Kelvin Ratings and How Your Tank Looks
Colour temperature is the setting nobody adjusts and everybody blames, and it costs nothing to get right.
Author
Vishal Rana
32 published guidesVishal Rana has spent the last decade tinkering with aquarium equipment on his own bench and in a friend's shop, mostly on canister pumps, heater controllers, and planted-tank lighting. He writes about the fixes that actually held up in the tank rather than the ones that only looked clean on paper, and he keeps three tanks running at home, including a 200 litre planted setup that has been the source of most of his opinions on CO2.
Published work
Everything by Vishal Rana
Signs Your Aquarium Heater Is About to Fail
Heaters rarely die without warning, and the earliest warning is a swing that widens while the average temperature still looks fine.
How Often to Clean Aquarium Filter Media
Mechanical media needs attention every few weeks, biological media every few months, and neither should ever meet a running tap.
Finding a Leak in a Canister Filter
Water in the cabinet tells you almost nothing about where it came from, so the job is to make the filter show...
How to Silence a Noisy Air Pump
Most air pump noise comes from the cabinet rather than the pump, which is why replacing the pump so often changes nothing.
How to Set Your CO2 Bubble Count Safely
A three week ramp built around a measured pH drop, with the daily checks that catch trouble before fish start breathing at...
PAR Explained for Planted Tanks
The one intensity figure that predicts growth, where it has to be measured, and why hanging height beats every spec on the...
How to Calibrate a Heater That Reads Wrong
Before you move the dial, prove the error is real, measure it across a full cycle, then correct by the offset.
Sponge Filters: When They Beat Everything Else
For fry, shrimp, hospital and quarantine tanks a $10 sponge outperforms filters costing twenty times more, and the reason is flow velocity.
Equipment Humming: Diagnosing by Sound
A hum, a rattle, a grind and a whine each come from a different part, and telling them apart takes about three...
Air Pump Sizing by Tank Depth
Water depth, not tank volume, decides whether an air pump keeps bubbling, and the number that matters is rarely printed on the...
Drop Checker Colours and What They Mean
How the sealed air gap works, why the fluid must be 4 dKH, and why the colour is always slightly out of...