There's always work to be done on a millionairium.
One thing I would like to tackle with a reef book is bridging the gap between theory and practice, scientist and hobbyist. I lay somewhere in the middle and hopefully we all get along.
I was thinking of adding footnotes that could be linked to video and further discussions. Maybe Peter can help me with the technical aspect of that. I would also like to directly include the reef keeping community, especially people who like to tinker and experiment and have the resources to do so. I set out a few brief examples of hair brained ideas that I feel are worthy of further exploration in this post
http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showpost.php?p=17217015&postcount=300
If you are up to it, you can try out some of the ideas on your own or we can figure out how we can all pool our resources as a group and somehow get empirical data with some semblance of a control on the experiment. Peter is probably in the best position to host some tests with his elaborate fish room. Having access to accurate testing equipment is also an asset.
There are a few formulas around for pump flow rates and plumbing drain rates if you are gifted at math, but real world numbers like the ones for automobile fuel consumption carry a lot more weight with me. If we could pool our numbers we can put compare them for some user friendly rule of thumb charts.
Too often we try three things (chemicals, products, methods etc.) at once, not knowing what the impact is of each, or if we did it right - for long enough - or for too long for that matter. Much of the information we have in this hobby is trial and error and loosely based theories. It would be nice to tie up some of the loose ends so we know once and for all if carbon works better in a fluidized bed reactor or if deep sand beds really need to be deep. We can leave the technical stuff like "what is detritus and skimmer sludge comprised of?" to the scientists with access to labs and R&D grants.
I'm not talking about bona fide experiments that live up to scientific scrutiny. Just simple tests that fulfill our requirements as hobbyists that something does what the manufacturers claim. If we do a good job on it, we can hit up some sponsors for freebies for bata testing. We have an immense data base here at RC. We just need a way to disseminate the information, but on a forum it can be hard to qualify the source of the information. We need to organize and compile info to discern the good from the bad. We need a way to separate the wheat from the... not so wheat
The ATS (algae turf scrubber) threads got out of control once a manufacturer started blindly feeding his "information" into them. It made it impossible to distinguish "good" information from "bad". I think we can fine tune our technology and methodology and advance our hobby with a little help from our other ology friend, biology.
