then start the filters back up. For the live demo, he just treated it with the filters still running and I was somewhat shocked at how it seems to attach itself to the algae and bubbled for a good 30 minutes after treatment, so I could only imagine what it looks like with the filters off.

Here, you can see the affect that it has on algae. He said he can dose as high as 3ml’s per gallon (300 ml per 100 gallons of actual volume) without any detriment to the live stock.

One of Walter’s (well his son’s) tank decorations after being treated with Hydrogen Peroxide

While the discussioned continued, and since Sergio brought along his super-duper LaMotte photo test kit (because Glenn was borrowing it), he decided to check Walter’s nitrates.

After several attempts because the nitrates were much higher then expected, Sergio had to keep diluting the sample.

He finally arrived at a measurement that was WAY higher than what Walter thought he was dosing for, with his PPS Pro style of dosing (it was “well over 50!”).

After Sergio completed the tests, we moved onto another problem that seems to plague a decent amount of owners of the Eheim 2026 and 2028 filters. The problem is in the priming mechanism, where there is an O-ring that seems to wear a lot faster than we all feel it should. This is not “normally” a user serviceable part, and would normally require you to send the filter out for repair.

Sergio examines the pump head

After many attempts at getting the replacement O-ring on the priming mechanism, he had to throw in the towel, as the replacement O-ring, which isn’t exactly OEM, didn’t really fit correctly and it wound up getting a little tear in it.

Sergio doesn’t give up so quickly!

Mike, Jerry, Jens, Ingo, Sergio, George, Frank (well, his back) and Jon

Sergio was going to bring the unit home and try with a different replacement O-ring.

Eheim – are you listening? Please do a recall of these models and fix the issue or just give us a way to seal the priming mechanism for good!

We wrapped up shortly after that with the usual plant swap (and driftwood too!).

Plant Swamp and Driftwood

Walter, Mike, Ingo