Tips For A Successful Beginner Saltwater Aquarium Setup

A beginner saltwater aquarium is a great way to add beauty and life to any room in your home, it is also a great way to start a new and exciting hobby that can last a life time.

Scared By The Thought Of Saltwater Tanks

Unfortunatley many people never setup their first saltwater tank because they have heard they are hard to take care of, the fish die or any other of the popular myths that keep people away from the hobby.

Saltwater Tanks Are Not Hard

One of the oldest myths is that saltwater tanks are hard to take care of. While this might have been true 20 year ago modern equipment and a better understanding of the fish make beginner saltwater aquariums an easy undertaking.

What Is Needed For a New Marine Aquarium

Really the best thing that you can do is have patience and research your purchase before you buy anything.

Alot of experts recommend choosing your fish first that way you can make sure you buy the right equipment and sized tank.

By choosing your saltwater fish first you can also eliminate any delicate,predatory,fish that have specialized diets or violent fish from your list and improve your chances at success.

Buying fish on impulse and mixing the wrong types of fish together is a common beginner mistake and one that contributes to much frustration and ultimate failure for new marine aquarium keepers.

Set A Budget

You must also decide how much you can spend on your new marine aquarium. Knowing this will ensure that you have enough money to properly setup your tank and have money left over for fish and maintenance costs.

Budget is actually one of the biggest causes of beginner saltwater aquarium failure. People jump in with little or no research and wind up failing because they could only afford second rate or undersized support equipment.

If you want a stunning Saltwater Aquarium that is full of healthy colorful fish check out our saltwater aquarium guide. This fully illustrated guide will help you properly setup and maintain a flawless saltwater tank. You can learn more at www.saltwatermethods.com

Amazing Tips On How To Feng Shui Your Personal Career Luck

There are effective and powerful ways to enhance your personal career luck with the wisdom of feng shui. In this article, I have my 12 amazing feng shui tips grouped into 4 main categories, they are “How To Enhance Your Personal Career Luck”, “How To Enhance Your Personal Work Space / Desk Top”, “How To Enhance Your Personal Office Space” and “How To Enhance Your Personal Success & Development”.

How To Enhance Your Personal Career Luck

What makes me so amazed at feng shui is its ability to help with every aspects of our life. We can use feng shui to give our career a boost. Good career feng shui usually manifests in the form of increased opportunities and responsibilities. The following three feng shui tips can help you to enhance your personal career luck.

1. The Career Corner
The career corner is the North of any residential building, corporate office or personal space. Hence, to get the most out of career feng shui, you should use fengshui methods to energize the North corner of both your home, as well as your office. One excellent way to activate your career luck is to place a small aquarium filled with guppies in the North wall or corner of your living room and office. Guppies create good yang energy as they are hardy little creatures that swim vigorously.

2. Activate Career Luck With Your Files
This is a very powerful feng shui tip for activating career luck. Simply energize all your important files with prosperity coins that symbolize good fortune. The key to activating these coins is the red ribbon used to tie the coins together. This helps create prosperity energies for the success of your work.

3. Sit Facing The Door
Inside your office, try to sit facing the door. Never have your back facing the door. For career people, this will mean you losing out in any politicking. It also means you’re subordinate, bosses or co-workers will betray you, and you have a hard time managing and handling them.

How To Enhance Your Personal Work Space / Desk Top

Career luck is much improved when you can fengshui your personal work space or desk top. Start by making sure the the location, position, direction, and layout of your workspace is correct. The following are three feng shui tips that can enhance your personal work space or desk top.

1. Sit With A Solid Wall Behind You
Always remember to sit with a solid wall behind you as the wall will give you tremendous support for any challenges or difficulty. Do not have the window behind you or have any door behind you.

2. Sit In Your Power Position
This is an excellent feng shui tip for enhancing your career luck by positioning your seat well in the office. The power position in any office is always the corner that is diagonally opposite the main door. It is deep inside the office. Try to sit in this spot to get the best career luck.

3. Never Sit Next To Or Below Toilets
Always remember to check whether you are sitting next to or below a toilet on the floor above you. In feng shui, this is considered very harmful situation in the office and you should move your desk away from under the toilet immediately.

How To Enhance Your Personal Office Space

We spend almost the whole day in our office working for a living. The environment that we are working in is important in terms of feng shui. We need to have an office space that we feel good working in. The office space must have a balance of yin and yang energies and the flow of air in the office space must be even and smooth. The following are 3 feng shui tips that can help you to enhance your personal office space.

1. Keep Trash Bins Out Of Sight
All cleaning gear like brooms and dust pans are deemed to symbolize bad luck and must be kept out of sight of your office space, and especially the main door.

2. Block Out Excessive Sunlight
While it is good to have yang energy like sunlight to energize your office space, you must also not forget about the balance of yin and yang energies in the office. This is espcially true for those office spaces that have a west-facing wall. The brightness and heat of the afternoon sun can create an excess of fire energy. This excessive yang energy from the sunlight will create disharmony in the office. Flared tempers and impatience will be the order of the day. One remedy is to block it with curtains.

3. Never Leave Clutter In Your Office Space
Your office space is where you work hard for your job or business. There should not have any clutter that will create blockage in your office space. Remove any clutter and organize the things in your office space properly. Clutter in your office space will bring bad luck, disharmony, irritation and conflicts with your co-workers.

How To Enhance Your Personal Success & Development

Success comes when you work hard towards it. The good news is, we can actually apply good feng shui to make sure that our path towards our success is more smooth-sailing. Below are three feng shui tips that can help you to enhance your personal success and development.

1. The Prosperity Signature
In feng shui, it is believed that a signature can attract great prosperity and success if it starts with a firm upward stroke and ends with another firm upward stroke. Many successful people have their signature signed in this way. Practice your new signature until you get it.

2. Buttons Of Your Clothes
Conventionally, buttons are usually round and when the buttons are made of metallic material, it represents strong metal element. Such buttons are excellent feng shui for those wearing black or blue but will be inauspicious for people wearing greens and browns. On the other, plastic round buttons are basically harmonious.

3. Dragon For Great Success And Good Fortune
The celestial Dragon is the ultimate good luck symbol in feng shui and Chinese tradition. In fact, the Chinese believed that places with excellent feng shui are said to enjoy the dragon’s precious cosmic breath. Hence, placing a picture of a dragon in the office is always believed to bring its owner great good fortune and success.

The Exciting Thing About The Tinfoil Barb

Many different fishes from the Cyprinid family are referred to as barbs, but it is chiefly the species found in the genus Barbus that we consider true barbs. The name Barbus is derived from the fact that barb fishes are equipped with sensatory organs called barbells that they can use to find their way in murky waters where light is scarce. The genus Barbus is also known as Puntius and contains a wide range of popular aquarium fishes, including the silvery Tinfoil barb (Barbus schwanefeldi).

The Tinfoil barb has a silvery body with bright and shiny scales and beautiful black and red-orange fins. The Tinfoil barb is sometimes confused with another species in the aquarium trade, Barbonymus altus, but this fish lacks the black lines that decorates the caudal fin of a true Tinfoil barb.

The Tinfoil barb is an active species that will inhabit the lower part of the aquarium, from the bottom and up to mid-level. Most Tinfoil barbs in the aquarium trade are wild caught, since their size makes them difficult to breed in captivity. Sexing the fish is also hard. Tinfoil barbs are egg-scatters and a female Tinfoil barb can produce several thousands of eggs during one spawning.

Tinfoil barbs should only be kept by aquarists with really large aquariums, since it is one of the largest barbs and can reach a length of 36 centimeters (14 inches). It is also a schooling species, so you must have enough space to house a group of Tinfoil barbs. A school of Tinfoil barbs is non-aggressive and can be combined with fish from other species as long as those fishes are as large as the barbs or bigger.

The Tinfoil barb feeds chiefly on plant material, but will not turn down occasional treats in the form of worms, insects, crustaceans or small fishes. Keeping your Tinfoil barbs with small fishes is therefore not recommended, since they might be perceived as prey. It is not hard to get your Tinfoil barb to eat in captivity. If you have tender plants in the aquarium, or plants that have not yet rooted themselves in the substrate, your Tinfoil barb might eat them.

The Tinfoil barb will also appreciate filamentous algae. Many aquarists choose artificial plants for their Tinfoil barb aquarium, but you can go for real plants if you choose sturdy plant species that will tolerate nibbling. Ideally begin with really inexpensive plant species to test how your particular Tinfoil barbs will treat the live plants.

The Tinfoil barb originates from tropical waters in Borneo, Sumatra, Thailand, and the Malayan peninsula, and the water temperature in the aquarium should therefore be 22-25 C (72-77 F). Since it inhabits rapidly moving rivers and streams in the wild, the Tinfoil barb will appreciate strong currents in the aquarium. The preferred pH is in the 6.5-7.0 range and the water hardness should not be higher than 10 dGH. If you care for your Tinfoil barbs and provide them with a suitable environment and appropriate diet they can live for 8-10 years.

The Purpose Of A Wave Maker Is An Aquarium

If you are planning to start a marine aquarium then you must be aware that there are a few things such as protein skimmers and wave makers which are absolutely necessary for your aquarium. This article is going to elaborate on the purpose of a wave maker in an aquarium. As well as provide some tips that can help you choose a wave maker for your aquarium.

Wave makers are basically water surge devices that are used in aquariums to produce waves that are similar to that of seas and oceans. These devices stimulate the water and allow water to be circulated in the aquarium which helps provide oxygen to the fish and invertebrates. Wave makers are especially helpful in a marine aquarium since lack of circulation can cause poisonous substances to grow in marine aquariums and wave makers eliminate any such problems. Wave makers also help deliver food to corals and other invertebrates that cannot search for food on their own.

Wave makers are units that allow you to connect power heads and pumps to the control unit. These control units provide options to control the speed and height of the wave. Good wave makers have features that can prevent damage to power heads and pumps and allow you to stimulate both day and night waves in order to mimic a natural environment. Features that allow you to choose from rolling, smooth and turbulent waves are required options in good wave makers. A good wave maker will also provide feeding modes that can help you feed your invertebrates. The cycle time for waves is adjustable in a good wave maker and this feature can help circulate water while removing dead spots that accumulate wastes inside your marine aquarium. Other advanced features may be available in wave makers that can prove beneficial if there is a requirement for those features in your marine aquarium.

Another type of device that is used to create waves is a switching current water director also known as SCWD. Switching current water directors use existing pumps to generate double directional movement in your marine aquarium. These units are beneficial to reef aquariums. A good SCWD will direct water incoming water flow to two alternative outputs and the device will switch alternatively depending on the incoming pressure of the water.

Power heads, timers and pumps are usually sold separately but it may be possible to get a package deal that has all the necessary components to make a wave maker fully functional.

The Seven Most Popular Baby Nursery Themes

Together you and your baby will be spending a good amount of time in the nursery and through colors and dcor you can create an atmosphere enjoyable and pleasing for both of you. As with many other things there is more than one way to accomplish that: you can have the nursery completely finished before the birth of your baby, or you can start with the color scheme and the few major pieces and let the nursery evolve with your babys growth. Whichever way you choose its much easier if you decide before hand on a nursery theme. Below are the seven most popular baby nursery themes in use today:

JUNGLE THEME
The Jungle theme combines greens, browns and yellows which can be exciting and cheerful and at the same time soothing; it is a gender neutral design. Baby bedding, quilts and nursery rugs as well as cut-outs of jungle animals, wall paper and borders are easy to find. Lions, giraffes, monkeys and elephants bring the exotic colors and sounds of the jungle to your little adventurer.

SPORTS
The Sports theme gained in popularity in the recent years. Hockey and football, soccer and basketball are all depicted on their own or in different combinations. The Sports theme features heavy graphical patterns and will compliment almost any room but generally is considered as boys nursery theme. Baby quilts, pillow cases, and wallpaper feature pictures of sports and sports items, such as different balls, pucks, rackets, skates, baseball gloves, nets, etc. The graphically drawn pictures are in bold colors that will easily catch and keep your little champions attention.

PRINCESS
Fairy Tale Princess or Cinderella is as girlish as it can be design. Sometimes it can be too heavy on pink but shiny gold stars and accents of orange, sage, blue and brown can help offset the cotton candy feeling of the more traditional design. In the new Fairy Tale Princess nursery designs nothing is missed the magic wand, the multi turreted castle, the sparkling crown, the pumpkin, the mice, the merciless clock and the legendary glass slipper. Cribs can even be purchased that resemble Cinderellas stage coach to complete the perfect princess theme.

ALPHABET
The Alphabet is a great theme choice; it looks orderly and neat and is considered a unisex design. Usually it has a nice mix of colors and shapes which easily compliment even preexisting room dcor. Two-year olds can recognize the letters and with a little parents help can memorize them easily. An early grasp on the alphabet is a real head start for your little scholar.

SEA LIFE
Perhaps the most popular of all is the nursery theme based on sea life Aquarium, Under the Sea, Sea World, etc. Grinning exotic sea creatures and tropical fish in bright and vibrant colors darting through the water kingdom are widely used. Seahorses, crabs, mermaids and corals all bring a multitude of colors to make this theme equally suited for baby boys and baby girls.

PETS
The Pets theme has always been quite popular among parents. It features favorite household pets like dogs or cats and is quite endearing to a lot of parents. The colors are usually calmer and more traditional and bring the sense of homeliness. A lot of parents feel more comfortable with the familiar faces and shapes. Generally dogs depicting design is seen as boys nursery design and cats themes are preferred for baby girls nurseries.

ANGELS
Watchful guardian angels are always welcome in the nursery and the theme is as popular as ever. Angels baby bedding and accessories are often offered in bright and vibrant colors, although more mellow versions are also available. This theme is gender neutral and is great for all stages of baby development.

A nursery theme is only an idea which you shouldnt be afraid to develop. Free your imagination and creativity and experiment; play with colors and shapes till the final result brings a smile on your face.