Every now and then we are gripped by a twinge of longing for the good old days of reef aquarium keeping and questionably useful reef gear. Top among the devices that come to mind is the venerable SCWD, pronounced “squid”, which was a nearly ubiquitous water current switching device on many typical-size reef setups of the early 2000’s.
There was hardly a reefer worth his weight in frags who didn’t have an SCWD on their three to four foot reef tank, because random, chaotic, turbulent water flow right? With the advent of more efficient water movers and propellers pumps, we all quickly wizened up and starting moving all of the water instead of little jets of it, and the SCWD fell mostly into obscurity,
That doesn’t mean that we’ve lost appreciation for this totally dated marketing video from 3iQventures with some real throw-back stylings. The blond model with the 70s hair, the CRTs, the monotonic monologue all give this video such retro appeal. But the best part is when the dull and motionless soft coral tank is transformed into a . . . bright, colorful and moving soft coral tank, and more anemones, simply by adding a SCWD.
Ah, memories. It’s easy to dog on the incremental advancements we can perceive on an annual basis in the marine aquarium hobby but when you look back at this way-old video, you can see we’ve come a looooong way from SCWDs and powerheads.
