就像利亚姆·尼森(Liam Neeson)在拍摄电影中一样,随着时间的推移,雷夫管理员开发了一套独特的技能。即使今天我们想要的大多数设备都很容易获得,这与我们大多数人建造自己的爱好的早期不同,但仍然很少有“真正的”插座礁石水族馆系统可用。结果,任何在业余爱好中的人都学会了很多职业技能,当他们第一次建立坦克时,他们可能会不需要这些职业技能。
如果您在业余爱好中呆了足够长的时间并取得成功,则尤其如此。What this typically means is that as you get successful you move to bigger and bigger tanks and as you move up in size fewer and fewer ready made things are available.因此,这导致一个人学习所需的技能或付钱的人。I will readily admit that rarely have I known, what I did not know, until it was too late.No pun intended, but usually at that point it became a sink or swim situation. Much of what many of us have learned and the skills we have developed have been through trial and error.随着业余爱好的发展并变得越来越昂贵,这种方法可能不是磨练自己技能的最具成本效益的方式。因此,了解人们可能需要的技能可能有用,因此我希望在下面讨论这些技能。
由于业余爱好中的每个人都知道谁在任何时候都在其中,至少对管道的基本理解对于任何长期成功都是至关重要的。如上所述,大多数系统没有插头,因此了解如何保持水的流动以及各种过滤器,泵,反应室等,以有效的方式至关重要。Adding in the threat that a power outage could cause to a poorly plumbed tank, and it is readily apparent that knowing how to maximize flow while minimizing floods and leaks is one of the fundamental things to know in the hobby.When you add in that virtually every device used to move water requires different sized hoses and fittings, not to mention that some European equipment uses metric fittings, is it any wonder how excited many hobbyists get when walking through the plumbing department at a big box store?
I myself have made friends and can now shop and walk through the aisles of the local wholesale plumbing supplier.To me it is like Christmas, as only here can I find the obscure fittings I require to connect devices and pipes that were never meant to be connected to each other.When I retire I hope to work part time in a plumbing department as I think it would be fun to have hobbyists try to stump me on getting things to connect as I have done their employees over the past 30 years. So, for anyone who has been in the hobby for any length of time, understanding plumbing is one skill we all acquire.
Like plumbing another crucial skill we all develop is being an electrician.我不知道我的设备所需的安培数是如何影响我的保险丝盒和电费的瓦特,直到我变得认真对待爱好。只有当您运行多个泵和高瓦金属卤化物灯时,您才能知道15安培断路器不是为21个峰值放大器设计的。此外,将一些设备插入墙壁的插头下一个对于原始插头,您使用的不会改变。At that point you also realize that you should have sent one of your kids to electrician school, as the electrician you brought in to change your circuit breakers charges more per hour than your doctor or lawyer.
By the same token, initially you don’t realize how expensive the electricity is to run your tank(s) until you are at a neighborhood function and you start talking about your electric bills and you realize that your is $200 per month more than any of your neighbors.但是您需要了解电力的主要原因是它可能很危险。海水导电远比联邦shwater and for this reason you need to understand that if there is free current running through your system either from a broken heater or corroded wire on a powerhead that the results can be fatal.For this reason alone you need to be an electrician and make sure you haveGFCIs在所有插头上,如果水箱中存在电流,则在将手伸入水箱之前,会提醒您。这就是为什么我对那些比我更好地了解接线和电路的人非常尊重。
Unlike the first two skills that everyone more or less must have, the remaining skills are more a matter of degree.那就是有些人确实发展了这些技能,而另一些人则具有或需要它们的程度较小。这些技能中的第一个是木工和工程。由于越来越大的坦克在业余爱好中,许多业余爱好者必须是工程师,以确保其坦克的放置不会导致地板上的压力。特别是如果他们将坦克放在底层或旧房屋上。As a result, they need to ascertain if where they are placing their tank is structurally sound.Fortunately there are now engineering programs online where you can plug in the weight numbers for your tank and see if the space is sound.As a result you become an engineer.
Since most of our tanks are on wooden stands you also need to do the engineering to make sure that a stand, especially if it is custom made, will hold the weight of your tank over time.Your carpentry skills come in to play if you decide to build your own stand or help someone build it for you.您还需要这些技能来修复木架或引擎盖可能出现的问题,或者如果您需要“自定义”它们才能握住设备或灯光。我现在帮助建立了几个坦克的看台,并定制了我购买的大部分引擎盖,因此我很幸运能够发展自己的木工技巧,因为它急剧降低了成本的成本为我建造的摊位和引擎盖。
In a similar vein, as we place bigger tanks in our homes we develop the skill of interior design.You can place a ten-gallon tank just about anywhere, but when you are placing a 150 or 300-gallon tank in your home you really do need to develop a sense of design for where you are placing the tank and what you are putting around it.I know that most of us tend to focus on what’s in the tank and sort of neglect the tank, stand and hood and how they look in a room.But having learned this the hard way, non-hobbyists look at the entire package and especially what the overall impact of the tank is in the room.Since as I discussed previously this is predominantly a male oriented hobby, I ask the women in my life to help design the room with my tanks.They have proven to be very helpful and if only for a brief period of time it gets them involved in the hobby I enjoy.
When these same women viewed the tanks once they were set up several have made the comment that is looks like a floral design.While I would not go that far, when you think or it when we place the live rock and corals in our tank the closest thing to it probably is floral design.This is actually kind of funny in that the early name for corals was “flower animals”. Designing the interior of a tank to maximize the coloration, size and most importantly requirements of its inhabitants really does require a special sense.No longer is the fruit stand look the way to go, especially now that larger and wider tanks are so widely available. It is often said that give two individuals the same equipment and same corals and their two tanks will look nothing like one another’s. Due to the internet there are now thousands of tanks we can view to get ideas.有趣的是,当我们看到一个真正令人眼花thisplion乱的展示与可能成功或健康的表演时,我们大多数人都同意,但并不令人着迷。这就是为什么发展“花卉设计师”技能如此有价值的原因。
Another skill that is valuable to have is that of contortionist. This skill is useful in so many circumstances.我们中的许多人有设备,是很难得到的to.As a result we have to contort our bodies in order to tighten screws, remove clamps or do other things in order to remove it to clean it or just to put it into place.Also as we all know, whenever a coral frag falls it always miraculously falls to the most unreachable spot in our tanks.As a result I have tried to stay as limber and flexible as I can as I know that this is a prerequisite for rescuing many of my corals. So it is probably a good thing that I am in the hobby as I know many of my friends are no longer nearly as flexible as I am as they have no need for this skill, while I do not see a time when my coral frags will not be falling to the far reaches of my tank.
The last skill that many of us now possess is that of gambler.Many of us do not adequately quarantine or fish or corals so every time we add something new we are gambling.Similarly we also gamble that what we do add is going to survive being placed in a new environment with new tank mates, different water quality and foreign food and survive.We also gamble that the coral we see on the internet will actually possess the colors we see in the photograph.Fortunately many of the vendors are honest in their depiction of colors and the care given to most fish and corals today from the collectors through the wholesalers to the shops has dramatically improved.As a result the degree of gambling has been dramatically reduced especially over the past ten years.
长期礁的技巧确实是独特的。But having acquired some of these skills while I have been in the hobby has allowed to be able to fix and repair a lot of things in my home. It has also allowed to appreciate what the professionals in these fields need to learn during their apprenticeships in order to become masters.我敢肯定,我们已经忽略了一些其他技能,但是我敢肯定有人会引起我的注意。