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Hubby bought a new tank. I pushed for a 4ft, but no room said he. Would have o get rid of a $20 round table - the pineboard type you buy in Target & put a tablecloth, photo & lamp on. He wouldn't part with the table or reposition it for any money.

So what we have is a 3ft long, by 2ft high & 2ft wide - which still dwarfs our previous 3ft tank. We've done it properly this time, with the reef trickle filter and a proper skimmer in the sump. Our last skimmer was an air driven contraption that was bulky & was inside the tank itself.

We had the tank made & drilled, ready for plumbing.

Being a little nervous, we got a guy out to install the pipes from the sump to the tank. What a mistake. We find now that it is not so hard & we could have done it ourselves & saved $180. He didn't do things how we wanted, wouldn't listen to us. He rocked up with various different width pipes & said - "well, these don't fit, but I bought them for you anyway so they are in the bill".

Our sump came with all the flexible tubing required to lead into & out of the hard fixed piping - but he wouldn't use these. He had hard PVC piping coming from the tank & into the sump. Maintenance on this sump should be easy & minimal, but with a hard PVC pipe going into it & reaching right to the bottom of the sump - how do you even move the sump towards the front of the cupboard for maintenance (if it should ever be required). We wanted to use the soft pipe that came with the filter. You can easily lift, bend, twist this out of the way for any maintenance.

The next thing we were unhappy about is how he wanted the chiller to be set up. Here's some background to our sump.

Gravity takes the water from the tank into the first chamber of the sump, where there is a pump/skimmer combined contraption. So water enters this chamber & is filtered through the skimmer by the pump into the next filtering chamber, which is to the left & above. From there it flows immediately below to another filtering chamber. Finallly it overflows into the final filtering chamber on the right hand side, which contains a pump to push the water back up into the tank.

Because we have a chiller, we wanted instead of this final pump sending things back up to the tank, that instead the water flows from the pump, through the chiller, then on to the tank. That's how we have it on our old cannister set up & is also exactly the same as LFS has it set up & running on their display tank.

But could we convince this guy to do this. No. Another of his hard PVC pipes took the water from the pump straight up to the tank. But the chiller we insist? "Buy another pump", says he. "Set up the chiller to take water from the sump, pump it through the chiller & then straight back into the sump. The sump will then take it back to the tank" says he.

What a waste - we don't need another pump & to complicate this simple matter.

$180 later, we have undone most of his work (except for the hard PVC pipe he has going up at the back of the tank). Needless to say, we are very unhappy customers.

Here's 2 more clues to his incompentancy. We showed him my freshwater tank. I have 2 brine shrimp hatchery's set up, for food for my fry. He spots these hatchery's and says "oh, you have C02". . (I do have C02, but not run through my hatchery). We tell him of my plan to increase my lighting to at least 2, or maybe 2.5wpg, so I can grow high light plants. "Oh, that's very dangerous to have that much light" says he.

Sorry to start this with a rant, but you know, sometimes, you need to let off steam. I will try to smile now.

Cheers
TW

I would have tossed him back out the door as soon as he refused to do the pipes the way I wanted and was going to charge me for pipe I never agreed for him to order. Any bills coming would not have been paid and seen court dates if needed. No idea why you'd let this guy do things his way which could completely mess up your tank setup and then pay him for it... He wouldn't get any money or even my time if he wasn't going to do it the way I want no matter what arguments he had.

See, there are instances in which people are too nice. I agree with Sham, that stinks. Nobody does my plumbing that I don't already trust.

Thankfully you are still able to make adjustments, and you live and learn. Plumbing is not all that difficult, I could have helped you out with it(Ask!).

Anyways I hope you kept the plumbing parts that you paid for even if you didn't use them. Just out of principle of course. This guy seemed like a real scammer that didn't really know what he was doing. It's terrible to get started like this, but don't give up. Get it done right.

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Critical Fertilator: The Micromanager of Macronutrients