Reef Aquarium Information Depot

A collaborative web site.

I encourage readers to suggest articles, or better yet, to write articles and submit them. The following outline indicates the topics about which I would like to write or acquire high quality articles. Some of these are links to articles already. Items that are not links do not have articles associated with them yet.

Fundamentals of natural reefs

Fundamentals of reef aquaria

• Physical environment
  • Light
  • Water motion
  • Temperature
  • Water quality: high particulates and low dissolved nutrients

Equipment and DIY

• Skimmers
  • A small downdraft skimmer (Learn from Chris's mistakes)
  • Chris's latest thoughts on skimmer design
  • Designing a high-efficiency skimmer
  • DIY plans for a high-efficiency skimmer
  • Really far out ways to skim (ultrafiltration assist, dissolved air flotation)
  • Ways to screw up a skimmer: don't do these things at home
  • Air injection nozzles for skimmers
  • More injection nozzles for skimmers
  • Foam fractionation bibliography
  • Dissolved-air flotation bibliography
  • Links to other interesting skimmer sites
• Calcium carbonate reactors
  • Recirculating reactors (Chris's old article from the ORAS newsletter)
  • A recirculating reactor
  • A water-filter-based calcium reactor (build this in 15 minutes)
• Chillers
  • How a chiller works
  • Choosing the right chiller size for your aquarium
  • Why a dorm fridge will not work
  • Notes on a do-it-yourself (DIY) reef aquarium chiller
• Lights
• Tanks
  • Building a plywood-epoxy-fiberglass aquarium
  • Building a foam sandwich epoxy-fiberglass aquarium
• Miscellaneous
  • A sound-absorbing enclosure for a water pump

Technique

• Carbon filtration: Rod buddy! Write me something.
• Evaporation topoff
  • A gravity-feed siphon topoff system (a glass bottle and a few cents of tubing keeps your tank topped off)
• Working with acrylic

Reviews of commercial products

• Water pumps: [ Gorman-Rupp 520 | Rainbow Lifeguard Quiet One | Gen-X ]
• Dwyer variable-area flow meters
• Hydrometers: [ Cole-Parmer ]

Sources of supplies for DIY projects

Annotated bibliography of scientific papers

Reef aquarium chat services

• FishRoom is where Chris hangs out. Click here to connect to FishRoom using Java.
• The #reefs IRC channel

Contributors' personal pages

• Chris's old reef page

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