So, it may seem that there's been no activity on any front for quite a while now, but in fact nothing could be further from the truth. I'm hard at work, hacking away on two main things:

[U][I]1) Lighting:[/I][/U]

The design is finished, and I've cut the aluminium to size for one test 'pod' to cover about 2' square, drilled the holes for each LED, tapped out the screw threads, and it's ready to assemble/wire. What's put this a bit on the back-burner was a teensy mistake...

So, off to the airport again for the live-sand, shipped straight from the seabed, since they didn't have any in stock last week. Monday gathering and shipment for a Tuesday delivery. Not bad.

Of course, adding the sand to a running tank was ... a mess, and the inevitable sandstorm makes a mockery of the crystal-clear water we could see before, so now it looks like:

[CENTER][IMG]http://www.0x0000ff.com/imgs/fishtank/blurry-mess.jpg[/IMG] ... [IMG]http://www.0x0000ff.com/imgs/fishtank/signs-of-life.jpg[/IMG][/CENTER]...

We're finally starting to get there... Yesterday afternoon I ordered 25 lbs of cherry primo picked live rock from [URL="http://www.liverocknreef.com/liverock/index.php?l=product_detail&p=7921"]liverocknreef.com[/URL] as a seed for the BRS rock already in the tank. This morning it arrived at the airport, so off to pick it up and here's what it looks like:

[CENTER][URL="http://www.0x0000ff.com/imgs/fishtank/lr_ll.jpg"][IMG]http://www.0x0000ff.com/imgs/fishtank/lr_sl.jpg[/IMG][/URL]...

So, this weekend I hooked up the Litermeter III. The plan was to set it up to swap out 20 gallons of water per week, and top up with freshwater. It didn't quite turn out that way, and I suspect I've got the wrong pump (I bought an 'external pump' rather than a 'water-exchange unit'). I think I'll be able to do it though.

[CENTER][IMG]http://0x0000ff.com/imgs/fishtank/litermeter.jpg[/IMG][/CENTER]

In the snapshot, the blue line is the freshwater, the red line is the...

So, now the tank is full of water, the Bean overflow is happily in place, and the only (tiny) leak actually drips into the sump anyway. I'll fix it, but it's not crucial right now.

The Warner Marine K2 skimmer is plugged in and switched on, it's actually producing far too many bubbles at the moment, even with the gate valve completely open (!). I've left it to overflow back into the sump, and I hope this is because the thing is squeaky clean and needs to bed in for a little while....