Gary: I'm pushing 70, but in my mind, I'm still young. When people start thinking old, they start to die and I'm not ready yet. The glass fish tank I had as a child had a painted iron frame with a slate bottom, but all glass ones, usually mounted in wrought iron frames have been around for at a long time. The fanciest I ever saw was in an antique shop in Brighton, England. The proprieter claimed it was early Victorian, which would have put it at somewhere around 1860- ish. It was about 5 ft. high, with a hand blown bowl that fit into upturned arms, with all sorts of elaborate bits of metal and glass embelishments on it; cherubs, fanciful fish, vines, flowers, glass balls, etc. Frankly, I thought it was hideous. But the Victorians did have larger, metal framed glass aquariums and kept the fish alive with continual water changes, which is easy if you have an estate, a conservatory, and an army of servants. Following the Great London Exibition and the Crystal Palace, glass conservatories became all the rage among the monied, landed Brits. My own love affair with small tropicals started in the Balanced Aquarium Room of the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago in the 1940's, when keeping any FW aquarium fish still depended far more on a balance between plants and fish than mechanical filtration and one of the reasons I still strive to affect it. The better balanced the tank, the less dependence on any filter. budcarlson: A survey? Okay, but I honestly don't know that it will help you, because every fish keeper has different likes, dislikes and tanks, as well as their own notions, but for what it's worth.... a) Filter type (duh) Box, sponge, canister, UV. b) Water type (fresh, etc) Fresh c) Gravel/sand/etc It's called substrate, but in my situation, it depends. The baby, grow-out and Q's are all bare, but fairly loaded with live plants in clay pots. I use a lot of low to lower light level types in my black water show tanks, as well as java moss and naja (guppy grass) in the livebearer tanks, as cover for babies and harried fems. I've been experimenting with different substrates in my show tanks. One that's worked well is sand over Flourite, but Gary wrote of using garden soil and I'm finally going to try it in a big stock tank this summer, but it will be outdoors, so if it turns out a muddy mess, I can just stir it up to slurry and use a sewage pump to send it all through a hose to the tomatoes. d) Plants/amount As all of my tanks are Amazon or Asian, all are farily heavily planted, mostly with Cryps and Anubia, but I keep the light fairly high in baby and grow-out tanks and have many wide shallow clay pots of Vals. e) Daily/weekly/monthly/yearly maintenance (filter only) I switch box filters in baby tanks daily, so I can load on the food without fouling the tank. But I don't use loose floss in them. I cut bonded pond filter media to fit the boxes and rinse them clean, getting at least 10 -12 uses from each and it makes changing easier, as does keeping the charcoal and zeno in net bags instead of loose in the filters. But the box filter frames are bleached cleaned after each use, and why I have at least 4 dozen of them. I do them in bulk, weekly. Foam filters may go several days in baby tanks, but are all doubles or quads, which allows me to squeeze half in tank water and the other in fresh, to make sure at least one is always loaded but one very clean, as to draw the most effectively. The plastic housing of the power filters are flushed out at least bi-monthly regardless and washed completely clean as new whenever they accumulate enough gunk to make me think they aren't flowing as well. The sponge pre-filters on power filter intakes are only to trap fines, not for bio-filtration, so are squeezed out in clean water in a bowl with repeated fresh water until it's clear at least bi-monthly. f) Necessary yearly supplies Impossible to make a comparison. I load in frozen foods from F & S once a year during winter, to take advantage of the flat rate shipping. Overwrap a package in foil and seal it into a freezer weight bag and as long as the freezer holds at 0 deg., it will be as good a year later as the day it arrived rock hard via FedEx Overnight. I buy dry food in single ingredient bulk bags from Ken Menard (kenfish.com) and make my own custom mix, with something to appeal to every species I keep. I mix it up in a 20 gal. tub, then pack it into small zip bags, inside larger freezer bags and store it also in the freezer. g) Major long term maintenance issue Keep to a regular maintenence schedule and there aren't any, unless you have a glass tank that suddenly starts leaking and if it does, as long as the glass is intact, resealing one like new is easy- IF you know how, and I do. h) Advantages To what? i) Disadvantages For me, being retired, instead of freezing my ass off in Illinois, messing with fish, I could be in Aruba, eating them fresh caught. j) Realistic monetary investment per year Also impossible to make a comparison. For some, the cost of setting up a 5,000 gal. reef tank is chump change. For others, a 5 gal. Eclipse with a single Betta is their limit. k) Have you ever had a catastrophic filtration system failure, and if you remember or know, why did it happen (and how could it have been prevented). If you had a near-failure, how did you save it? Certainly. That's when I learned the Awful Truth about UG's. It happened because I did everything I was told to do, using powerheads on both uplift's and suctioning the water at changes through them, but in the end, all it took was my getting too sick for a week to do a good change and the gasses trapped under the filter plates exploded and I lost an entire breeding colony of Sterbi. If I ever had a near failure I was unaware of it, because I did something to avert it- probably a water or filter change. Unless the filter quits and you aren't paying enough attention to your tank to even notice it, if you keep the tank clean with regular water changes, a filter break-down alone- CAN'T kill your fish.

You're right that it probably doesn't matter. The OSCR Jr. is an excellent design! I've got a similar set up but not nearly as nicely built. I've found that my worms don't get anywhere near eating the suggested 'half their body weight per day'. I do the 'wait until it's almost done' to add more and I actually just split the bin in half, not 4 or 6 quadrants and spread the food thinly about half way down the bedding. I work different days of the week (inc. weekends) each week, so I don't have a schedule like 'feeding them on Sundays'. I guess I feed them about every 5 days, but I don't measure the weight. I don't know if that's helpful, but that's what I do. I'd estimate I have about a pound of worms in each of the bins and give them a pound of food every 5-6 days, but that's a very rough estimate. I certainly can't give 3 1/2 pounds a week as some suggest they should be able to do. Maybe one of these days I'll get a scale and keep better records. It seems like a lot of work for a hobby one can ignore so easily and still get good results!

yno, My cost/benefit trade in this area resulted in a cellulose insulation package with geothemal heating & cooling. The second runner up was a foam insulation package with HE heat pumps. Both of the options were about the same total cost. I used Anderson A400 windows and patio doors with 3 point locks & 4 sided seals on the face of the doors. Many of the windows are casment and provide a very tight seal. I also have a lot of patio doors in this new home, and I found in other homes I have lived in that the doors were always a major source or air infiltration. We also had the entire house caulked on the inside - and we did use foam in areas where the cellulose would not stick well (like between ceiling joists at the walls) or between large gaps in the framing (like on the corners of angled walls - between the studs). After all of that effort, I am very pleased with the results for both consistency in the house temperature and the monthly bills. However, I discovered that i need to add a few additional components to the HVAC system which were not part of the original design ( but should have been). The first is a de-humidifier for the basement. We found that the moisture levels in the basement were very high during the summer and since the house is sealed tighly, no way for it to move out. We started noticing spots on the concrete floor when we would have temps in the low 70's but humidity levels in the 60 to 70% range. I bought a whole house dehumidifier and that cleared up that problem immediately plus got rid of a funky smell which we now know was related to the moisture build up. The second device that I will add soon is a whole house Energy Recovery Ventilator. We need one of these because the house is so tight we are not getting movement of stale air out and fresh air in like we should. The ERV provides a heat/cooling/mositure exchange so that it minimizes the energy losses when you bring in unconditioned air from outside. I plan on using IAQ thermostats (Honeywell makes a nice one) that provides integrated control for the HVAC unit plus any humidifier, de-humidifer, or ERV that is tied to it. On one hand I wish that my HVAC contractor and builder had included this in the design - or at least brought it to my attention. On the other hand, I have learned a lot (mostly from the GW forums) and have saved a lot of money by installing the humidifiers and de-humidifier devices myself. A good source for HVAC components and info is www.iaqsource.com. One of the best investments you can make is the purchase of a few good thermometer/hydrometers which cost about $25 each and can tell you what the moisture levels are - I have one on each floor. Any moisture level above 55% is high. In some cases we were tipping the scale at 75 to 77% - and that is very high. Best of luck.

Ah this is what I had imagined First things first, I suggest you up your pipe size for the supply to the filter and YOU WILL HAVE TO for the GRAVITY feed from the filter to the waterfall. The pump should take up to 40mm hose, NOTE hozelock hoses tails are metric in OD with an imperial 1.5"BSP thread. A lot of hose is still imperial, up to 1" metric=imperial but 32mm=1.26" and 40mm=1.57". Fitting 1.25" hose onto a 32mm is a wee bit of a struggle but 1.5" hose on a 40mm hosetail is a swearing match, it can be done and is best done by getting a piece of 40mm pushfit PIPE, not hose, and filing a 1 in 10 or 1 in 15 taper on one end right down to the bore of the pipe. Heat the hose with a hairdryer, £5 from argos, and twist the hose onto the pipe, the diagram below shows how to twist the pipe and hose so that the helix of the hose opens as they are twisted, if your helix is the other hand than swap the directions of rotation a little bit of plumbers silicon grease high up the taper will help. Once the hose is well on the pipe let it sit for a while to take a set. Cut of the smaller unused hosetails and file a slight taper on the hozelock hosetail. Take the pipe out using the same twisting action and fit the hose over the hose tail. Alternatively buy an Oase aquamax hose tail as that should fit. I normally use a Hozelock hose tail on an aquamax pump. Why do I say up your hose size, small bore pipe has a high resistance to flow. I have a hose "pipe loss" chart presumably form hozelock as it in metric It quotes the following losses for 25mm/1" hose 1591lph 5 cm per metre of hose 2273lph 10cm per metre of hose 2386lph 11cm per metre of hose???? 3409lph 21cm per metre of hose for 32mm hose 3409lph generates 7cm per metre of hose and 40mm hose generates about 3cm per metre of hose. I guess you know what follows but I include it for 'completeness'. The pump sees the friction as added lift and that cuts down the flowrat, you are paying for the wasted energy via your electricty bill. It is up to you whether you up the supply side but the return is a different kettle of fish, the head that pushes water from the filter to the fall is the drop in water level from the surface inside the filter to the surface over the water fall and that is finite. The hose connecting the filter and the fall isnt bothered by whether the flow is pumped or gravity driven, its resistance will be the same as listed above. So, say you have 8 ft of 1" hose and a flow rate of 2273lph you would require the level inside the filter to be 1.6ft, 19.2", above the level over the fall and at a guess more because that will be into the media which its self will add slightly to the required head. For you information, I am setting the plant pond up with a filter system, that will have gravity feed to a...