@Henders @trondhansen @RebeccaRVT @RichieACC It is scorching heat in my home town. Bhutu is always under the shed of sofa. She doesn't move throughout the day, and barely eats. And she is drinking 5 to 6 bowels of water a day. Every half an hour hour she is coming out of sofa to drink water.

People are dying from sunstroke over there

Morning Pet-ers :D

@Henders Afternoon Hen-ders :D

@JourneymanGeek very cute

@Henders Aren't you gonna post Daily Pet today?

@AJ Hmm, let me see what I've got

I got one in a bit

@JAD Wearing a hat?!

it's a Hognose. They like to dig, evidently :P

Guess you've seen this:

mhmm

Pretty cute :P

Daily Pet 18-06-2018 (Noodle)

It's my gf's Hognose btw. His enclosure has a lot of fluff so he can dig his tunnels

and a bin of mulchy dirt, to dig in

@JAD Ooo that sounds cool :P So you both have hognoses?

Oh wait, i'm getting confused. Snakie is the ball python and snor is the boa.

I think it's pretty cool when they just disappear into the ground

just the one :P

yeah, Hognoses are more tunneling while those sandy snakes just dig themselves in to hide in ambush

@JAD I now have a doubt. Is Hognose being used to create a secret tunnel between your and your gf's houses? ;-P

thi is what trine is doing right now.

What's it doing?

it is a vole 20 cm+tail

hunting voles

trine my cat she is a killer

last year i promised to take a picture of her prey to be sure it realy was a vole and it is :)

@trondhansen wow! white cat with brown (right?) patch on head and back.

she is black-orange and white :) the black and orange are mixed.

I'd love to pet a cat, but my family won't allow this. Cause, they excrete anywhere, which smells very awful. We had a stray cat that we used to feed, but had to get her out during the night when all doors are closed. If she couldn't get out, she'd excrete in the house which wouldn't let us sleep. And that smell doesn't go that easily.

@JAD It would be interesting to see where their tunnels go.

@Henders I think I explained it in the next message. ;)

some of the tunnels end in my garden pond,luckily over the waterline the voles chew the rubber liner as if it was paper :(

I just mean, within the enclosure, it would be interesting to know how all of their tunnels interconnect and what shapes they naturally build, for example.

@trondhansen I remember that! The picture we couldn't work out what it was! Wow, impressive she gets voles!

she gave me one still living today and it is definitly a vole :)

At the weekend I was playing with a friends cat. They have some feathers on a string which it chases and pounces on. It's great!

@Henders Well, it's a small enclosure (60x40 cm), so nowhere really. And the tunnels are just all crisscross everywhere

my cat do not play a lot but she do hunt anything that moves she is a crazy good hunter as most female cats are.

@JAD Hmm, I thought maybe it would make a little burrow.

nah, it has a few hides from coconut shells

Do snakes even make burrows? I kind of just assumed they would..

voles are in the same family as hamsters so their network of tunnels are likly complicated,with birthing chambers and storage chambers.

here the snakes do burrow in the winter and often more than one type at the same place.

@Sonevol man, and I thought it was hot here! Least I have AC, the inside of my house last night was 30.5C. Too hot for us Canadians.

@RebeccaRVT 30.5C is cool for us. It's over 45C here.

Woah. Way too hot for me!

I start moaning at 30 degrees :p

HOW?! You live in the desert? Haha honestly if our weather was that hot they would cancel school

@Henders This is why you shouldn't come here during summer. Though, our local newspapers show pictures of foreigners wearing hats and carrying umbrellas with caption "Mercury breaks the record of last 45 years". :P

My head would burn without a hat haha

My hat would burn!

I'd have to put sun cream on my hat!

Are you dark skinned? I believe dark skinned people don't burn nearly as easy by the sun.

@RebeccaRVT Kinda. It's more than 60 percent desert, but I live in a non-desert area. But still it's always that hot. We don't even have to spend electricity to get hot water.

Wow, I'm sure you get use to it.

@RebeccaRVT I am not. Kinda fair I am.

@RebeccaRVT 30C is way too hot,we have had a record breaking heatwave here in norway for over a month but it have ended now.

👍

it really depends though

global warming! ☺️

over here, when it gets 30+ it's humid as hell

When I was in Gambia, it was 30 but dry as a bone. That was very bareable

@JAD you guys have air conditioning?

here at work, sorta. At home, nope

:(

Id invest in one lol

I even think about investing in the UK. I can't sleep when it's too hot...

we live in a rented apartment. I'm not too keen on making investments for that

There are portable ac units

Ahh, fair enough. You can get ones that you put a pipe out the window though. Still very effective

@RebeccaRVT This one time when I was walking in the market and stopped at one place to take a cold drink, a foreigner standing there said, "how the hell you can walk in that heat without a hat or umbrella?!".

@Henders We got AC and air cooler like in 2000. Before that, we used to have fan.

investing in a heatpump is a good thing,it keeps you hot in the winter and cool in the summer and one can save a lot of power atlest in the winter.

@trondhansen Is that the tank you bury in your garden?

@trondhansen yeah, it's going to be a big thing here soon

They're going to shut down the gas winning in Groningen, so the country will have to reduce gas usage

no it takes the heat out of the air outside and pumps it into the house in the winter and it is effective down to minus 15C and in the summer it can move the heat to the outside of your house.

Oh, that's neat. Are they expensive?

kinda

5-10k I see here

if you invest 1000 euro you get a good one but you get a lot lower heating bill if you normally use electric power for heating.

Oh, hello, Petters!!

it came out a little wrong you save a lot of energy if you normally heat your house by electric power.

also if you use gas

it just saves on the gas bill instead of the electric bill

the heatpump i have uses 1000w but it gives me 3000w of heat back so i save mony.

Yeah, sounds like it's just the initial investment which is big. After that, it helps.

Like a solar panel.

same with solar panels

damn

Haha

Great minds ;)

LOL

@RichieACC Didn't see you come in! Hello :)

in new buildings they often drill deep into the rock to use the heat from the ground to heat buildings,it is expensive but over time it saves mony.

@Henders Hey 😊😊

@Henders I had an idea last night. I was watching the King of DIY's latest video. He bought a tank with a sump. That got me thinking. A larger volume of water improves water stability. So I'm thinking of making a large sump for both of my smaller tanks. 100L plastic containers are quite cheap. I'd then be able to do better filtration, and I could use it as a decorative aquaponics system.

But there are some challenges. I will have to make a stand, get pumps, make holes in the glass, etc, etc. And a mistake there could cost me the tank. So, I'm weighing up whether I want to do the sump, or just get a big tank. But if I get a big tank, then I will still have 2 small tanks, and there is no way that I won't want to put fish in there. le sigh.

@AJ ya I'd be asking the same thing!!

@RichieACC Yeah, it's a tricky decision. I thought about drilling my tanks too but decided against it (only because I hadn't got any funds to replace it if it broke). Gotta watch the type of plastic you use won't leach any chemicals so I normally go for 'food safe' containers.

I'd like a sump on a bigger tank if I got one. It means you can get rid of all the equipment from inside the tank and just have the input and output feeds there instead.

Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. The sump can do all the filtering, aeration, CO2 injection, etc. But I'm guessing I'd need heating in the sump and in both tanks.

stupid question: what's a sump?

Why would you need it in the sump and both tanks?

@JAD It's an exterior storage for water, allows for having more water in the system, and more advanced, bulky filtration that would not fit in the tank.

@JAD It's basically a container for liquid. In the aquarium context it's like a box of water that is outside your aquarium (usually underneath).

@Henders To keep the temperature constant. I don't want the tanks to be cold and getting warmer water from the sump, or the tanks to be warm and getting colder water from the sump.

The tank on the left has a sump

@RichieACC Hmm, I'd say you're unlikely to get that. If you get a heater that's big enough to heat the volume of water you're trying to heat and your filters are turning the water in the tank over several times per hour, you'll be fine.

So, then just one strong one in the sump?

Yeah, that's what I intend to do.

Unless you've got the sump in another room that's cold or something.. If it is directly underneath, chances are it will be subject to the same conditions

If I do this, I will let experimentation be my teacher. I will try one in the sump only, and if I can't get stable temperatures in the tanks, then I can add heaters there.

Yep, keep an eye on both temperatures. If your filter is powerful enough to turn over the water several times per hour, there shouldn't really be a problem.

I did big water changes on two of my tanks this weekend. At least 60%. I want to do that again this weekend coming. I don't think my tanks are very healthy right now. Especially the small one. The water fouls quickly. On Saturday morning one of my snails looked dead. But when I started working in the tank, he retracted into his shell. In this tank in particular, I need to stabilise the water.

@trondhansen thats a cute deadly hunter :p

The new tank, in which I've put the gouramis and kuhli loaches, seems to be doing really well. There is some die-back on some of the plants. I think that's a shock reaction. For the most part they seem to be thriving. My betta is much happier in that tank. He actually comes out and swims around the tank and plays. He's not hiding from the angels anymore.

@RichieACC Check your levels of ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, PH etc. That's the only way you can have clarity on what is happening in your tank.

Sometimes large water changes can actually do more harm than good if the water you're replacing it with is vastly different to what you took out.

Ha, yeah, you want to avoid answering the question in the comments to be honest. Comments are fleeting and get cleared up routinely so it might be that your suggestion is removed in a week or so :P

hmmm... makes sense. I could find some links and more information to support what I'm saying and post a decent answer.

I like the idea of pets stack exchange

a socially acceptable way to look at kittens at work

@Magisch 🤩🤩

@Magisch :)

@JourneymanGeek the benefits of yorkies: abcnews.go.com/News/…

they're mostly clever dogs

@Magisch got any pets?

@Henders not anymore

current apartment is no pets

@Magisch someone we knew had a .... mentally and physically challenged yorkie

Ahhh that sucks. Mine is too but they made an exception for fish :P

@Magisch My mom's Yorkie is that protective over the youngest goat.

Is the goat not bigger than the yorkie? :P

Kinda want a yorkie over a cat now

I'll hug him and call him george

I want a dog too. I haven't decided which breed yet though. I need to do some research

Then I too can unlock the power of ridiculously dapper and cute dog profile pics

And the power of having ridiculously cute dogs to cuddle and go for walks with

@Henders Yup! And if you read the article, the toddler is bigger than the dog as well :)

I think more dogs wear mod hats than not on SE :P

I swear small dogs have no concept of fear

well a good chunk of them are hunting dogs

Loki is a hunting dog :) They were bred in Germany to hunt wild boars, bears, and deer.

@CeilingCat lol, this weather, how do you keep a 40 gallon dog pool free of dog?