Today's sponsor is De's Fish Company's Fish Company is in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota is a 1000 square foot local fish store. With all that you need to get your party started. Go see the beard of knowledge, Derek Schuman himself. It is majestic. It's kind of Santa like plushy really. Go check it out. What do you mean? That check isn't cash yet anyways. Go check it out. Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. Check it out. Physically in person. You can feed Koi for 25 cents there at the place with promo code Aquarium guys. He will give you free koi food. That's what we got. It's an in person store. He again, mom and pop shop. He doesn't sell online yet, so just give him some patronage. He's supporting the podcast. Support him if you live in Detroit Lakes. If not, at least go on Facebook. Find the page like and follow along for fun. A quick update on last podcast. We had a giveaway for Fish Game. I have two winners that have been selected. The other winners I've tried to reach out to and have not been able to give a key. So if you get a random phone number seeing on your cell phone that's calling you from Minnesota, pick up. You probably won. And I've been trying to get a hold of you for your free copy of Fish Game. Certainly. Check that out and let's make that podcast. Welcome to the Aquarium Guys podcast. Jimmy. I missed you.

What?

Why did you miss me, you douche nugget?

I also miss Adam Moore because he wasn't at our last fish swamp, but I'm your host, Rob Zolson.

I'm Jim Colby.

And I'm Adam Elnishar.

Well, holy shit, Adam, thanks for joining us.

You know, they don't get to hear the delay. I edit out every podcast, but there's like an easy 30 second delay.

There is a 45 second delay every episode. Yeah.

Now, you know, normally we give some news, but I think we're gonna have way too much to cover in this topic, so we'll have to do another just reading emails and doing news episod episode.

I have news.

We read emails every year. Once a year.

Right. So is it something you have to say this episode or can we hold it to the next one?

Adam, it can wait.

I guess it was just going to.

Be me going on a rant about salmon, so.

All right, well, you know, hold that one for the end of the podcast if you want to Adam Rand. Today we are blessed to have Jeff Turner, the CEO of Chemipure the fantastic company that we're going to go into a little bit further on. But he's here to teach us a little bit about. I would like to focus a bit on activated carbons, all of those type of cleaning regiments for the aquarium. As far as chemical supplements, which I get nothing but bombarded questions about, which seems in my world to be basic. And I figured, who better to have than my favorite product line on the podcast. Jeff, thank you so much for coming on.

Why I'm doing this, I have no flipping idea. But I'm happy to be here, Jeff.

The money is great. It just never gets to your house.

Well, we've scheduled this. I think there's no. This is the 6th, the 10th we. I've got sick. I think it was mainly me. But then we also had. The last one was the hurricane. We like schedule on the hurricane landing. We're like, hey, how I call you up and you're like, I'm not going to make it, man. I'm like, I know. I was going to call the pre cancel. You're in Florida. It seems unfair.

Is it one of these two? That was a presidential debate or something going on, right?

Yeah. And then I did it too. I did it on the presidential debate like a dingus. Because we didn't want to miss that cartoon affair.

That was fun, you know.

No, that was a great comedy event.

You know, comedy of the century.

I tell you, if you follow Saturday Night Live anymore, I don't know if you do or not. They have done a fantastic job the last three episodes making fun of everybody, everybody. And they got Jim Gaffigan on his. Tim Walls, our Minnesota governor, and he nails it pretty good.

So don't they call him Funnel cake Dad still?

Yeah, probably.

I think so. Anyways, so getting into getting the subject, we always start with what got you into our ridiculous hobby, Jeff, to get a little bit. Know more about you.

Holy shit. That's. That's gonna take a long time.

Well, this is a long format podcast.

We got all frickin night, dude.

Grab a beer.

I sent Rob a bio a while ago earlier today, and he didn't even finish reading it. He was reading for three hours and he didn't know when to stop or throw it out of the window of the car. So I've been in the trade literally my whole life. My dad was second president of the Florida Made Aquarium Society in 1957, and Dick Boyd was associated Bob, John and some other guys back in the late 50s down here in Florida. So I was literally born into the trade in 62. And my dad was already in process of building the Hialeah Aquarium in Miami, or in Hialeah actually at that time in 1962. So, you know, I've been involved forever. I probably used my first Chemipure in 69. I was seven years old, I remember, at the Floyd Marine Aquarium Society. And then, yeah, 71, somewhere in that range. So probably close to 1970. So I've been using Chemipure for no less than 50 odd years constantly. So that's a long time.

No doubt. Yeah, no doubt. So, yeah, in it by peer pressure.

Peer pressure.

Well, it was just by assimilation. I mean, I've been building, you know, I built my first glass tank literally when I was 7 years old with my dad. That was a 13 gallon, it was 36 by like 11 by 11 or 11 by 12, 3, 8 inch glass with silicone. So I clearly remember that aquarium. I used it in several competitions when I was a kid. But Cami Pure goes back for a long, long time. And then about 14 years ago, Mrs. Boyd died and Mr. Boyd had died in 92 and there was an opportunity to get involved with the company and purchase it. So I did because I've been using the product my whole life and it's easy to does something you believe in that works. So that's a great statement right there.

So I think we had a two parts. We got the where you got into the aquarium hobby. But then if we can get a little history on Chemipure before we get into further questions as well, you know, when did it start? You said it was by Mr. Boyd. Give us a little background on that as well.

You can see it on our YouTube page. I did a video on it, a YouTube video about the history of Chemipure and the history of the companies. But we have articles of Chemitur from 1959 and 1960 in tropical fish Hobbyist magazine that was printed. And I have original copies of that framed in the office that was given to me by CFH as a gesture of good faith, I guess, just because I asked. And they sent me original copies of the article. So they're framed on the wall on the hallway going down to my office. And those were the first publications where Dick discovered what he was doing, what he was making and how it was working. And then I have a copy of the first AD, I believe it was in 1962 in TFH for ChemiCare. So that's a long time ago.

Definitely been going a very long time. Very Very long time.

I think it's the longest legacy brand aquarium product domestically produced, unless one of you guys brings something else up.

There's been a lot of names that I know of, but I don't know of names that stayed consistent besides like, you know, some of the. I think, yeah, it's gotta be older than Wardley.

Trying to think those kinds of companies. Jungle.

There's so many that have wrapped up and rebranded that I think that just takes them out of the running, you know.

Yeah, well, it's a, it's a legacy brand, you know, family owned still to this day. And certainly Dick Boyd would probably be pretty proud of what we've done and, you know, how the company, his legacy carried on and that I didn't change the name when we bought it. It could be Turner Enterprises, but what the hell? Why would I do that? Right?

Right. I gotta say, big fan of it. If anybody's deep in the aquarium hobby and you haven't heard of the product, you're not very deep into it. My history on aquariums is, again, my grandparents got me into it. My grandma, I still have her original book by Axelrod. I got all her notes in the book and in it, even her notes from decades ago. Is Chemi Pier's one of her favorite products. I'm also guilt by association as being a big fanboy of the product, so would love to nerd out, but I'm going to try to capture questions to get our advanced fish keepers and our basic fish keepers on activated carbons and of course, how Chemipur is a bit different than everybody else in the class. For if you're listening to this podcast as one of your first podcasts and you're coming in as a beginner, you got your three forms of filtration. Mechanical, biological and chemical. So your mechanical, just for your high level going for these intro, people are listening to the podcast for the first time. Is your normal filter, your sponge filter, your hang in the back filter, your canister filter that takes the physical particles out of the water, the actual suspended poo, detritus, whatever else is in the water. Then you have biological. That's the nitrification cycle we've talked a lot about on the podcast. You have ammonia that needs to be broken down, you have bacteria to do so. And this is not the step there. This is chemical filtration. So chemical filtration is commonly done by activated carbons. Different silicas and UV sterilizations are some of the more common methods of getting it done. My favorite, of course, is using carbon. Especially when you have a, how do we say, accidental person that came around with Windex and decided to, you know, spray around your two and a half gallon tank. The only hope I'm going to have is throwing activated carbon in to absorb those pieces out of the tank in an emergent situation. But it's still removes ammonia, other things out of the water. But going into it. What are some of the things that make Chemipur a bit different than just going out and getting the traditional generic activated carbon that come free in a filter or you buy in a canister?

Well, I think one of the most important aspects is that, you know, the carbon that has always been used for cabinpure is a lignite based carbon. So it's a softer carbon. Originally the product was made using a domestic product, believe it or not, out of Texas. It's lignite carbon. And that was a Darko 2040 I think was the size mill of it and it was really soft. So years ago, any of us that are older like Jim and myself, more than 40 years old, you used the chemistry years ago and you'd rinse it and it would be black, right? The sink would go black.

You'd rinse it for an hour.

Yeah, it's just breaking down and grinding down kind of like GFO does, granular ferric oxide. You know, when you roll it in a media filter, it'll break down. You want to roll it too much or at all actually. But the carbon change that we did about now, maybe nine years ago, I went to a.08 millimeter German lignite carbon that is super fine and you know, it's extruded pelletized. So it's hard, it doesn't break down and put all this black mess into the water. And it was a pretty big decision to change carbon after so many years. I was offered opportunities to buy carbon in, you know, Thailand. Coconut based carbon. Dina, you know lots of cheap places to buy carbon from, but it really isn't the best carbon. So we made that change probably nine years ago and we've been still using the pelletized carbon across all the ranges of hemipure the whole entire time. And it's made a massive difference in a consumer's first used product. They take it, they rinse it, it goes clean and then they use it. So that makes I think a big difference from a visual standpoint and then from an effectiveness standpoint, it's a stronger grade lignite carbon, obviously steam activated. So it's not rinsed in phosphate, which some of these carbons you'll get. And then even if you're sourcing carbon from another country, I mean, Germany is a lot different than a lot of places I've been to. Very, you know, how would I call it, Quality oriented. That move to get that carbon and use that carbon exclusively was more expensive but better off and its product even that much better than it was for 40 years that it was using the other carbon the entire time. So that makes a big difference. And obviously the resin, organic scavenging resins that we use, there's a variety of them for the different styles of Chemipur. And then the mix and the way they're put together with the liquid when we manufacture it. So the product comes in wet, it's in the bag, it's sealed with a tie wrap and bottled in our factory in Fort Lauderdale. So we make all of it in house. So all quality control is in house.

That's fantastic. No one does that anymore.

Yeah.

How many different sizes do you have? I mean, not actual physical sizes of carbon, but like can I get a five pound bag? Can I get a ten pound bag? Can I get a fifty pound bag?

No, it's a pre mixed product. So you can get a grande, which is about four regular units of Chemipure, then you have a full unit, then you have the half units, and then we have nano packets as well. So there's four different size ranges, plus there's Chemipur and bulk. You can buy them in six packs. I mean, like you could with beer.

Beer is good.

Right. And you buy a six pack and a bulk thing in a bulk bag that's vacuum sealed and then that doesn't have the bottles or the plastic cap or any of that. So it's actually more reasonable for us to produce and also more reasonable for the consumer to purchase.

Okay, before we get too far, I'm going to still dictate some of these questions that we're getting in chat. I'm reading along, trying to get the beginners in advance. Like we always try to balance what exactly does if you just use just carbon, Because a lot of products have a mix and we'll get to a couple of those details of those mixes are. But just carbon activated carbon, what does that absorb and what can that absorb commonly out of an aquarium?

I mean, it's going to absorb colors, phenol, different organic compounds that are in the middle of breaking down organic waste, basically. Because if you look at it in a, you know, in a format of its Absorption with water passing through it. It's that whole surface area that's constantly charged and collecting things as they pass by. Beyond that, it's obviously bacteriological too. I mean, carbon. We recommend if you had chemipures on an aquarium, let's say, I don't know, 360 gallon or 500 gallon aquarium, and you had those running, you only want to replace half of them at a time. And a lot of that has to do with the bacteria that's growing on those units that have been in the aquarium for, let's say, three months.

Now, when you say those units, what do you mean exactly? The carbon itself?

Yeah. A unit of chemifere is a single unit, which is the full unit size. It's 11 ounce jar, approximately.

Okay. And these are the. For those that haven't had the product before, you open them up, you have 11 ounce jar. They come in those bags. At least that's how I get my chemipur correct.

It comes in a nylon, nylon bag, which again is a, you know, very fine mesh nylon, which doesn't allow for the material to leach through the bag. So it's safer to use, you know, in a sump or a pressurized filter or canister filter or hang on the back, you know, just the outside filter on the aquarium. But when you change the units, you only want to change half. And there's a lot of reasons why. One of them is, of course, you don't want all of it to happen at one time. When you use a lot of carbon at one time, even though we sell it, I don't recommend that you take all six output six new in. I would say you take three out and then wait two weeks or three weeks and then change the other three out. And that way you're affecting your aquarium in a more gradual sense versus an immediate sense. Now, obviously, if somebody sprayed Windex next to the tank, you probably want to do it quicker, get it out of the system. But carbon as a whole is a really. It's been, you know, historically used in aquarium since I can't tell you the beginning of time, very well documented, being used as a, you know, a filter media that clears the water and absorbs pollutants and organic matter. So not all carbons are created equal, I'll tell you that.

Fair enough.

So how often, how often do you suggest that somebody, the average aquarium with an average load, how often do you suggest that people change their carbon?

Typically every 90 days, you're going to look at changing all or a portion of your carbon, depending on what your load is in the system, how much food's going in, and to me, more the clarity. Looking down the length as well, that's a telltale sign. If you look down the length of your aquarium, you got some yellowing, you can see it's not really clear. That's a time to take that from a visual effect. And again, any of us who've been in the hobby our entire lives or professionally, you know, observation is key. Right. The first thing you do when you look at somebody's aquarium is you look at it, you see what do you got and your mind's already rolling into, you know, how it's working and what's going on. But as we all know, there's always so much more to learn. There really is. Incredible.

So you said 90 days is kind of that, that sweet spot. Now I gotta let listeners know, I don't put an asterisk if you're using Chemipure. I've done longer than 90 days and risking it and still had good success because Chemipure is a solid product. And that's why I'm biased. You said that not all carbons are created equal. Like if you go out and get a steak dinner at Outback Steakhouse versus going to a nice elite steak dinner, are they both steak? Absolutely. They're completely different classifications. So that 90 days, it can last a bit longer in some situations. But other brands of carbon, if you're going to put a bag of carbon of, say I'm going to pick on Walmart, go ahead and kick me. If you're going to go to, you know, and get just crappy, no name off brand, maybe even, you know, find from a. I'm trying to remember, I bought some from a thrift store in a big can, came with an aquarium I bought and I'm like, I'm just going to use it up. The stuff did not last 30 days. So I would say if you're not using Chemipure, I would use a rule of thumb that, that carbon is only going to last you 30 days on average. If you're going to be using a less superior. I know that sounds like I'm a real stickler, but it's the truth. I got. What is that? It's some sort of. What is that Walmart brand of carbon? Well, I'm gonna Google it here while I got the computer in front of me.

I think one time they sold Black Diamond.

Yeah, yeah.

And now it's some dirty crap. I've still Got one. I don't even like using it because I have to spend a half an hour cleaning it before I even use it. And then I have to clean out my sink and then I have to try to somehow get my hands clean afterwards.

Okay, so yeah, here it is. Walmart used to sell Marineland Black diamond activated carbon. It was just pure only carbon. Then they switched to Aquatech and some of the Aquatech. I'm not going to shit on brands for shitting on brands, but I'm just saying that that stuff I know for a fact lasts 30 days, it ain't going to last further than that. In my experience with my tanks, where other, you know, good quality stuff like Chemipure is that I can do this because I'm not sponsored by any of these people. So I'm going to tell you my experience that that's my record.

Sponsor us.

If you guys got something different, I'm gonna let you know.

I tell you what I like about the pelletized. The pelletized carbon is that it doesn't compact like frickin sand does with some of this cheap stuff where it just becomes a ball of frickin dirt.

Black mud.

Yeah.

So it's in your.

And it just, you know, the outside absorbs for a little bit and then it just becomes a big black clump of crap. And then you try to clean that out and get it out of your tank and stuff. I do love the pellet ties. I do love having it in those little nylon bags. Because you're more apt to do it if you're not spending a frickin half an hour screwing around cleaning fricking tanks.

Yeah, well let me, let me say something about it. I mean, you know, I'm honestly not biased either. Even though we own the company. Okay. The reality is that change to buy more expensive carbon actually reduced the margin of the product as a company. I mean it was the reality. But it was the right thing to do. Because it's funny, Jolene and I went to the factory in Texas trying to remember the city it was in. It was a town off in the middle of the woods somewhere. And we went to this big ass factory, you know, making the Darko that we were using. It was Darko 4x12 I believe. And yeah, it was amazing that you know, there's so much carbon, it's used in so many industries worldwide. But what you'll find out is the higher grade carbons are used like in liquor product then and in different pharmaceutical grades. And that's really where it cuts to a high grade. If I was just take different carbon and buy it right now, we'd make double the money.

Sure.

Literally. But we, the product would be. I say this word on camera.

Oh, you're good, you're good.

We understand shit.

This is a free market podcast. You can say whatever you want.

Jeff, now I had to say it. I mean, what else am I going to say? I mean there's, there's no. I mean, it'd be great to make a few more dollars a year, right? But at what cost?

So what we see people do is they'll put it in, hang on back filters or put it in canister filters. They'll put it in places that's not in the aquarium, of course, because, you know, they won't want carbo in their, in their tank, just actively seen. So when people do that and they have loose carbon in that tin or a can that they get, you know, Chemipure comes in the nice pouches because you guys have done the homework. You guys know how it works. And it does break down eventually. Having it in that pouch is nice because then you can just toss it away. It's not a mess. Doesn't get stuck in your filter. People see that, they're like, oh, it's loose carbon. I can just shake that right in my filter. Well, goodbye filter motor. You know, it's, it's going to cross soot or at least a mess. So what I do for listeners at home, and if you're listening or watching the podcast, we have a small audience here live on Discord. Go to our website or in the show notes. You'll find our link to Discord. I have this reel and this lasts me a long time. This is. Was it nylon? It's aquarium safe. It's what you use to put over your gutters. You can get this at Menards, Home Depot, Lowe's, and you put this over your gutters to stop leaves from getting into your gutters. So it's just a giant white nylon sock that's really fine mesh to let liquid through. And so I put, you know, I'll put a knot in it. I'll fill up with my little bit of, you know, crap carbon I'm trying to use up before I use my good chemipure stuff. And then I will not the other end and make my own little nylon bag in a pinch if I have to. So this, that's what I use for this. And anything else that I want to leach into a tank, people want to do the tannin thing, you know, do like the almond leaves, whatever else. And I don't want to have the mess of the detritus after good idea after fact. So I do my cones, my woods and my leaves in these same bags. So anything that I want to, you know, quote unquote, either treat as a carbon or leach into the tank on purpose. This is my go to, because then I can just throw the thing away. And this didn't cost me much. This lasts me. I've still yet to go through a whole roll. And I think the roll was like 20 bucks.

And for those of you listening, it looks like a giant big roll of toilet paper.

Yeah, like cloth toilet paper.

And it's like 8 inches wide. And it's like. It's just a big sock.

So what you're saying is you could shit in the bag and put it.

In your tank 100%, light it on.

Fire, put it on Jeff's sidewalk.

It's elephant toilet paper.

Elephant toilet paper.

I thought it was elephant condom, but it's probably too small.

Well, going back in the question, reverse. What does carbon not absorb out from the tank that people would have, like, you know, commonly mistake?

I mean, trace elements, really, in the marine sector, you know, is it affecting your general hardness, you know, things like that in the freshwater sector? And the answer is, it really isn't. It's not removing trace elements level that we can even detect. I mean, we. Yes. I've been using it my whole life, and I'm even using it on the jellyfish aquariums. And they're pretty delicate creatures when you think about it. But, you know, carbon has its use. I mean, I've seen guys with reef tanks that won't use any or barely any, and they're just always, always, always changing water. You know, it's a challenge to keep the tank or the aquarium crystal clear. And we try to help that out and make that a lot easier. You know, I mean, obviously I have a lot of really big aquariums that we manage and take care of and install with our customs business, reef aquarium design and jellyfish art. So, you know, we're using it on every aquarium that we're caring for. And there's, you know, thousands of people, tens of thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands of people overall that use the product in North America and worldwide. So it's pretty exciting.

So the common questions that I get from people, and we get a lot in our discord. Our discord is like a 24 hour. People can jump in, ask a question, and we have a bunch of peer groups here to kind of refine the answers. And we get a lot of people saying, hey, I got a lot of ammonia. Can I just throw carbon in there to absorb it out? And it's really, in my opinion, not going to do much, if anything at all if you have just pure carbon. I don't know if you see anything different because again, you're an expert on carbon, but beyond me, but I sure don't see much. And I tell people that they need to have a blend of zeolite which does much better absorption on ammonia, which is a common, I would say, branding education deal, because they'll get carbon from a pet store and they'll have a blend of carbon and zeolite in the same package. And they say, hey, my last one said it absorbed ammonia. Why is this one not? So check to see what's on the package. And a way you can tell is, you know, zeolite's got that gray, it's not black, it's like a white gray coloration where the carbon is truly a black full color. So if you want to see your package, either get a see through container or, you know, you can buy them individually. I don't know if you see anything different or Chemipure has a zeolite line.

But, well, you know, it's, it's interesting you say that. I think that, you know, carbon is really not absorbing ammonia. It's absorbing the, potentially the yellow in the aquarium, which would be really tannins that you might think of as ammonia when you piss in the toilet. Did I just say that, Jim?

You can say that. And, and at our age, you got to stand close because you don't want to miss the toilet. Just saying.

Well, I gotta think, I gotta think to myself, maybe what I'll do is I'll piss in the toilet, throw a chemipur on the overnight and see what happens.

Let the dog drink out of the.

Toilet in the morning.

Let the dog drink out of in the morning, see if it lives.

That's what we should do, guys. We'll start it here. We'll call it the Chemi Pure Piss Challenge. Use your brand of carbon.

That's right.

Ounce for ounce, see how strong it is absorbing piss and then versus chemi peer. I promise you, Chemipill absorb more.

Put your pee in a Mountain Dew bottle and mail it to Robbie and he'll check it out for you.

Oh, that is way too bad.

If you leave the cap loose enough.

So that when he opens it all over his hand and make sure you use UPS or something.

We'll put some, some of that elephant toilet paper around it when we ship it.

That's right.

That way.

Yeah.

Big old giant stick to it.

Yeah. So it's not absorbing ammonia. I think we really got to recognize, especially when you look at freshwater aquariums. Sure, Zeolite is going to do it. And really in saltwater we don't use zeolite. I do, obviously a lot of salt water. But, you know, we're not really having ammonia as an issue because that's usually in the biological cycle up front, you don't really have an ammonia issue unless you have, you know, some, you know, event, catastrophe event, you know, of dying animals. Then you're going to get ammonia. Like a hurricane out of the system. Yeah, like a hurricane. Then no electricity to your aquarium for six days or three days or four days. You got to have power to your aquarium. And that's one of these things that we all recognize very clearly down here especially. But yeah, carbons are an integral portion, I think a pathway to success. For. I'll make a wild guess, you know, 80% of aquarists probably use carbon in some form, minimum.

Now, for those people who are listening now, you live in Florida and the company is based out in Florida also, correct?

Yeah, we're in Fort Lauderdale.

You're in the Fort Lauderdale area and stuff. You guys dodged a bullet by what, 100 miles or so?

It's about 150 or more. And most those hurricanes went north into the Panhandle mostly, which was obviously, you know, Sarasota moving upwards, you know, towards Tallahassee, which was. Debbie went through, I think, in that area too, in Helene, even as well. So, yeah, they got hammered this year and we didn't. But we're always prepared, you know.

Yeah, one of my, one of the companies that I buy fish from, they are in the Tampa area. And I kept in close contact with him through the whole thing. He actually sent me some stuff. He was working with some high end stuff and he sent me some stuff. He goes, you know, can you hold onto this in case I get wiped out? He goes, so at least I have some brood stock to get started. And so I got, I got a quick shipment from him on Monday before the Wednesday when it hit. And his biggest concern was, you know, they're far enough inland they have to worry about tidal surge, but he had to worry about electricity and they lost electricity for, I think. And he goes, here's the thing we forgot about. He said, we had enough Fuel for a couple of days. But then we didn't realize that there's going to be no fuel in the whole state. And so they had to drive several, like 40 or 50 miles to try to find fuel to come back to keep their generator going, to keep the aerators going on in the pond and stuff like that. You've always got to be prepared. And you guys in Florida every year get pounded one way or the other, it seems like. And, you know, up here in the Northland, we get blizzards and not a big deal because we all just hunker down. But when you lose power, you're pretty much screwed when it comes to aquariums and stuff. So I know Robbie and I have talked about it. I've got a small little thing that you can plug in my pump in, which will last probably about eight or ten hours, but after that I'm screwed, too. And I've got 60 or 70 tanks downstairs in my basement. So it's always an ongoing thought about how to survive the next day. When you're living down in Florida.

Yeah, you know, being here, you know, my whole life, I mean, we're prepared, you know. The building has 150 kilowatts, generating three legs of 800amps and 2,000 gallons of fuel in the ground. I can run the building for three to four weeks without any fuel delivery at all, which is amazing. And, you know, we have aquaculture jellyfish and corals and all the systems and aquariums and aquaculture systems in our building, mostly salt water. But without backup power, how can you do it? And the answer is you can't, because you know you're going to get hit. And then really elevation, like you said, is the key thing. Our building is at 10.3ft above floodplain. That sounds like a little bit, but it's actually a lot for Fort Lauderdale. So we're, you know, it's very highly unlikely that it'll ever flood. It never has. So that's important to recognize. But you got to have backup. And certainly, you know, plugging the product for a minute a couple Chemipur is probably a good idea, especially, you know, if you had a power disruption. You can't run everything to when you get the power back going. You can put a chemical 2 in there, and that's going to help with the additional, you know, I would call it bioload to the system from the fish crapping and even you feeding, if you decide to feed. I mean, one of the things you don't do if you don't have power is don't feed that.

That's great advice.

Yeah. You don't want to have extra fish poop. Did I say shit?

You can say shit.

Oh, yeah, I said that again. You can say fish poop.

Duty. Cocka duty.

Extra duty in the water is not a good thing.

You guys don't get to see this. We got him alive on webcam. As he said fish, his door opened and then someone left right away. That was the best. In his room. That was the best part.

His wife's been checking out. Make sure he's not watching porn or something on the web.

Honey, can you bring me another effing beer, please?

There you go. There you go.

Yeah, all right. And can you.

Hey, bring me a beer, will ya?

There you go.

There you go. Lay down the law. So you're gonna be sleeping on the couch tonight.

This is the last time we'll ever hear him. But you want to be here. Can I have a beer, please? I did, but here's your water too.

Thank you.

We don't want a water.

Are you gonna deliver it? Yeah, deliver it.

Come on.

Come on, let's go. Come on, bring it over. Just come in to stay.

Can you get some cheese and crackers for.

For those that are here with us?

Thanks, Jolene.

Shout out to Jolene for doing tech service and getting Jeff set up for the podcast. Thank you.

You've got a good one there, Jeff.

Yep. It's a team over there at the Turner Turner residence.

It's really scary being married to the Same woman for 35 years.

Well, she hasn't figured out your batshit crazy by now. She ain't gonna figure it out.

All right, so, you know, it's a degree of crazy right this way or that way.

We have a few beginner questions that we went through. Now I'm gonna go at least in one advanced question. I'm getting them as they come from the audience. So if you got something, put them in chat. Guys, there is a couple Corydori fans in the audience. And the Corydoras, when they're transported and they stress out, they generate their own toxin in a bag. It's kind of known in the Corydori culture to have garlic supplements on hand because they've tested it, and those toxins are basically altogether neutralized by garlic supplements. So there's, you know, you can get liquid garlic that you can get as a supplement. Otherwise people use garlic tabs. There's all kinds of different remedies. There's people that believe or wanted to know if this same Corydora stress toxin can be absorbed by something like Chemipure or an activated carbon.

It's a hell of a question and I really don't know the answer. I mean, I could give you guys some BS about it if you want that.

Well, give us your hyperbole. We won't hold you to it. You just had a beer.

I mean, it's possible that it could help with that.

I've never really, I've never tested.

Known about it or tested it.

I've done the garlic trick.

Who wants to test that? Send us your address. And we're sending you some free Chemipura and you can figure it out yourself.

Excellent. And just to confirm that, what email can they send that to?

Oh shit, I'm not going to give you mine.

Okay, you could send it to aquariummail.com and we will filter through for Jeff.

No, no, no, you said it. Send it to chemipure.com and we'll take a look at it. But yeah, if you have a legitimate. I mean it's one of the things we do is as a company we support clubs and hobbyists all across the country. We typically try to avoid shipping product to Canada for free or, you know, out of the country.

Yeah, you have to be within the country. That's limitations.

Yeah, they're within country. I mean we do it all the time. We've been supporting clubs since as far as I can remember, you know, Dick Boyd selling the product. Shit, I was next door to him in 1991 when I moved over there. No, it was actually 89. So I moved next door to Dick Boyd's facility where he was producing Chemipur for 27 years until I bought the company in these two warehouses in Ives Dairy Road. Yeah, that's what he always did the same thing. He was giving product away to clubs and club events. Right. So we still do that all the time.

Sure.

Historically. And again it's a family owned company, so I don't know, I gotta look around and see who has to prove that. Well, I guess it's me, you know.

That Limitations by Jeff apply.

That is such great business sense. Really is. I mean, so you get it to the. These groups, they try it out, they talk about it amongst themselves and stuff and then. And pretty soon you've got another 20 people that you're selling to or 30 people or whatever it is. And it's just good business sense to help these guys out.

Hey, Jimmy. The first. The first hits free, you know, I'm saying.

Oh yeah, it's all you got hooked on Method.

The first hit's free.

Yeah. No, not a math.

Yeah. I mean, I've never. I've never done math. I don't even know really what it is. But I suppose you smoke it.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so when somebody said, hey, you want some meth? I went, I'm really bad at math, so don't math. Yeah, that's what I thought they said.

So you can even at trade. So. So if you guys. Well, none of you guys are going to Aquashella, which is at the end of the month coming up right now in Daytona. But we always bring a shit ton of product there and give it away to consumers to come in. So one of the things I've always done. So they're coming in, they see the booth, you know, they like the product or they don't use the product. I say, well, how much did you pay to get in? And they say, oh, I don't know, 20 bucks or $23 or whatever it costs to get in. I said, well, I'm going to give you a Chemipure and you're now offset your entire expense to come and do this show. And they look at me like, really? Yeah, yeah, we own the company. We're going to do it. And I mean, you guys think about that. And we've been around a long time. I mean, business like that doesn't happen as much anymore. Even in the aquarium. Who gives you free shit? When you walk up, they usually give you a tiny sample packet. We have those too. But usually we'll give a free product to people at trade shows. Consumers who, you know, want to try to use the product. So it's pretty cool.

So when I go to these trade shows, I normally go to the strip clubs two nights before. That's usually about 3, 3, 400 bucks. So I'll need a case of, you know, whatever. You got to help me out.

I mean, you've been you.

I'll be in a parking lot selling it. I'm on my second one.

Well, I have the same one that I originally married. So I guess if I don't go to the strip clubs, it might work out. Just ask permission first.

Burn, Jimmy burn.

You know, I can honestly say that I've only been asked to leave a strip club one time, and it was because my wife and my buddy's wife were doing things they shouldn't have been doing, you know, and it was. It was a lot of fun. Well, and we still talk about it.

Since we're off the deep end. And you mentioned giving away free Chemi Pierce. So, Jeff, there's. We're kind of the meme group over here. So there's a bunch of different products, and we love a lot of different products, and we have our opinions on other products. Clearly, I didn't like the aquatech carbon in the aquarium hobby, especially in our circle. We love prime by seachem. We have a lot of stories with a lot of different friends. The Ohio Fish Rescue has a lot of stories that they've had on this podcast about prime and getting high off of prime accidentally.

So that is always accidentally.

It's always accidentally.

Always accidentally.

So of course, that. That initiates a bunch of memes and we find out other people have been making fun of this product for years to. As the one product you could possibly get high off of in the aquarium hobby. So everybody's, you know, wants. When they talk about something, they're like, you know, they post a little picture of the bottle of prime and how they're, you know, that they're gonna have a party tonight, that type of thing.

Don't ask Jeff what you can get from him. That will make you high. That's just bad business, dude.

Right.

So.

No, no. So I just wanted to inform you, and I did a little bit before the podcast. A little bit of what about that, you know how Chemipure is a. Is a bit of a culture. Culture meme in these late great days. So the joke in our circles is that if you get too drunk that you would, you know, dare keister a chemipure and it will absorb the alcohol out of your system. That's the joke.

This is true. This is true. And I've tried it. Will it work? Sure, why not?

I mean, guys, I'd like to put an asterisk out that Jeff is not liable for company statements. He's at least three beers deep. So if the rest of the. If the HR department of Chemie Pier hears this.

So if I take a tampon, soak it in vodka, put it in my butt, and then I chug.

Whoa.

Chemie pure.

Whoa.

Not a good idea.

Okay, just checking.

Don't do any of this. Get home kids.

No, probably not a good idea.

Yeah, that was a.

We don't. We don't. We don't advise that it's to be used in a rectal aquarium department, but.

You know, it can be used in other areas vaginally. Whoa.

Come on. He said.

He didn't say that. He did. Jim's mind goes down the Toilet again.

Use it for, you know, urine test. That's all he recommended this podcast. The rest is all just jokes.

So let's say I work for a company. I have to be drug tested once in a while. Can I chug some chemipur to absorb?

No, no.

Whatever. I'm just checking.

We were talking suppository.

You piss through it when you put it in the little bottle.

Okay, wait, wait, wait.

You use the chemipure in. In the delivery cup. So when you absorb it out of this. Okay?

So when you go in for the drug test for you people listening, you take the. You take the chemipure, You. You fill your underwear full of it. And then you pee through your underwear through and yeah, bro, you're back to work tomorrow.

Think about it.

You.

They give you a lid, and they give you a nice cup.

You.

You put the lid on, and then you shake the chemipure in there. You take that chemipure, you flush it down the toilet. So there's no evidence.

A lot of times they come in and watch you do it. But I'm just saying, they'll stand behind you, make sure you do it.

They're gonna be like, I have a hell of a kidney stone. Don't judge me.

I can't wait till you go to bed tonight and say, hey, Jolene, you know what those dickheads start talking about?

There's a lot of editing I'm gonna have to do on this one.

I mean, how many other owners would go through this rhetoric with you guys? I love you giving us so much shit.

I love you. You know what? If we're the highlight of your day? That's all matters.

So anyways, don't try this at home, kids. I hope you got a good laugh out of it.

Yeah, I wouldn't use it for that, okay? That's for damn sure.

It works.

Good. Now, going down the. The line, we talked about the zeolite. More questions about resins. What are resins used for? And does Chemi beer have any resin lines?

A really good time.

You're a saltwater guy. I figured this one might be a slam dunk as well.

Well, yeah, resins was probably, you know, one of Dick's aha moments years ago, and he realized that resins, you know, affect the positive nega negative ion charges in water, especially in salt water. That also affects the way the carbon reacts as a. How would I call it? Combined mix at one time. So that was probably really his biggest discovery and even talked about it in the 59 and 1960 articles. I should get those to you and you could post those articles. It's pretty fascinating read from bit before I was born. And I'm like a dinosaur, you know, it's 62 now, so you got to figure it's been around since before I was born, literally 59. So that would make it three more years to 65 years in the market. So the resins are a very important component. There's a lot of different types of resins. If you go do any wastewater treatment research, you'll find they're used in wastewater treatment plants all across the planet and, you know, for different aspects of absorption of phosphates. Absorption of arsenic is a big one. You know, they're going to absorb heavy metals out of solution, and you got to be careful which ones to use and then how much to use. When you make the product, recommend it for that size volume of aquarium. And it's, you know, organic scavenging resins. There's a lot of different residents that are out there. I mean, you use. If you have a water softener at your house, you're using a resin for that, and you're charging that resin with salt. Typically, like I do at my house. It's on a well point. So you learn a lot about it. And I've gone out and, you know, done a lot of research on it from the very beginning. And it's just a constant thing that's happened. So the resins are different and the blue, the green, obviously the elite and the regular chemipur. And it's, you know, an area. There's. There's even more out there. There's some resins that are just, you know, have an affection to absorb copper out of solution or other heavy metals. Only Julian sells one that's called metazole. It's a unique resin that I did some work with in the beginning, but I realized I couldn't use it in every chemi pure because not everybody wants all of the metals out of their water. So there's patents on, you know, I'm going to guess thousands of resin absorptions across the world.

The big one that I've heard of because again, I only do salt somewhat. I'm not a huge salt guy. I work with other people that do salt. And I know the big one outside of the aquarium industry that I've heard is taking lead out of water. Yeah, People were concerned about, you know, personal water supplies. Even when Flint, Michigan was going, oh, I heard rumors that people were trying to, like, do lead. Excuse me, resin Filtrations, remove lead.

Yeah. So basically lead or, you know, mercury from a flu at a power plant. Right. They're going to absorb mercury out of the smoke coming out of a PowerPoint plant and or ledge. So they'll use what they call, you know, black carbon, which is really super fine dust. That's stuff that we're washing down the sink years ago. They use that to trap these contaminants coming out of, you know, a fire, basically out of a power plant. So there's again, in the carbon side and in the resin side, you know, stuff that people just get patents on to absorb only that or exclusively that or mainly that out of a solution of water or air. So you could, you know, you could get resins to absorb a lot of stuff and nasty stuff too, like arsenic. Interesting that Arizona has one of the highest arsenic levels of water in the ground. Where that comes from I have no idea. It's probably, you know, some geological formation, but. But they're one of the locations that use, you know, high quality resins in drinking water and water, potable water for people to absorb arsenic, which also absorbs phosphate and other things down the line as water passes through it.

That is amazing. I've learned more about carbon in the last 30 minutes than I've ever learned in my entire life.

Well, go ahead, go on for a second. I'll tell you something about in the beginning.

You know, you drive by these power plants and you see them just billowing smoke. And I know that they do all these things to try to clean it up as best as possible. And then my thought is like, so what do they do with everything that they use it to absorb it? I mean, it's like used toilet paper. What do they put with it? Do they put it in a big can? Do they put it in the landfill? Do they put it in my backyard?

Or do they burn it and try to burn it off again at some lighter level? One of the things I learned in the beginning was going. I went to weftech, which is the Water Equipment Manufacturers Association. You know, nationally, WESTEC is what it is. It's the annual water infiltration treatment. Go. And I went to the one in Chicago and I learned a hell of a lot. You know, Culligan's a big player, Cabot's big player, Norridge's a big player. There's a lot of consolidation of those industries because carbon and other things that purify water is, you know, it's a massive product used worldwide and so many applications. So there's Big companies that have bought these things up and really control the markets. It's interesting, the more I learned about it, like Lancsis obviously controls the GFO market out of Germany. They own it, it's theirs and you can't take it away because that's the number one producing place for GFO in the world, is Germany. And just like, you know, the lignite carbon we were getting out of Texas, it comes from probably areas that were, you know, during the dinosaurs. That's where they're getting that lignite, which is a wood based carbon, from deep under the earth.

So is that the carbon in Texas? Is that come out of the Texas soil or out of their landscape?

It does.

So yeah, it does. It's all local, it's all USA made stuff and it's high quality.

It is. But they didn't make teleties and I wanted to get rid of the dust because I'll be damned if you know how many bags of Chemipure I rinsed in my life as a kid, right? And it was black and the white sink would turn black and I got to clean the effing sink. Now I have black. Can I just say that again?

Right, God bless.

From this podcast.

No, God bless you.

And I get it all over my hands. I got to wipe it off my.

Shirt, you know, Gotta wash a damn shirt too.

Yeah, so when I changed that, it was, it was a big eye opener to do it. And I think, you know, we kind of did it. We announced it and then we did it. It was really one of the best moves we ever did. I think Dick Boyd rolled over in his grave and was head up again and said, wow, that was a great idea.

That's better than haunting you in your dreams at night.

Well, I think it's better. Yeah. Yeah. He doesn't haunt me at all. I thought to myself, well, this is probably the right thing to do. And that, you know, I had to reflect back and think about it. You know, what would they think? What would he think about doing that after so many years and recognizing that there might be a better thing. Right? Like the resins that we use in Chemipur blue and Chemipur green are different than the original Chemipur. And I wasn't going to sit on my Duffys. Is that the proper term?

Ass?

Yeah, there, Rob, your derriere.

My derriere?

Your big old hairy butt.

Quite my butt.

That's right. I wasn't gonna sit on my ass and do nothing about it. So, you know, we went Out. And we did a lot of testing because we have aquariums to test on now. I'm talking some big aquariums, some beautiful aquariums. So when we did testing for blue and for green, we tested on our own aquariums in the house, but also our clients aquariums without even telling them.

There you go.

That makes sense, right?

Right.

Now how do you guys pelletize the carbon?

We don't. It's extruded steam activated extrusion. Extruded carbon out of Germany. Made in Germany.

Okay.

So it's steam activated. So you know, there's, there's different grades of it available potentially worldwide, maybe even in dhi Na.

I was going to ask like I've never bought pelletized carbon from chemipure. I've only got the bags. I've got the elite and the elite.

If you guys want to. If I sent you some just with no resins whatsoever, I mean I could probably sell that. Maybe we should do that. You are getting credit for the new product development department.

I hope it doesn't crash because I don't want to hear that shit later on. You cost us a half a million dollars.

Here it is. Here's Chemi plugs. There you go, boys. We're gonna sell Chemi plugs. You heard it here first.

Get invited on this podcast in the first place. Whose idea was it to get on this podcast? I want to know that guy. Where is he?

It's your wife. We went through her and she's actually, she's. That's what we sent the money to. So if you're looking for the money for this podcast, she's got, she probably bough new shoes or something.

Yeah, there you go.

At the Goodwill store.

Honey, honey, what's going on? Did you get the money from these guys yet?

Probably not.

It's kind of amazing how you meet people in the industry, right? So I go to this pond convention in a what? I go to this pond convention in Chicago and I'm sitting there having lunch, you know, BSing back and forth and meet your friend and just chit chatting and I learned so much off from your friend. We chit chat about stuff that I'm doing. We're just going back and forth, having a great lunch and he just mentions like, oh yeah, but my buddy was doing something, something like that. He. He owns Chemie Pier. Like wait, what? No, no, you're like, you can't leave me without giving me some. So like at least sending out an APB to that gentleman that I have.

To talk to him and that was nice.

Tweet. Yeah.

Would you get a phone number?

I'm like nine.

Social Security number.

Like, I'm the biggest fan. I have one in my ass right now. The guy looked at me like, what was.

It was Dave Tilton. That's right. Dave Tilton in.

That threw you under the bus.

You. You can say his name. I. I don't have permission, so I'm glad you.

Oh, no, I can say Dave's name. He doesn't care.

Excellent.

Matter of fact, he. He hates you guys, so you're a good shape.

F. He hates me. What did I do wrong? Good.

Well, it's just because, I mean, once you get a hater or two in your life, you know you're a success.

Excellent.

Just like Taylor Swift.

I like him so exactly.

Yeah, my son went to Taylor Swift with his wife on Saturday night over here. They had a great epic time. We dropped him off a while a bit away. But Dave Tilton advised you to get in touch with me. And I thought to myself, yeah, sure, I'll do it. But he's a really good pond guy, knows a lot about reefs and freshwater aquariums and has stores and I've been working with him for 25 plus years. He helped me build the Smithsonian's coral reef Aquarium for the Sant Ocean hall at the Natural History Museum and several projects. Red bank vet one Hackensack, N.J. one in Hamilton, N.J. as well. So, yeah, I've done them a long time. Good guy, hard working guy.

It was a fantastic lunch, I promise you. Now, I asked this to a lot of people that own a company and have a product for aquariums. I have to because we want to get the inside scoop. No one else is asking. If we're gonna burn a bridge, we're gonna light that shit on fire. So if you have a product like chemipeer, when customers call you and you have a product that's been going so long, how do people just use it wrong? For instance, like we talk to people with heater companies and, you know, they've, you know, stuck them out of the aquarium, they've plugged them in dry, they've used them as curling irons. They've. I mean, we've got some crazy stories on different products. So how have people used chemipure wrong in that you have some stories on how shouldn't people do this?

It doesn't happen a lot, but I'll tell you when it does happen. So the micron bag itself, right, It's a really fine nylon Denier style, woven mesh, right? Super fine.

Yeah.

And if you're forcing water through it, it has a tendency to collect schmutz on the bag surface itself and slow down the water flow. That's one item that can happen. And then it will kind of, you know, compact down and slow the flow in the filter, which you really don't want. You want filter flow to go through your filter, whatever type it is. And best is to upwell it. Right. Water going through it, not down and forcing down it. And then I think really probably the biggest issue that we've ever had that still happens here and there once in a while is that, you know, seam on a bag splits, they rip the bag. The bag was not sewn properly, anything like that happened. So, like, you have. You have this little extra sock, right? The elephant toilet paper. Can we name that elephant toilet paper?

Let's do that. Because calling it like, you know, gutter cover does not make it feel like it's a good product.

Gutter cover.

No, but, but, but, I mean, you know, if you're going to use it, it's good to have it in an area that's passive flow. Because absorption works from water, you know, coming through it the faster. Doesn't make it absorbed, no, quicker. That's something people don't understand maybe about carbon or resin or gfo. Going faster through the product isn't absorbing more. There's a limitation. You can only have water go through it. And I prefer the use of term passively. So, yeah, split bag is probably the biggest issue we have. And I swear to you, as I sit here today, I can't remember, we've had a complaint this year from somebody having a problem using chemical. It just doesn't happen.

So, Jeff, I got to level with you. We got. I got at least one story to tell you. We got. We got a fish store here in Detroit Lakes that I help open with Derek. He's been on the podcast a few times called D's Fish Company. We got Chemie Pier there that he sells. He loves the product, just like me. And we got a couple customers that come in with some unusual things that say, hey, maybe I'm doing this wrong. How should I be doing this? I don't think it's right. And they bought the smaller chemipur pouches and they found some way. They thought that they were inserts for your undergravel filtration tubes. Yeah, they found a way just to stuff it and just plug down their filtration tubes and break their tubes. I think that's about the worst I could come up with.

I've got one. I do tank maintenance. I had customers saying, yeah, I did a filter change when you weren't here and it overflows and I can't figure out what I did wrong and stuff. So I pulled out the, they had a little poly bag of carbon and I pulled it out and I took it out of the plastic and I put it back in. They left it in the damn plastic.

It's like, yeah, we don't have that issue. I think, you know, other than loose carbon coming out of the bag, that's about the worst case scenario. I don't, I mean, I'm going to tell you right now. We haven't had somebody make a claim, a false claim or a legitimate claim related to, you know, chemipur causing a problem in their aquarium and killing their fish or killing their coral or killing their plants. It just doesn't happen. Yeah, so that's something I don't ever think about. Which is kind of great. Right. Think about that. That would be like an effing nightmare. You know, realizing that you're selling a product that causes people problems, Not a good idea. It doesn't work.

I did have one customer that came up to me and says that I have geophagous cichlids dig up my bottom of my tank and I'm, I've never used carbon because I'm concerned that one of those pieces of carbon will get down and my geophagus will get in its mouth and it's poisonous. I'm like, I don't think you understand that carbon is more inert than most things in your tank. That if a geophagus decides to crush a piece of carbon, it's not going to kill or harm that fish in any way.

Yeah. And I'm going to add to that too. So when I first started doing jellyfish, now about 18 years ago, I built a 20 foot long, really incredible jellyfish aquarium at stake 954, the W Hotel in Fort Lauderdale that is still continuously running now, almost 16 years. It'll be 16 years, I think February or March. And that aquarium, you know, I was told you can't use carbon or GFO or anything with jellyfish because they're very sensitive and you'll kill them. Well, that's patently false. And I, I thought to myself, well, the water's yellow, you know, we have phosphates building up. What am I going to do? Well, hell, I'm going to use carbon and Chemipure Blue Especially to absorb all that organic material and the tannins that are getting built up from the need to feed jellyfish on a regular, constant basis. And then likewise gfo which we use in Chemipure Elite to absorb the phosphate out of solution in a jellyfish aquarium and bring the phosphates and I'm going to tell you guys right now to zero. In a jellyfish aquarium, you do not need phosphates to grow jellyfish. They're getting phosphates in all the food they're eating. They don't need it in the water at all. So if you have zero phosphates in a jellyfish aquarium, guess what? You won't grow algae. It doesn't grow if there's no phosphate. So there's things we've discovered, you know, along the way using carbons, resins and gfo, which are all components of different types of Chemipur. But on these big ones that I'm using, I'm not, you know, putting 50 units of Chemipur on there. I'm probably going to utilize some Chemipur and GFO on a dedicated filter to absorb phosphates exclusively. Right.

Just, just so I don't have more questions, can you elaborate? Gfo quickly.

Granular ferric oxide is made by lanxis, which is Bayer 33. You know, we buy it obviously in super sacks and it's a really, you know, cool product that absorbs phosphate and other things from water fresh or salt. So you want to lower your, you know, your phosphates, you can use algal absorption. Right? Plants are going to uptake phosphate and you can use gfo. Those are two of the real main ways to take out phosphates out of solution.

Now I have a completely weird question, but, like, what are you feeding jellyfish? I mean, is there Wardley's jellyfish?

You know what I mean?

What do you guys do?

We use Naupli, obviously, and even live brine, like whole brine that's live. And then you can use, you know, I use Hikari, you know, spirulina infused frozen sometimes for them if we don't have live available. And then we have a pelletized granular food that we use that does really well that we've worked on for quite some time. And then we're working on another one that I've been extensively working on that is also a liquid. One of my goals would be to meter that in and replace nuclei or, you know, libraine mature adult live brine for a food for jellyfish. But the key thing with jellyfish and I Know that Rob asked that question before we went on air earlier, is that damn things have to eat. You can starve them if they're healthy and growing, but you can't grow them if you don't feed them. That makes sense. So it's like any animal. So you could control the speed of the growth of a jellyfish by how much food that goes in. And the more food that you put in, the more organics that you have, the more water pollution that you might accumulate if you're not managing it via many different filtration methods that help to absorb that organic loading, which is fish poop.

So.

So how long?

Say again.

You can say again. So how large of a tank and how many jellyfish? Because people will ask. That's the stuff that they. People find fascinating.

I. I gotta. I gotta block this one because we. I want to bribe this guy in just for jellyfish. They're just to give a little hint. This guy is responsible for, I think, the largest Kickstarter campaign of making independent jellyfish tanks for the public. So I want to have a whole jellyfish episode with this guy. So if you got more jellyfish questions, I want you to put them on pause because I know. I know you're just chomping at the bit.

He won't come back on this a second time.

I'm good.

Please. Not a chance.

I'm gonna. I'm only gonna do it in January. If you guys behave, I will.

January? You want to do it, like, January 6th or something? Or you want to watch the chaos on TV?

Come. I come back from the Bahamas on January 5th or 6th, so I might be in good enough shape to do that. I have a lot of sun, and I won't shave at Staven for 12 days, so maybe I'll come on without shaving.

Oh, God, don't bathe.

That'd be fantastic.

Don't bathe.

Bathe either. No, you have to bathe, man. You're fishing the whole effing time. Yeah, but you guys are freezing your ass off in the snow.

We'll be in a Parker for you.

No, it's usually when I show up down at your state and drink all your beer and pee in your aquariums.

This guy.

Well, I want to see if your. If your stuff works.

After. After the podcast, he'll have to tell you stories about what he did with Elwyn Sigris.

Yeah, Elwin I knew very well years ago. Super great guy.

Yeah, yeah.

Really, really, really interesting guy and, you know, grew a hell of a business they were affected by the hurricane massively. Yeah. From Milton. And it really, you know, damaged their place and damaged Marty Tanner's place as well. And a lot of that was water intrusion and then building collapses from the wind. Awful, you know, electrical disruption too. So, yeah, they had some rough times. I speak. I spoke to Sandy Moore the other day about it.

Yeah, I've been to Secrets Farms dozen times and I mean, you literally, if you stood out on the highway, you can see the bay down towards where all the manatees hang out and stuff. And so are they back up and slope? Yep. Are they back and running then?

She, you know, basically said that it was really tough and that they lost a bunch of ponds because they got overrun by water. Yep. So, you know, again, it's the wrong time of year to get hit from a hurricane. October. And you know, as you guys know, with breeding, fresh waters, you know, you have months out before you can catch up if you didn't affect your brood stock. So I don't know the whole equation of what happened there. I mean, you know, it isn't. Wasn't good.

Not even because they had like three.

Times they got hit. Really. Three.

And, and October. I always look forward to September, October, November, because that's when their best stuff came out. That's been in ponds all freaking summer growing and stuff. That's when they always came out and they had the best color, the best size and so very unfortunate. You know, the hurricane season just crapped on them.

They had, I think, well, I think the Facebook posted like over 30 inches of standing water after the hurricane. Yeah, it was insane of knowing what went up on the building.

Yeah, yeah, you were there.

No, no. Yeah, this was on their Facebook page after the hurricane.

Yeah, you look at, you know, Seagrass Farms, obviously owned by Central Garden and Pet cgp and you know, they all, they have business interruption insurance, things like that that these larger corporations have and you know, that should bring them forward. But you know, when you go through an event like that, it's, you know, you're the owner or you're the operations person, you're going to want to really, you know, address, you know, the rebuild of what you do to maybe make it even stronger than it was before. That's an important aspect when you build anything. Right. You always build it better or you try to. To your best ability.

Yeah. Because the weather is not going to get any calmer in the next 10 years. It's just going to increasingly get shittier and shittier. For those of you believe in global warming, Whatever. I mean, take it for what it's worth. I mean, look what's happening. Something.

Yeah, I mean, this is all part of the reality of living in Florida. I think you have to, you know, you gotta have water, fuel, food, weapons, cash. Let me think. What else?

Cuban cigars, Strawberry Pop Tarts.

Wait, yeah, Cuban cigars.

Let me see if I got three flavors. Mountain Dew.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You gotta have plenty of food. Yeah, but you got to be ready, man. You guys, with storms and, you know, snowstorms and blizzards and whatnot, you can get closed off for a week or two weeks, I guess. It happens, right?

Yeah.

Can't get anywhere.

One of my friends works for, I think it was, used to be Kellogg's. But anyway, they were talking about during the hurricanes that strawberry Pop Tarts. They couldn't get enough of them in the Florida, the number one selling food. And I'm going, yes, it's a fact. Look it up. You can't get a Pop Tart. I'm like, why Pop Tarts? And they go, well, it's just, you know, individually wrapped and ready to eat, and you don't need electricity to run it. And that's one of the number one things. You know, people come in every time a hurricane happens down there. We see all the empty shelves of water and stuff, and you need water, Pop Tarts, and you can last a week.

All right, next on the advanced questions list, getting back to the topics here we have a listener that messaged in asking about his fertilization. So he has a CO2 fed tank. He puts in, you know, each piece of different fertilization. So generally you can get like the six parts from, like, a common fertilization company. I always pick on, like, reef flowers. We've had on the podcast before from Cobalt at Product line. And instead of using the all in one, you can pick your, you know, six different flavors and dose accordingly with carbon in the tank. Are those absorbed? Is there. You have to overdose certain things for fertilizers, or is it just don't worry about it and dose normally?

Yeah, I mean, that's. That's a. You know, it's a complicated question, but at the same time, I think the. The reality of it with anything just like a stony coral reef print, right. I got all these incredible acroporas growing and whatnot. You don't want to overdo it. So as an aquarist, I think you learn and develop your own, you know, visual mechanisms, and your testing tells you just use less. So, you know, if you're going to do what you're going to do a freshwater planet requirement, you're doing a bunch of additions into there. If you're using carbon or you're using Chemipur, I would just recommend use it, really associate it with a tannin. So you're looking to have that, you know, din clear look. You know, it may say, you know, One unit treats 50 gallons or 50, and you may say, well, I'll put two in. I only have a 75 gallon. Well, you might want to just put one in or half a unit in and see the result. You know, too much too quick doesn't really help a lot. And you know, being Aquarius my whole life and seeing aquariums and observing, which is the key element, observing the trends and what's going on in each aquarium that brings you into, I think, a better control mechanism with how much of anything you're adding, including an array of minor trace elements into the solution that you're, you know, whether you're growing plants or you're using, you know, almond leaves to make the water brown for a different style aquarium or, you know, reef aquarium with really super high alkalinity. You know, some people might run it at 12 and others might run it at 7. You know, there's different ways to skin that cat and we all agree it should be dead.

Damn right. I hate cats.

Did you catch that?

I hate cats.

Did you catch that, Jim?

I hate cats.

We have a cat in the house, actually. Socks lives here, but she's in and out.

Mr. Socks or Ms. Socks?

No, no, Mrs. Socks.

Okay.

And she's a little whiny some days and meows a lot for food. So yeah, we have Victor in the daytime and she goes out and has to deal with the bobcats, raccoons and possums.

Yeah. You know, Jeff, I don't know if you knew this. You know what the best way it is to walk a cat with a leash? No. You just throw it in the dryer and let it go.

I've never tried that.

Yeah, don't do that. Don't do that. My ex wife had cats and that happened one time. She, you know, opened it up and it wasn't quite dry and the cat jumped in. But the cat made enough noise, we let her out, but it wasn't happy.

Now I know why you have no cats anymore.

That's right. I got dogs.

Yeah, you got dogs.

Yeah, cats are pretty easy. You can just leave them outside and give them food and walk away. Just leave them outside. Dogs, you can't really do that.

So next hard question. I've gotten questions in the past about shrimp tanks. Keep going on those advanced questions, man. Shrimp tanks are generally smaller tanks. They're going to be like a 2 gallon on average, let's just say for like a neocardenia tank. Right. And these types of creatures love biofilm. Sure, you can feed them, but you want an established tank that has, you know, microbiology going on in the tank. So when you cycle a tank, you can't just cycle a tank, put shrimp in and expect everything's going to go perfect. You have to season a tank. You have to have the full on biofilms and the microorganisms growing for them to fully thrive and feed correctly. So when you're doing this, until you have a full robust established tank. I've told people from my experience not to put carbon in just because my common sense tells me if there's, you know, micronutrients, small traces of stuff, I want that to grow first before I dial stuff back and absorb things from the tank. That's at least my, my perspective with nano tanks like shrimp tanks. Do you have any special recommendations using Chemipur?

Well, I mean we made nano packets for a reason. You know, those small little nanopackets are great for a five gallon, two gallon, three gallon aquarium. And it's really a single use packet. That material is also a nylon based material, believe it or not. We source that from Japan and that's hermetically sealed to seal in the small amount of Chemipur blue or Chemipur green product. You know, biofilm, you know, comes from really bacteriological colonization in a new system. So if you're going to use a bacteriological product, let's call it, you know, Fritz sign or you're going to use Dr. Tim's or you're going to use. Oh shit. The other one that Phil from Xenia sells up in Canada, Poly Biomarine. Right. You know, they have different colonized bacterias in a bottle or in different forms to use in your aquarium. That's really where you're going to get the biofilm from. I don't believe that the carbon is affecting that because it's bacteriological and it really isn't taking out that. And I just said that before. I mean a colonized bag of Chemipure has this of bacteria on that. So if you're using a bunch of bags on a bigger system, like I said, only change half of them because you're taking out the biological cycle. That's Living in the bacteria, in the carbon. Right. That bacteria is living within the pores of all of that, including the surface of the bag. Right. So I don't see that as an issue. There's a lot of people using the nanopackets on small aquariums of all sorts. And one of the things that I find fascinating, too, you know, at a different level of hobbyists, is their, you know, their acumen to understanding what the animal they're about to house is going to eat. Right. It's got to eat something. There's a tendency to overfeed. I think we all would agree with that. A new hobbyist might have a tendency to overfeed. And still to this day, even within our group of professional Aquarius and our facilities and on the road taking care of some really incredible projects, food is still, I would call, underrated as far as a massiveness destiny. When you have a large aquarium and great flow and you're creating this biologically stabilized environment, you got to recognize what food you're using, how much, how many water changes or what water changes you might be producing. And the addition of carbon to that is a beneficial aspect of, you know, a filtration, what I call it. It'd be a complex of filtration to make it, you know, a healthy biome in the box of water that you have in your house. And that could be 2 gallons or 2000 gallons or 5000 gallons or 100 gallons. It just. It is what it is. You know, each one's a little different. So what I. I would have, you know, I would say, I would advise, sure, you can use a small chemipure packet and a small shrimp tank. And I've, you know, we. We've gone to all these trade shows and we've provided packets many, many, many, many people. And nobody says, oh, shit, that didn't work. You know, it isn't what happens or we know about it. You guys would know about it too.

Right?

Right.

So what I think Jeff's saying, if you wade into it slowly and don't try to fix it immediately, it's kind of like cooking. You can add salt, but you can't really take salt out quick when you're cooking. And so if you just wade into it slowly and try to get to that equilibrium, that makes everybody happy. You know, I try to explain to some people that a fish or a shrimp, I mean, their stomach isn't that big. You don't need to feed them that much. And it's almost better to underfeed than overfeed. Until you, you dial it in. And there's certain tanks that I have that I only feed every other day. And people are going that that's cruel. I go, well they're fine, they're healthy and they're breeding. So I don't know what to tell you. I just don't like most people. I don't like to do a lot of water changes if I don't have to to. So by, by going into it slowly and adjusting it, it's probably the best way for anybody, especially when you're new.

Well, I'm going to give you some really great info now. Ready for this one? So years ago, the label on Chemipur, even when we bought the company at the label at one time in the very beginning and one of the formats that Dick was using to sell it in the beginning was the fact that no expensive water changes ever. First AD talked about how he hasn't changed water in his aquarium in a year or two years because of the use of Chemipura. So he was trying to speak to hobbyists years ago about, you know, expensive water changes, especially when salt came along and we're using artificial sea salt, you know, with the whole avoidance thing. But you know, I think all of us would agree that, you know, especially if you're using the right water, water change on a regular basis that's, you know, either timed or sequenced with your aquarium as it's growing or you're adding more fish or bigger fish and more food, you know, doing a water change is still a very advisable thing. I can't or I don't really want to advise people to not change water. So maybe unless you're in California.

There you go. You know, I, I know like I raise a lot of baby fish and you can see the growth after a water change because of calcium in the water for bone development and stuff. Like Adam once upon a time used to throw cuttlebones for birds in baby fish tanks, you know, to add that added calcium by doing water changes on a regular time. You know, I mean like I've got a tank that's 220 gallons over at a clinic and I do the same thing every time I go there and it's crystal clear and it does well. But I don't add a lot of fish. I don't take any fish out. Nobody dies. It's balanced out. So I don't want to touch it. So I really, so I really feel that just by doing that 220 gallon tank, I do about a 40 gallon water change every two weeks. Don't have any issues with it. So I just. But when you start talking about salt water doing a 40 gallon water change, that's a lot of money. And I can seriously see why you guys would say that it is.

But, you know, when you think about us and we have a 5,000 gallon reef requirement, we're doing, you know, 500 gallons or more water changes on a weekly basis. You know, it is what it is. I mean, we're growing some of the finest coral reef privately held coral reef aquariums in the nation that are, you know, professionally managed. And, you know, water changes are a real benefit to helping to stabilize and, you know, accentuate the minor and major trace elements that really need to be available in growing a coral reef aquarium. So when we have a closed body of salt water, we're not taking water out and shipping fish out like a wholesaler or dipping corals out like a wholesaler. You're always replenishing salt water. So, you know, you know, exporting nutrients and the buildup of schmutz. You like that? I like that schmutz that accumulates in your aquarium. I mean, you gotta really think about that. And again, I go back to the cat, you know, it should be dead before we skin it.

That's right.

We all agree on that. But that's the only thing we agree on at this point, period.

It's much quieter.

January.

January.

Yeah.

I just have a silly saltwater question because we're not salt water guys. Do you have any? So, like, I do a water change and you get that bucket of schmucky water and it's great for my houseplants.

Yeah.

Is there anything you can do with, with schmucky salt water other than flush it down the drain?

Yeah, you're basically going to go down the drain with it. I mean, you wouldn't want to water your plants outside. It'd be like a hurricane hitting the plants.

Right.

That salt water intrusion. And there's not a lot we can do with it unless you want to reclaim it and have another separate system and, you know, go that route and have your own water cleaning spot and, you know, reconstitute that salt water again. I mean, you could do that, but I don't really know a lot of people that do it. And even these, the big public aquariums, you know, I know that for a fact. I mean, some of the big ones, like the Georgia Aquarium, I mean, you see truckloads of instant ocean delivered to the Georgia Aquarium. Truckloads you know, super sacks and they're changing water all the time. I mean, that's just very normal.

Yeah. The last time, the last time I was at SeaWorld, I saw that my, my salesperson Julie from Secrets Farms at the time, she kind of had a really good working relationship with him. So she arranged us a behind the scenes tour at SeaWorld and Stuff. And, and they had saltwater pallets or salt pallets just stacked up and stacked up and, and Right. I was more interested in the kind of the interconnecting works of all the pumps and whatnot. And my wife was over playing with baby penguins.

So, you know, penguins are the grossest ass things.

They smell so bad.

They are like, I don't care how.

They need water changes every day.

Creatures at SeaWorld, you know, you can.

You can just, you know, you can dress them up, but you just can't make them smell better.

All right, we're gonna do a shotgun round here.

So what's that?

Would you like a baby penguin?

No.

No, I don't. Adam always knows a guy.

I would not like a baby penguin. All right, a couple questions. Adam first with carbon.

I know that large saltwater angelfish.

It's been one of those myths of.

The trade that carbon causes hole in.

The head or lateral line disease.

Have you ever seen that in any of your products with large saltwater angelfish or any angelfish at all?

Yeah, the only time is when I've seen the carbon pulverize basically in either it's ground down and goes into a fine missed in the Quran. I've seen that through time. But typically, I mean, we're not dealing with it. Even in our showroom reef aquarium, we.

Have a 1600 whoop one second and.

One of you guys pushed the wrong button again. What'd you do? Rob?

I'm back. Don't you worry about it. I'm here.

You can't. If we're coming back in January, we can't do that anyways. The, the big reef aquarium there, I had some yellow tanks from Chad Callan that came from Hawaii. Some of the original ones be bred that had hl hll hole in the head, lateral line, you know, erosion. And those tanks are still in there. Some of them still have it, but none of the new tanks that we put in, whether it's the Natho or Tuminensis or gem tang, we have a couple other types of tangs in there. Blue tangs, hippopotamus, hippopas, but none of those have it. And we're using and we have been using Chemipur in there forever. So there is that group that's more of the non lignite carbon that can cause that. Jay Hemdall did a paper about it years ago that talked about how, you know, carbon's this bad thing that's causing hla. But I think really in that situation, like in a big public aquarium, like maybe, you know, Disney Years ago, with 500 cpm, the nitrates in the system, there's a lot more things going on to the water chemistry that's affecting those fish that cause that problem. And a lot of it is nutrient deficiency in the food. And she's opened the door again. Yes, dear.

She's got a gun, Jeff.

Every time she comes in, she keeps getting giving you better and better things. Don't complain.

Yeah, believe me, she doesn't have a gun that I'm aware of. There's at least one open in the house right now, but he typically doesn't pick it up.

She's gonna turn that sharp wedding ring. Turn that sharp wedding ring on the inside of her hand. That's what's gonna happen.

You wanna give me another beer?

Yeah, give him a beer.

Okay, again, gonna answer some more fan questions, but I got one question.

Oh, does anything. Does anything help hole in head disease?

I mean, you ask a lot to a lot of people. We're going to get an answer someday.

I know.

I. I think realistically it's a vitamin deficiency. C is a big one for sure. You know, I could, I could advise you to soak vitachem. Soak your food in vitocam before you feed your fish. That might help. I mean, but we're talking marine fish, right? Strict Marines, right.

Have you ever seen any good recovery?

Here's a good story. So years ago, we were getting purple tangs in from the Red Sea. Vince Rado, Sea searchers down in Miami. Years ago, we get them in, we put them in the system with some copper, which was typical. You had a prophylactic level of copper in your wholesale system. Those fish would come down with lateral line disease. We had a spruce loose outside, which is more of an algal filter with water coming down. Oyster shells growing green luxuriant algae that went into a big sumptuous that had green algae in it too. All you did was throw the purple tangs out there for the month. And you go back and look, oh, those fish are beautiful. Look how great they are. And the HLLE was gone.

Really.

And to me it was. Yeah, it was. It was nutritive from eating the right Food. And at that time we really weren't using nori. We would supply, you know, romaine lettuce or something like that, which was probably a poor nutrient, you know, very nutrient deficient romaine lettuce for fish compared to spinach or nori, which is very high probably in iron and vitamin C. So, yeah, it's diet, diet, Diet, I think, is the only way to solve that. And think about this. It was natural sunlight outside too.

Right.

So there's a vitamin D component. Interesting, probably, but that worked. That solves it 100%. That is to this day, I bet you I could do the same thing. Even when I saw the yellow tanks coming from Bayada and the blue tangs originally with, you know, the lateral line, I'm. I asked that question, you know, because I, I've been to oi, which is Oceanic Institute in Hawaii, where they bred them originally with Chad Callan. They're not putting them out in a sunlit natural pond. You know, birds might hit them. They're in the open environment, they got to clean the tank. But that's where they live in the ocean. Right, right.

That's incredible.

I mean, it's hard to fix that.

We've had that question posed to us about a thousand times and nobody's really had any success. And I'm just so glad to hear that something like that would, would work if you have access to that sort of conditions and food.

Well, I was going to say observation is the key. Right, Observation. Go ahead, Adam.

I wonder if reptile light bulbs would work like that. Add like a vitamin D3 or any like A, like a 10.0 or something like that.

I mean, that's a possibility, but I think if it's. I'm going to say it's both. I think the light was good, but the light was the result. Growing the algae, right? Yep. So the algae was what they were eating. And that makes total sense to me. I mean, I've dove all around the world. Australia, you know, I've dove in Maldives, We've been to Bora Bora, to French Polynesia. We did Indonesia, you know, Hawaii, all over Central America. And anywhere you see shoals of tanks, they're typically in a shoal together, pecking and eating the whole time, you know, in a shallow water, in a wave crest area, in a wave crashed area. And that's where they're eating microalgae. That's their main diet, I think, for those guys. So think like the animal. Right. What does the animal want? Where does the animal live?

Right.

Forget about what we want to do. That sucks.

All right, knocking out more of these questions. Next one would be, would carbon take out a lot of tannins? I have a lot, and I'm doing water changes a few times a month. Month, yes. Carbon by itself, absolutely will hit tannins. Now, everybody messaged me saying, oh, what's the measurement? Well, there's no way to measure because we don't know how many tannins or what's generating. Tenants in your tank, do you have a giant tree stump that's just bleaching or, you know, leaching tannins left and right, or do you have two leaves? So, you know, what I would do is start small, and if it's not doing enough, keep adding enough carbon until you feel that your tannin reduction is efficient enough. But, you know, the obvious answer is either live with appropriate amount of blackwater tannins or eliminate the production or find the happy medium with, you know, getting your subscription of Chemipure sent to your house.

So, yeah, I mean, all of those. All those things will work. You know, again, like you said, it's better to start slower and look for the results. And I think, really, you know, tea, even after so many years of playing with fishbowls, you know, observation is so important, right? You go in, you see it, or I haven't seen, you know, Jim's aquarium or Rob's aquarium before, and I go there and I see it. You know, what do you observe? Right? What do you observe?

It's not like you're doing something colorless, something that when you see clarity, there's your answer. There's your measuring stick, bud.

You know, it's a visual thing for us humans, right? We like to see things clean. Like the windows are dirty in this room. Well, you clean the windows, and, wow, it's clean. You can see outside. It's the same shit. I think when you're looking through any pane of glass, whether it's water, the windshield of your boat, the windshield of your car, right? You have windshield wipers for a reason. And it's. I think it's a human thing. We want to see something visually clear. To us, it seems better. But, you know, a natural environment on a river and the Amazon or, you know, Biscayne Bay in Miami, might be dirtier, more turbid, but those animals live in those environments. So, you know, what environment you're creating is really what you're aiming for and what you need to recognize. I think, really in the beginning and then the end, which Never happens. An aquarium is this perpetual thing that keeps growing and living and, you know, giving back and the animals that live in there. I mean, our goal is to keep it running right as long as we, we can or as long as we desire to. Right. We want to do it and keep it working and keep it effective and efficient and clear.

Next one is. Next question is we mentioned quite a bit at the beginning of the podcast about carbon dust and how we didn't like it and how it was made our clothes messy or fingers messy and we didn't like rinsing it out, is that they want to know if there's any negative effects of just not caring and let that dust in your aquarium. Could it hurt your fish?

Yeah, it's. It's not. It's not going to hurt the fish. They're not going to eat it that I've ever seen. And I think that, you know, especially even when I look at the fact of a jellyfish, right, it's this filter thing. It's this piece of living plankton pulsing and going through the water. You know, that's not what's killing the animal, nor does it kill the animal, but certainly the dust. That's why we still advise people, even though we're using the.08 millimeter carbon pelletized to rinse it. You know, you get a small amount of black dust that might be in there from the manufacturing just on the carbon in general, and then it's gone. It's. It's done. It's not there anymore.

So.

And it doesn't come out.

I think the thing they were leading towards is that same question that we did with the geophagus. Is it going to be toxic to a fish if they get in their, you know, gills? It's not. It's inert. So you. Like you said, the jellyfish ain't gonna matter. You know, it's not. It's gonna be safe. The thing, the only thing that'll do in my opinion, is raise TDS for a short period of time. Tds? The total dissolved solids. The micro shit in the water column that you should be filtering out somehow that will be raised for a time. You're putting dust in your water. You're going to have particles in your water column, but carbon will eventually, unless you have like, you know, three turbo fans blowing in all directions, you'll eventually have that settle somewhere in your tank.

Yeah, I remember. This is a great story. So years ago, when Julian Sprung came back from working for John Burleson, probably 90, 1990 1991, Dick Boyd was still alive. He was right next door. And Julian had his little 15 gallon reef aquarium with gorgonians and clams. It was really a healthy thriving environment with a bunch of T12 bulbs across it, across the whole top of this 15 gallon aquarium. And he would put a chemipura in there with the dust and everything and say, oh, it doesn't matter. It gets filtered out. It goes into the floss and it doesn't hurt anything. And I was really kind of stunned by that years ago. I thought to myself, well, why don't you risk this? Oh no. The dust is a really small microproduct that actually finally cleans the water and kind of goes back into what, you know, black carbon is, is really the fine dust material that's used in, you know, power plant stacks to remove mercury from air pollution coming out of a power plant. That's a fact. Now look that up. That dictates pricing on carbon actually.

Right. I get people messaging me, it's like, well what if we just ingest carbon? There's got to be something it does to us. And I want to tell people that if you know a health nut friend or if you call the poison control hotline, they're easy go to thing for. If you've, I don't know, had your kid drink soap or bleach or some harsh chemical, their first thing is to tell you to get a bag of activated medical grade carbon. They're not going to tell you to get your fish supplies people, they're never going to say that. They're going to tell you to go out and get a bag of activated charcoal from a pharmacy that's in powder form and they're going to tell you to mix it in water or a beverage and down it immediately to swallow an amount of activated charcoal to absorb poisons from your system. That is something they use for stomach treatments. They use in Poison control hotline and a lot of other medical practices. So it is safe for you to even consume, you know, considering it's a human made for label. Again, if you're getting carbon from a aquarium source, they're not making it for people on purpose. Don't, don't consume aquarium.

I mean you can get, you can get carbon tablets, right?

Yep. Pills. Pills, yeah, you can buy them.

People use them all the time. So yeah, it's not gonna hurt you.

That is that again just to take time.

It's a great product. It just, it works and it doesn't hurt anything.

So I was on some high Medications for kidney stones for a while because I had an elongated kidney stone that lasted about a week. So I took a bunch of different medications for nausea, a bunch of pain medications and a lot of stuff that was making me constipated. And they were concerned that of course I was getting just way too much stuff and hitting my lips. So I took carbon pills to help balance my system and, you know, ease on my stomach because I thought I was going to be up chucking from the amount of stuff I'm hitting.

We're probably not going to get in that business because that's going to require.

FDA approved Don't get in that business.

This is nothing to do with aquarium.

No, that's a pharma thing. Again, don't eat your aquarium carbon.

Well, there goes lunch.

There goes lunch. I, I'm dying to know personally, wink, wink, even though I may not already know, what's the difference between. Because we're going to get email questions on it. Chemipure, Chemipure Elite. Chemipure Blue. Chemipure Green. Tell us about the rainbow.

Well, the original Chemipure was what Dick designed and built, you know, back in 1959. We made it better basically by changing the carbon component about nine years ago or so. And that formula is still the original formula, albeit with a different.08 millimeter pelletized lignite carbon. So it's the same product, but better because of the grade of carbon that's being used. Chemipure Elite was an aha moment from Matt Boyd years ago who thought about and thought, you know, a lot of marine aquariums are using DFO to absorb phosphate out of solution. Why don't we put GFO in the bag and call it Chemipure Elite. It was a great idea and it's still one of the top sellers of the Chemipure brand of products. And that is really the only extra thing to that is the GFO that is absorbing phosphate out of solution in your aquarium water. Chemipure Blue, we developed probably a solid eight years ago now and that was a transition into phosphate absorbing resins with the high grade lignite, carbon and other resin components that are removing organics out of solution that were, how would I say this, stronger in absorption capacity compared to the original resins that were used in the original chemifur that still use today. So when I looked at it, I thought, well, you know, people are using Chemipur and salts and fresh water. When I started looking at Blue, I thought, okay, this is going to be better for saltwater because it's going to have a higher capacity for absorption. So that's really where we advertised it and sold it in and tested obviously on our own aquarium for over a year plus during that entire time. And one of the things that transpired with the blue was that the cichlid guys or gals started to use hemipair blue for cichlid aquariums. And they were just stunned at how crystal clear their cichlid aquarium became. So that became kind of this add on use of Chemipure blue, which still again I use in all the reef tanks. I really don't use the original Chemipure formula on the reef aquariums. And then Green was geared more towards a planted aquarium with resins that don't affect GH anywhere as much as a typical resin might. Your general hardness in your freshwater aquarium or freshwater planet aquarium. And that's done really well.

So resins by their nature are harsher on the planet aquarium. You said ghost ph.

Yeah, it could be, it could affect general hardness depending on what resins you're using. Not necessarily the carbon.

Sure.

Because it's a, it's a base product. Right. Carbon is base. But resins can affect general hardness, alkalinity. You know, again, different types. Like I said, there's, there's got to be at least a thousand patents on resins and there's a shit ton of them out there. That's really the main difference in all of them. And then again, sizing down to the smaller size, we've talked about other packets and making other ones. And then again, just, you know, packaging the carbon alone by itself and selling that to. Maybe we'll do that going into 25. It's not an emergency. And the interesting thing as we develop these new products is we didn't bastardize. So sometimes you'll build a new product and then it, it causes less sales in another product type thing takes away. But we've only, we've only grown over time with all of those four types of Chemipura. And I kind of stopped at that point. I thought about, you know, do you make one for shrimp? And you know, do we work at something different, you know, for invertebrates? And there's really no reason to do it that I can see.

I was gonna ask you if you could make one that has like a calcium leaching supplement.

Yeah, I thought about even adding a flocculant to it too. Because some of the things people, you know, a new Aquarius gets in and my tank's cloudy. Oh, well, what am I doing to do? Right? And you can use a flocculant that pretty much settles out any suspended matter. So they may see the aquarium. It's dirty. Well, it's just suspended matter. Right. So a flocculant will do that too. We talked about doing that at one time, but we didn't. It just really was no reason to because Chemipur, you know, typically within a day period or two day period will help reduce those tannins and cloudiness in an aquarium to make it crystal clear. And that's basically carbon and resin at work. Right? Think about it. Just absorb the basic easy principle. If I have another beer, I will now have absorbed that much more alcohol.

You are embodying the chemipure life, aren't you?

You said to me I, if I go on the show that I gotta drink effing beer.

So I'm tickled.

Yeah, I got a couple beers.

I'm proud of you.

Well, it's 11, it's 10:30 here on the east coast. I'll try to wrap it up.

Okay, don't worry about it. I got one more. So I sent a text message to your phone and I'm going to send a picture here to the listeners in the. The chat. And this is a scam that happened oh, let's say six years ago that really took off. It's been around for a lot longer. But this was a big thing on TikTok how a product, I think they used to call it the Wonder Cube. It was the, it was the like the cat's meow. And they advertise it as absolutely no reason to ever change your water again, just like all kinds of other treatments. And it was literally a carbon block, a honeycomb carbon block. And all you use, drop that some bitch in there like it's a giant Alka Seltzer can and suddenly it's going to cure all of your problems. And they put horrible like TikTok videos together saying it's going to, you know, remove diseases, it's going to cure your mom's cancer, it's going to, you know, whatever else you know, allegedly, it's just suddenly the miracle thing. And you don't need to treat your, your water with any other chemicals, with any other things. Just drop this in all your, your things will come true.

Now I.

Besides that, I feel like they, they took that idea and just ran with a terrible means. But have you seen people use these things in a sump? Have you seen these things fall apart? Like what what's, what's your take on the wonder cube, my friend?

Well, I mean those are, those are things just like these other. I think there's silica based bio, you know, blocks, right, that you put in a sump. We see them degrade over time, especially in saltwater. And I've taken them out. I mean, I just don't want to have that kind of shit in our thumbs professionally managing system. That isn't necessarily the key. And I'll go looking at a block like that and tell you. Biofilm, I mean eventually, you know, it's bacteriological, right? It's covered with bacterias and internally with bacteria and then potentially with biofilm on the external surface of it that clogs it down. And if you're going to use something like that, just like any media that you might have in a sump, like we do in salt water, you're going to need to take that out and clean it once in a while. And the only thing I would advise, if you're going to use something like that, you're going to clean it with the water that you're using. Don't take it to the city water or your well point water and start cleaning it in a non active water. I would take the dirty water, do a water change, clean that bacteriological thing and then put it back in your stump, your outside filter, your hanging on the back, whatever you got. And you know, there is no miracle, you know, fix to anything in the aquarium trade still to this minute that I've ever seen the mag float. Did a hell of a job helping us keep the magnet, you know, using a magnet that floats, cleaning the glass. But beyond that, what else is there besides Chemipure?

I'm just trying to think of myself like what is the benefit of some guy making a honeycomb cube? Like when do they sit there in the R D department and go, why is this they just try to put it into a single object so it's not loose. Was that the idea behind it? Is there some, something that you've heard that people did this for a reason?

Maybe you're breeding coolie loaches. Yeah, maybe that 10,000 coolie loads fit in that thing.

Well, you know, and that's the idea. You got to sell a gimmick, right? You got to sell a gimmick. And if you sell a gimmick and people believe in it, then maybe you'll sell more, you know, like Chia Pets or, you know, I mean, what was the damn rock in a box that people sold years ago, sold tens of millions of dollars of those things. I forget the name of the product, but, you know, it's a gimmick. The pet rock, somebody's going to buy it. And worms words got pet rock, right? It's people. You know, people are going to start following that and they're going to buy a bunch of it and then it's going to be a hit of some sort for a period of time. But, you know, I think what we do is a lot different. You know, if I can do a company plug, I mean, reality is we're using the products that we're selling on a professional basis at a high level and have been, I mean, really my entire life. So it's a fun thing with the Chemipure business in and of itself, and it's helped a lot of people, I mean, millions of people through the year, millions and millions of people with the success of their aquariums. So we're just going to stick with it, keep building a great product and delivering it and providing customer support and customer service and doing the right thing, you know, for all of our aquariums and all the animals that live in our boxes at home or anywhere.

Well, Adam, Jimmy, you guys got further questions for them?

I've just got one final question for you, and I know it's getting late over there. What is the one customer request that you get that you wish you could take care of? I mean, people are asking you, can you create a product to do this?

Whoa, whoa, whoa. That's company secrets. But our listeners are under NDA.

Oh, no, but I mean, people have asked.

I mean, I could answer that question. I mean, you know, we sell Chemi clean that, you know, helps to remove the stains that's caused by cyanobacteria. And cyanobacteria, you know, is a bacterial colonization in fresh or saltwater crimes. Right. Whether it's a blue green algae or a red sinobacteria. But we call it blue green algae, but really it's a blue green cyanobacteria.

Right.

You know, that's kind of a plague for people through time. And even then, you know, chemicaling will work sometimes, but it doesn't work at all times. There's well documented over 200 different types of red cyanobacteria, different strains of it. I mean, these are things that are, you know, in nature all over the world. I mean, this happens everywhere and in lakes and in streams and in ponds and in your aquarium. So that's probably one of the items that we get questions on, you know, how do you deal with it? How do you fix it? You know, I dosed it. It's come back and I. We always try to tell people, and Shawn does a great job with it from our office. You know, we try to help them find the root of why they're growing cyanobacteria, why cyanobacteria might be growing and their systems, whether it's, you know, elevated silicates, elevated phosphates, you know, too clean of an aquarium. You know, maybe it's dinoflagents they're looking at or that's adding to it. You know, again, it's. The fascinating thing about aquariums is that, you know, the more we learn, the more we, you know, keep learning. You know, you're never going to know everything. So it's. It could be. A lot of that, I think, comes back from your source water. I did a bunch of aquariums up in Wisconsin, even for the all glass owners years ago, and they had great groundwater, was high in calcium, and their coral reefs flourished. And I blame a lot of that on just the factual composite of their groundwater. So if you're using city water like we are down here with chloramines and maybe fluoride and other shit that the government's putting into your water, you know, so it's hard to say that my water is like your water, you know, up in Brick and almost by Fargo, North Dakota, where Rob lives.

We're liquid rock. And most. Most of the parts around here, we're pretty well liquid. Liquid rock. Yeah.

Yeah. So, you know, that source water is critical, important. So from a challenges or new products thing, I'm going to develop a salt. We're just going to sell salt.

There you go. And then maybe that's a joke, maybe a side of pepper. You know, you do the old salt and pepper.

Yeah, we're not doing salt. There's no flipping way. I was suggesting to me at one time, I don't want to do it. I mean, it's. There's things you want to do and things you. That you can do. And one of the things we're going to just keep doing is building really fabulous, incredible reef and jellyfish displays. Because professionally that's. I've been doing that my whole entire life, especially beefs and marine reef aquariums. Marine aquarium aquariums in general. So we'll just keep doing a great job and, you know, having fun in this business. I mean, you know, I think like, Jim too, I hear you service aquariums. I mean, still, I'M I'm out building and creating some incredible installations. This one we just finished on the west coast of Florida is off the charts. I can't publish it at this point. Maybe one day they'll let me, but it's incredible. Just this big cylinder we did. There is just fascination. So there's, you know, the hobbyist side of me or the Aquarius side of me saying, you know, wow, we really love what we're doing. It's a tremendous industry to be in and say, you know, I go to work every day and, you know, I build aquariums for a living, but at a really high level. It's a lot of fun. It's challenging, but it's a lot of fun.

You know, what I like seeing is your enthusiasm. And every time we all get in this rut where you're kind of sick of the aquarium stuff, and then all of a sudden, something brings you back. I think this podcast does that for a lot of people, where you listen to something and you hear great success that you're doing or whatnot, and it brings people back to wanting to do a great job on their aquariums. And right now, I'm back on a high. I'm having a lot of success breeding celestial Pearl Danios, and it's just given me a lot of. Just a lot of joy and happiness. It's so much easier to go down in your fish room if things are going well. But I know Rob and I in the past, and Adam, too, you know, something crashes and you. You just kind of lose faith and you don't want to do it anymore. But I just like this idea that this podcast does create excitement amongst the community, and I want to thank you for bringing that here tonight.

Well, I think that that's an important part, right? Education at the end of the day. And I've thought about this very extensively. You get to reflect or look back in the mirror and think about what have you done or what are the accomplishments that you're gaining and what are you teaching your team, and how is the team building upon that? You know, it's this whole educational realm. At the top end of the, you know, you have a business, we'll call it a triangle. At the top of that triangle is education. And really, you know, a good Aquarius is helping other Aquarius learn from their successes and their failures. To hope that that person, you know, recognizes, you know, what to do, or maybe they believe in what you're saying and you can help them succeed. That's really where the industry still stays and why we're in it, right? And then I've determined. This is a really good one, too. Through time, I've determined that the reason people buy these massive reef aquariums or jellyfish aquariums from us and want to have this beautiful slice of the ocean and their home is that they draw blanks when they look at it. Think about that. They stop thinking about what their day was, what's in front of them. They look at the aquarium, and we do this, too. And you may not know this subconsciously, but you stop thinking. Think about that. That's a hard thing to do nowadays with this damn thing that the kids are staring at all day. Oh, that's my wife in the photo.

Why is she topless?

Every time I change the picture, there she is. Joe, set that up on my camera. So she's always a different picture every time I look at it. She likes that. But, yeah, I mean, you know, we all stop thinking. We look at our aquariums, recognize the wonderful world of the, you know, what we have in our aquarium, whether it's fresh or salt water, and you're just taken back for a minute, you stop worrying about the effing traffic on the way home or the fact that your wife isn't cooking dinner tonight, you have to go out and buy dinner, or that the dog is chasing the cat or you gotta pay bills or something else happens. You look at your aquarium, you think, oh, what the f. Did I say that again, Rob? Am I allowed to cuss?

You're good.

Go on.

You're good. But wrap up, Jim.

Wrap up, Jim.

No, no. Wrap up, Jim. That was a good. That was a good note. I felt very, very inspired and have a fire lit up in my ass as well. And it's not just the chemipur packet up there either. So, Jeff, thank you again. Adam, we'll have to save your story for the next one. You can find jeff@reefaquaria design.com jellyfishart.com and more importantly, chemipeer.com to find your own location nearest you to purchase chemipure. Jeff, thank you. Those links are in the show notes. We appreciate you again, and I hope to hell we can get you on for at least the jellyfish, if not another one about how to correctly juice your fish with vitamins and not drugs.

So sounds like a great idea.

I got a lot more questions.

Say no to drugs, people.

Guys, well, I really appreciate it. Great talking to you and have a happy Thanksgiving.

You too, my friend. And let's try to rope you into Coming back in January when you get back from what, the Bahamas, you said?

Yeah, when you guys are deep as shit and snow. Get in touch with me and let's talk about it then. And I can trash you about the snow. I. Outside while I'm in Bahamas.

Speedo. Speed up. Speedo.

Yeah, that's normally when you see every Minnesotan. In January, we'll be down in the Bahamas, so I might just run into you.

Yeah, leave your Speedos at home, will ya?

Yeah, I go incognito.

He's not wearing pants.

That's right.

And we're off. Bye, friends. Thanks guys for listening to the podcast. Please go to your favorite place where podcasts are found, whether it be Spotify, itunes, Stitcher, wherever they can be found. Like subscribe. And make sure you get push notifications directly to your phone so you, you don't miss great content like this.

We always bring a ton of product and give it away.

Oh, yeah, that's how I got hooked on meth.

The first hit's free.

Yeah.

Thailand.

I did a little bit before the.

Podcast, so I'll need a case of, you know, whatever. You got to help me out. Can I get a five pound bag? Can I get a ten pound bag? Can I get a fifty pound bag?

You know, it's, it's, it's a premixed product. So you can get a grande, which is about four regular units of keep.

I know I've got a small little thing that will last probably about eight or 10 hours, like eight inches wide. And it's like, it's just a big sock, but after that, I'm screwed.

It's hard.

You fill your underwear full of it and then you pee through your underwear and yeah, you're back to work tomorrow.

Speedo, Speedo, Speedo.