The way back machine

[reefkeeperZ]

ok I just replied on some ones thread (ericb's) and it got me thinking about some of the crazy crap we tried way back to get stuff to work, grow and actually survive. So please sit down pull up a chair by the campfire and tell me a story of one of the great or not so great things you tried WAY back when....

a couple buddies and I dug around and got enough ballasts together to power a flat of 4 ft flourescent bulbs, enough to almost completely cover the top of the kiddie pooI don't remember the exact count of bulbs (yes they sat on the pool we didn't hang anything I shudder at the fire risk and shock risk), but we had a bunch of softies in there with a close loop surface skimming setup, filtration was simply bags of carbon and filter floss pumped through a 5g bucket about 1g of carbon the rest floss maybe 2 gallons worth. heat was dicey we had hang on heaters that were horrible at keeping temp plus the damn things weren't close to water tight splashes were at your own risk. Mixing salt was done by hand (what can I say we were neanderthals) with large plastic spoons. declorination? no it had to sit out for a couple days, Ro was a dream, a fantasy write up in a magazine about gear we could never afford, for us. But I swear we had our prize acroporas (we had 2) at roughly the center of the kiddie pool (water depth 6 inches acros as close to the surface as we could prop them) and the damned things grew enough they were on the bottom and starting to poke out of the surface. our monti (brown) was our second jewel it was easily the size of a tea saucer by the time the system crashed. yeah algae etc etc etc. but the damned corals grew we ended up with one hell of a mushroom farm and more capnella than you could shake a tree at......

 

[snakeblitz33]

Back in my day we had aquariums soldered together with lead seams with granite rock bottoms. Tube heaters didn't exist, so we lit a candle underneath the tank to help heat the water. Water movement was done with convection heat and a wooden spoon. Just kidding, that wasn't me.

No, we used macroalgae for everything, from start to finish. It is a cure all. Oh, no, that wasn't me either, though there is one aquarist on here who still swears it works.

I remember when I got started, we had two options, a plenum/jaubert system which created a dead zone for anaerobic bacteria or we had the Berlin system with heavy mechanical filtration, including a protein skimmer.

Locally, a favorite was to use crushed coral on top of an undergravel filter powered with an air pump.

After researching and trying everything, my best systems have always contained a deep sand bed. I've tried other methods but I always seem to go back to the DSB.

My first skimmer was a seaclone but it never worked. I was always a diy kinda guy, so I used a water bottle and a wooden air stone in the corner of the tank sometimes.

One of my most prolific tanks was a 55g tank that had 3" of crushed coral on bottom with 5" of sand on top. It took up a lot of space in the tank, but I never had issues with nutrients and algae.

Back then all we had was power compacts for lighting - and I remember paying out the nose for the ballasts. Then I upgraded to metal halides from the hardware store. Lol.

 

[reefkeeperZ]

hahah Yeah i built some lime wood skimmers myself in the past, surprisingly they did work fairly well. not like the modern skimmers we have now.

and the tanks were slate bottom, not granite.

we used the plenum system too in a lot of our regular tanks but our kiddie pool "lagoon" the theory was mechanical export as much as possible instead of trying to utilize biological means at all. probably the end reason why it "tanked" so to speak.

 

[reefkeeperZ]

a couple of friends and I tried some high pressure sodium bulbs, you can guess how that worked out...

 

[snakeblitz33]

I used 70w 18k metal halides that were meant for dusk/dawn lights. I modified them. Lol.

Slate bottoms, excuse me. Lol


I remember back in the day when some people messed around a lot with FSB filtrrs and DE filters.

 

[reefkeeperZ]

I still have a fluidized sand bed filter out in my back room somewhere I saved it in case I ever felt the need to modify it into a media reactor, if they ever stopped for any reason you had to empty them and start fresh or the bacterial crash and reslutant ammonia spike would wipe your tank. I never put DE on marine tanks I have used em for fresh though.