Every time a box from Malincho arrives, I feel for a moment as though I’m in Bulgariа, in a small store at the entrance of some building…

Our typical order looks like this:

• Plain cookies/crackers – There are plenty of cookies and crackers in the stores here, but they are all thin and sweet. And everyone knows that the best cracker cake is made with plain thick crackers that can soak the tasty cream. Yummm
• Cookie with honey and chocolate – This doesn’t exist in the US
• Cookies Mirage (blueberry) – I’ll remember these crackers with them always being in our office at the little main street in Plovdiv and were very popular there
• Chocolate Wafer Borovez – Classic
• Croissant 7 Days – You can get these from Stop and Shop now, but I’d rather have them made in Europe because here they are sweetened with all kinds of crap.
• Saltsticks with Spices – No popcorn nor chips. When I sit down with a pack of these saltsticks and mmm…
• Hot Pipperitsa (pepper relish spread) Deroni – Even since I was in Bulgaria I know that the best liutenica after the one my grandma makes, is made by Deroni. The Hot pipperitsa is coarse and a little spice. Super!
• Lukanka – Because there is no such thing here in the US, we order the one made at Malincho. According to them it is made by the Bulgarian National Standard and I have to admit it is pretty good
• Sheeps Bulgarian Sirene – This is the biggest reason why we order from Malincho. Few years ago the packaging used to say Diado Liben (famous bulgarian sirene producer). Now the packaging comes with US barcode and I’m not sure where it is produced. At Diado LIben’s website it still points to Malincho as their exporter in the US so it is probably just repackaged in the US. It’s a fact, however, that it still tastes great.

When they have any, we also order some mineral water Devin, but I haven’t seen it recently. Also, with the last order, we got some temenujki (drops), bake rolls and some lukcheta

I got myself PAR sensor to measure how good my lights are for photosynthesis and here is how things look:

I’m fairly happy with the numbers. That should be enough to keep SPS and most LPS coral.

I also measured how much electricity the various components of my tank use:
White LEDs: 74W/h
Blue LEDs: 63W/h
Eheim 1260+MJ900: 56W/h (Return + carbon reactor)
Arduino: 3W/h
MP40wES: 10W/h

Всичко: 203W/h

That’s pretty good, if you ask me. With the lights on for about 8 hrs and the rest for 24, the monthly sum comes to about 82kW, which is about $17 bucks. That will probably go up a bit in the winter, but I doubt it will be by much.

The LEDs heat up to about 120F without active cooling with room temperature at about 78F, which is acceptable. I’m guessing that will go down about 15F in the winter, which can only be good

I also found out that our AC is rotating only the air in the apartment. In the summer months, when it was pretty hot outside, we didn’t open the windows for days which caused the oxygen in the apartment to drop so much that the PH of the tank water went down to 7.3. Since then I always crack the windows open for a few hours, at least, and the PH is now above 8.

Meanwhile, I got 2 pompom crabs, 3 bluegreen chromis, 1 cardinal, a hole bunch of snails and another skunk shrimp. I also got a few new coral frags, because the tank was looking too empty

(more photos in the gallery)

I still have to setup the dosers and to work on the controller. We finally found out the problem with the ethernet port and new boards are on their way. A big chunk of the firmware is written (here), but there is still more to be done. I hope to have a fully working controller within a month.

As I promised, I’ve added all this info to the permanent page of the tank.

Three weeks ago we went to Florida on vacation for 6 days. We figured that the weather is going to be nice for diving so that’s what we did. The water temperature was in the high 80s and we were lucky enough to be missed by the hurricanes. We dove 3 days which translated into 7 dives. Five of them were towards the PADI AOW certificate which allows us to dive to 100ft/30m.

Not counting the fact that I got sea sick on the first day on the boat, the entire experience was pretty good. We did 3 deep dives at the T-Bolt which is around 115ft deep. There we saw a shark, few barracudas and a few Goliath gropers which was really cool.

We are certified to go scuba diving at up to 60ft!