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Aquarium Equipment Diagnosis and Repair Clinic Guest Speaker: Mike Wickham Saturday, June 13th, 7:00 pm Rogers Police Station - Community Room
(SE Corner of Dixieland and New Hope Road)
Things are jumpin’ in July! Join us for our July 2010 club meeting. Our guest speaker is aquarium book author and Aquarium Fish International magazine columnist, Mike Wickham. He’ll teach us how to repair broken lights, heaters, air pumps, and filters.
Bring your broken equipment along for a quick diagnosis. We’ll teach you how to repair everything. We’ll fix whatever we can on the spot! (If repair parts are necessary, you must bring your own.)
Bad bulb, bad bulb… watcha gonna do? We’ve got bright ideas for fixing your light units!
Did your filter up and quit? We’ll show you how to reemploy it.
And your heater won’t heat? Who cares? It’s summer! But we’ve got a burning desire to fix it anyway.
Did your air pump take its last breath? We’ll resuscitate it!
I finally got around to working on my light fixture.It is a Nova Extreme T5, four bulbs and with moonlights. I plugged it up to see what it was doing for sure, and it seems to be functioning properly. I will leave it on for a while to make sure it isn't just a temporary thing. Is it possible that it had moisture somewhere that needed to dry out for the light to work?
~Kenna
I can stop buying fish anytime I want. Seriously.
That's possible. If the unit lights for a while, then goes off, another possibility is that your ballast may have thermal overload protection built in. This is a circuit that opens if the unit gets too hot, and resets when it cools down. In that case, check to be sure air flow around the unit is unhindered, vents aren't blocked, and (if the unit has built in fans) that they are clean and running full speed. If those are all okay, the ballast may need replacing.
I recall you saying that you could see a bulb strobe-- where you can see waves of light travel across the bulb. Another cause of that that I forgot to mention is proper grounding. I recall a light unit that required grounded metal plates to be behind the bulb itself or it would have trouble starting and would strobe. Sometimes, touching the light unit with a finger would ground it and cause it to fire up.
Hey Mike, you didn't happen to put a hex on me or something at the meeting???????????????????? The next day one of my fluorescent lights quit working. Now I gotta run down one of these funky ballast with a built in starter. No starter to be found but does have 6 wires coming out of it. If I can't find one tomorrow I'll post a pic of it. It's a 5 year old ALL-GLASS light.
Corey Mohrhauser
One planet, one chance, DO NOT SCREW IT UP
