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Nuke 'em? who'd a thunk. I'll have to try that. By the time they stop bubbling well, mine are pretty nast/slimey. That's going to smell just grand, I'm sure.
You'll have to rip (cut with the grain) your 4"x4"x8" piece of basswodd into smaller pieces. Boxes made by pieces that came from anything bigger than a 2"x4" wouldn't fit in mine.
Electric - you can cut the blocks using a radial arm saw. Be careful, especially when you rip wood on a radial arm saw.
In short, here are some suggestions, based on my experiences:
1. Mentioned it above. Be sure the boxes you glue up will fit in the skimmer.
2. If available, use a planere and jointer to get a perfectly square chunk of basswood before you start slicing it to make the boxes. A box glued up of pieces that aren't square is is tough to work with.
3. To make sure your box is square, lap sand the ends of the box before you glue the ends on.
4. If you lap sand and do good job cutting the pieces, you can use thin slices of the basswood for the ends, rather than how KW suggests to do it. You increase the diffusing surface this way too.
5. If you turn your skimmer of for a while (few days or so), for example if you are goind to dose phyto and don't want the skimmer to pull the phyto out of the water, the boxes don't work well when you power up the pump again.
6. Plumb the skimmer to allow you the option to raise the water level higher than Snailman suggests.
7. A TetraTec Deep Water 96-2 wasn't enough to drive my skimmer.
8. A MEDO 0502 works just right. In fact, I have to bleed off some of the airflow when the boxes are new.
That's about it!
Blue
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