Need someone to hook up auto-top-off...

[Delphinus]

I know how you feel, I wish I could pay someone sometimes to help me out. But consider this: the going rate for say an LFS guy to come help you out is $75/hr, or at least that's what I was told when I called around a couple of places looking for someone to help me out with my microbubble problem, :eek:

Honestly, a topoff shouldn't be all that hard. The only issue is perhaps if you need to drill a hole through glass. I personally wouldn't mess around with those $10 spade-tip glass/ceramic drill bits. Unfortunately, a good diamond-tipped hole saw costs around $90-$100, so that's perhaps a little steep if you're only going to use it once.

OTOH, if whatever you need drilled is easy to carry around, you could take it to say Riverfront and they'll drill a hole for you for $10 or $20 per hole (depending on who you ask). I'm not sure any of the other LFS have drill bits inhouse. Another idea is call around the glass shops I bet it wouldn't take too long to find someone willing to drill a hole for a nominal fee.

If you really are adverse to drilling glass, you might be able to work around that. I used to be ...so my 50g tank has a float valve that I never drilled through the glass wall of the sump. Instead, I created a standpipe that could sit in the sump (using a toilet flange and 3" PVC). It needs to be weighted down to keep in place, but otherwise works pretty good. I drilled through that to get my float valve in my sump, and now I get the benefit of a float-valve topoff without having drilled the glass.

If you just want someone to come over and help you brainstorm, well I can do that for free! Or, for the price of coming over to MY place and helping me out sometime. :D I'm replacing the sump on my 75g, hopefully this will fix my microbubble problem. If this doesn't do it, then I'm going to really need someone else's eyes on this and brainstorming what I can do. Microbubbles suck man!!!! And I will be moving into a new abode pretty soon here myself (hey Mitch if you're reading this now you know why I was so eager to jump on the boat for helping you move! :D )

But it seems to the greatest single benefit of forming a club of sorts is that we can all benefit from the collective experience... sooner or later we're bound to run into someone who's already done whatever it someone else is trying.

[ 07 March 2002, 09:46: Message edited by: delphinus ]