I can't say for sure in your area, but having been in New York and LOng Island I know if its made its sold there somewhere, as they have it all. You may be able to pick up stainless all thread rod at any marina or boating supply..or you could order online at places like McMaster-Carr or MSC. I buy mine locally at a major supplier that deals only with threaded fasteners, a place called House of Threads, or Alabama Bolt and Nut. Look in your yellow pages for Bolts or NUts or fasteners etc........Then again some of those hardware stores may just have some in stock. Here is McMaster-Carrs website. http://www.mcmaster.com/ Here is a part number for a 36" long all threaded rod of 316 alloy stainless with thread size of 10-32....which is approx 3/16" in diameter, and pretty darn tough. $3.62 each Part Number 93250A120 Here is part number for 36" long piece of same stuff but with 1/4-20 threads cost for these are $3.84 Part number 93250A125 You can go to their website and once it loads, you can put those part numbers in the search feature and read abaout them. Or off the main paage you can go to the section on "FASTENING and SEALING" on the lower right side which lists fasteners, bolts etc etc etc and look for "threaded rod" and it will give you all kinds of products to search from......select threaded rods and studs, then material (stainless) then diameter, then threadsize and finally length.....They have about 8 different alloys listed and 316 would be about the best for submersion in water etc and is one of the cheaper alloys as compared to some of the others, you only need a standard fit and thread so no special tolerances are needed.........just common threaded rod in 316 stainless steel. Odds are they have a distribution center near you anyway as they are all over the country. Have fun

Brenda, If you can fill the aquarium with water from the barrel, the more the better. If you were to totally fill the aquarium with pond water, in theory you could just net the fish right away and drop them in the aquarium because the temperature and chemistry of the aquarium water would be the same as the barrel pond. Less stress on the fish. If you half-fill the aquarium with pond water, when you transfer the fish you may have to put the fish in zip loc bags and float them in the aquarium for a bit, to equalize the temperature (like you do for store bought fish). I assume you dont have a fish filter in your barrel but if you do, the suggestion to run this in the new aquarium for a few weeks is a good one (at the same time you are running the new aquarium filter). The pond filter and pond water have beneficial bacteria in it. In a nutshell, fish produce ammonia as waste. This bacteria helps break down the ammonia into less harmful substances. You can search on the net for Ânitrogen cycle or Âaquarium nitrogen cycle or Âaquarium cycling for more detail. The gist is, in a newly set up pond or aquarium this beneficial bacteria doesnÂt exist yet in sufficient amounts to handle the fish waste, so if you add 3 fish the ammonia levels might rise to an unsafe level and do harm to the fish. Transferring the pond water to the aquarium as well as transferring the pond filter to the aquarium temporarily may help transfer this good bacteria to the aquarium. You should probably buy a water test kit (from a pet store) to test for ammonia and nitrate especially. For the first 4  6 weeks the fish are in the aquarium, check for ammonia and nitrite every two days. If the level is extremely high, do water changes. ItÂs as simple as removing some of the old water (25 to 50%) and refilling with new tap water, at the same temperature and dechlorinated of course. I read that better to be safe than sorry, so I suggest you buy some dechlorinator. Other than that, however, you really donÂt need anything fancy in the world of fish supplies. I guess part of how much light to give the water lettuce will depend on the maximum wattage bulb your light fixture can handle. DonÂt exceed this. If you find that the water lettuce still yellows and dies donÂt be disappointed. ItÂs very hard to overwinter indoors unless you have a very bright, warm greenhouse. The only hope is that it floats on the water surface, so right under the bulb it might be better light. I was able to overwinter hornwort this way, though it did look scraggly and not great. Oh, for the first bit donÂt overfeed the fish. You donÂt need them producing excess amounts of waste (ammonia) until the aquarium filter is cycled and can handle the ammonia they produce. Good luck. My goldfish and koi will be coming inside shortly as well. I have a small inground pond. They can take cold water, even ice on top, just not a pond that freezes solid as mine would eventually do over winter (18" deep ponds freeze solid in our winters.) Glen

It shouldn't need a preservative. Usually a clear marine grade, safe for potable water,epoxy resin is used. Some Marine coatings are copper based and are toxic to some fish and all plants.

I don't think a computer fan running on a cheap variable voltage wall-wart is very complex, and it's reliable, cheap and effective :) I also very much doubt that the heating due to friction is significant for ceiling fans. A more likely reason is that a low speed breeze is just as effective as a fast one for cooling, and obviously uses less energy. You can make a computer fan go slower by dropping the voltage, or putting two in series. Bigger fans move more air for a given voltage. Ok, having got the negatives out of the way, I like your ideas - you are thinking outside the box (does that make sense for a terrarium?). Let me share a few things with you. Firstly, there are two general kinds of fluid flow we can talk about: Laminar and turbulent. Laminar is 'more efficient', in that you can get more airmass moving (momentum) for a given input of energy. Turbulence chews up a considerable amount of energy, you can see this if you compare the water flowing out of a tap with a hose connector at the end, vs one without. The hose connector reduces the turbulence, increasing the rate at which the water can escape. However, if you want to get the air close to a surface you need turbulence. Without the turbulence the air forms a boundary layer (on a windy day you'll notice that the air is more still closer to the ground, even in the middle of a paddock). In your example of stomata breathing you wanted to get the air closer to the leaf's surface, this would require turbulence. (Having said that, I think the gas diffusion rate for CO2 in air is faster than you'll be able to blow air, so I don't think this is really a problem.) To get turbulence you are better off with a narrow stream of fast moving air hitting some kind of obstacle. This leads on to "matching". In electronics we have an idea called 'impedance matching', the same idea appears in fans and ducts, in water flows, in sound systems, pipe organs and car engines. The idea is that if you directly connect a thin tube with high 'whatsit' to a large tube with low 'whatsit' you'll get a reflection occuring at the boundary. This reflection causes signal loss, or energy loss (the same thing really :). In the little gramophone that we wound round and round we used an exponential horn to match the sharpish needle's high pressure, small volume sound to the room's low pressure, large volume. You have the same problem with your fan. Water falling is a relatively high pressure, low volume fluid flow. We want to match that to the low pressure, high volume fluid flow of air. There are many simple ways to do this. All of your nifty ideas have been mechanical (converting the falling water to mechanical motion, and then back using a primitive fan (propellor type fans are vastly more efficient than ones that work by flapping, or by impulse means, btw). Can we do the impedance match any other ways? When I go and visit