Pict of my DIY build- now recycling
- Thread starter spiff
- Start date
Thanks for the kudo's!
Here are some more pictures and an article of my documenting of what I did.
This build is the culmination of over a year of planning and work. The result is a two window aquarium with a capacity of 1600 to 2000 gallons, depending on depth used. It has a 4'x8' and a 4'x4' acrylic window.
This picture was a long time ago. Its looking down the length of the two pieces of acrylic, the 2in 4x8 and 1in 4x4.
I did some online research into other people's large DIY builds, but never found anything that I would want to do. The closest thing I found was poured concrete builds. But I figured there were ways to save on materials. There are lots of different purchasable units available out there too that would come close to the cost of building it, but it would be impossible to get it into the basement or would very much limit the size. We can't have that.
My plan was to use a corner of the basement, taking advantage of the 8" thick poured concrete walls and the floor of the house. Building a free-standing unit seemed like a waste of resources, as something that large would never get moved regardless. So I decided that I might as well use as much existing structure as possible, and I found my basement corner perfect for this.
Good footage of the rod support.
My home is around 50 years old and there is no evidence that the floor has ever moved in relation to the walls. If the floors did drop a bit from the weight of the water, I was prepared to bolt the floor and walls together every foot or so, but luckily this didn't happen. I would then use cedar 6x6's as the window framing, using .75 inch threaded rod and .25 plate steel "washers" to hold it all together. If everything went perfect, I would have spent around 6-8k and been done in 3-4 months. In hindsight, I'm not sure that I would recommend this sort of build unless you have lots of skill and access to resources and can take a degree of personal defeat because its almost inevitable on something like this. Everything seemed so simple in theory and on paper, but doing it is another matter. I'm inherently lazy, so there was quite a bit of procrastinating also as this was mostly one miserably ponderous task after another or it could of been finished much faster. Like VLDesigns work, I don't know where he got the energy to knock that thing out so fast. He must be a mutant. Needless to say, I went over my planned budget and time expectancy on this. And after several debacles I just had to take some breaks as well. An occasional smashed finger and being laid off also caused delays. I had help with the 400lb window and moving the rocks and sand into the tank, the rest I did by myself.
I started with clearing out a corner of the basement. Removing the paneling and wiring was easy, but the floor was a chore. Both the carpet backing and the tile were firmly stuck to the concrete floor and required scrapping. Lots of it. It took a better part of a week of working a few hours after getting home from work and several vertebra to clear a 12x6 spot on the floor. If I had known the work required, I probably would have bit the bullet and rented some sort of stripper. Off to the east-side...
Then it was time to prepare the concrete. This was undoubtedly the lousiest task of all. If this was outdoors, there would be no problem, but indoors with almost no ventilation; really it shouldn't be done at all. First was the wire wheeling of the effervescence off the basement walls. I tested acid-etching on this stuff and it doesnt penetrate it what so ever. So I had to wire wheel it with a right angle grinder which makes a huge mess of things. I used some greatstuff foam in a can to create a little levee around the perimeter of my work area so that I could continually hose it down, with the run-off dregs accumulating in the lowest corner. Then I had my shop vac set up with a drain hose and valve going across the basement (finished) to the floor drain and I would vacuum up water as it accumulated. I used a non-toxic alternative to acid-etching since I was indoors. This was probably why it didn't do to much to the effervescence on the walls as its not nearly as powerful as hydrochloric acid.
Efforts to prevent a mess were moot. I had buckets for washing feet, curtains of visqueen around everything and lots of duct tape around the work area. It didn't matter, even with the constant hosing to try keeping the dust down. The house wound up with a nice layer of concrete dust on everything, looking like some sort of indoor winter wonderland. There is nothing neater than watching a dust storm get kicked up from just trying to climb into bed at night and for two weeks my nose was like a 30guage shotgun. It took two weeks of grinding to get the concrete surface to be an acceptable condition for epoxy or other coating. Another hindsight; I should have just rented a blasted sandblaster.
Next came the cedar framing. I opted for wood over concrete because I thought that using wood would be easier and less of a mess. I might regret that decision 20+ years down the road though. But realistically, I don't foresee a problem as the wood is always dry as the rest of the basement, so I doubt there will be any rot. The wood structure does flex a bit, so any constant filling and emptying could work a seal loose eventually. So I leave it full to minimize this effect using incremental water changes of only 4 inches at a time and just do them a bit more frequently or several in a row. But the flexibility might be an advantage in an earthquake over a rigid concrete unit, which we seem to have at least every decade.
Corner work and tools of force.
I did a rough build first before I started drilling anchor holes to get things the way I wanted it. I went totally freehand on this and didn't worry too much about being square since I knew it was impossible when working with my sloping basement floor. All that had to be square were the window frames that I routed out and even that doesn't need to be perfect. I did regret this decision later once I noticed that my bolt holes were not even and didn't look as clean as it could be. But the Mad Max look is cool too. It took forty, 3" x 1" female anchors for the .75" threaded rod. I rented a Hilti drill for this, and even with it, drilling all the four inch deep or more, one inch holes was still some serious work as I hit solid aggregate and re-bar pretty much every time. Each of these anchors are good for at least 19,000lbs of pull out strength at 3" deep or 25,000lbs at 4" deep. The weight of the water is around 15,000lbs so each anchor could in theory hold the entire weight of the water easily not to mention just the lateral pressure that they'll be subjected to. Piece of mind was the name of the game here since I'm not a structural engineer and I didn't consult one.
My design ended up with the window being a foot off the floor for several reasons. This allowed room for the four rods that hold the corner piece in place to keep them from intersecting on the same horizontal plane. If I tried to only use one 6x6 as the base, then having the intersecting rods meet in that corner piece from two different sides would have effectively cut it in half, seriously compromising its strength. The four rods you see on the corner piece go through the wood structure in both directions and are anchored in the far concrete walls and help pull the whole structure together. The other reason was for more volume and I like the way it looks. It worked out great as there is only about a 4" blind spot strip at the bottom of the 1' base when you stick your face against the window. Then I used large pieces of .25 plate steel as the holding washers for these four rods in this important corner piece as well as a few other crucial spots. The largest of these support washers is 2'x3', the smallest are 1'x1' and they are screwed on in addition to being just a washer and help reinforce the wood junctions.
Once I had my window frames routed out, I Pond Armored it and siliconed the windows in. These were the two biggest mistakes I made. I had routed the corner piece to allow both windows to intersect together, leaving a nice 2x2 inch slot to slide the smaller window along side the bigger one. The problem ended up that when the window is slid into this slot its a total blind shot. I found that an air bubble was caught in this slot and displaced the silicon in some places. The result was a leak about 3.5 feet deep where the windows meet. Once drained and the window removed, I was able to see the bubble on both sides of the window cast in the silicon leaving only about 1/8 inch or less of actual sealant in spots. The solution was to fill the entire 2x2inch(4ft tall) slot solid with silicon before pushing the window into it. A waste of silicon, but at least there was no chance of air being trapped again as only silicon was being displaced as the window was pushed in this time.
I used GE1, and the edges of the acrylic was sanded and cleaned thoroughly with denatured alcohol to give the silicon every chance to bond. The resealing of the window was another month+ delay. It took several days to remove enough silicon to be able to remove the window, a day just to work the panel out, and then another few weeks to completely strip it down to be ready for the resealing and touching up the epoxy window frame. And then yet another month for the super-thick silicon beads to cure again. Everything about this project would take large time spans...
The biggest (and most expensive) mistake of all was going with the Pond Armor. The stuff works great, but not in any application where there is the slightest bit of flexing. Its too brittle. The manufacturer's touting of flexibility enduring properties is hogwash. Even the most infinitesimal movement causes cracking with this stuff. I had the tank at 6ft deep, but ended up draining it and taking it down again and restriping it and using Sanitred instead because the Pond Armor would stress crack at places while under load. I won't mention the fun I was having at this point. Once drained, these stress cracks would close again and would literally be invisible. All of these stress cracks were between pieces of wood. Surprisingly, the wood to concrete seams were solid. I think the acrobatics required for me to climb in and out of the tank was responsible for most of the flex cracking. (the only access once the windows were in was a 14" x 20" inch hole 6ft off the ground- everything went through this hole, driftwood, rocks, background paneling, ect- as well as myself) And don't get me started on the billion pin-holes in the epoxy. All of this resulted in a long and expensive 8 months of delay, trying to get the stupid pond armor to work, and finding out the hard way that it wouldn't. Reinforcing the epoxy with fiberglass matte tape just meant that instead of getting a nice clean crack on a seam, it went all over the place. I also spent time trying to seal the pond armor flex points with silicon from the inside. Just another wasted effort. Another month to scrape 2 dozen tubes worth of silicon out just so that I can continue. So eventually I bailed on the epoxy and went with Sanitred which worked right the first time and was as easy to put on as painting versus the spreading of a silly putty like epoxy. With the Sanitred, all these flex spots were generously coated with the LBR base before given 4 top coats. Four coats wasn't nessessary, but I sure liked the piece of mind that this almost 1/8" thick rubber armored coating gives me, especially after the Pond Armor debacle.
Once I went with the Sanitred, I was up again in no time. I'm glad this happened though since before I would have left it with the plain blue, uninsulated Pond Armor background. With the extra delay, I put in this cool looking rock wall background from Replications Unlimited. The owner hooked me up with his new super flex panel that I was able to fold times four to get it into the tank. Any other of the products would have been too stiff to get it in between the overhead support rods. Lots of Greatstuff foam later, and its glued to the 2" styrofoam sheeting that I also greatstuffed to the wall all the way up to the ceiling. This leaves an average of about 4" of insulation on the walls of the tank, eating into the volume a bit more than I would have liked, but will make up for it in the winter months when I have to heat it. Besides, I couldn't be happier with the look of the rock wall panels. I was worried that the buoyancy would rip it off the wall once under close to 5 feet of water, but so far it seems unfounded. If it ever does detach, I'll set it on a frame of .50 PVC lattice work hung from the ceiling.
After the rebuild, I also decided not to continue to press my luck with the original 6' depth. The Sanitred probably would have succeeded at 6ft, and the structure already supported that much depth previously with the PondArmor. But the rockwall panel didn't go that high either and I didn't want to buy a whole new panel for just 12" or less. So now its just shy of 5ft deep, or around 1600gallons. This means I had to lose one of my two 55gallon rubbermaid preliminary sump containers. That just left the other 55gallon tub and the 90gal acrylic sump. Plumbing was kept ultra-simple with a solitary 4in siphon-overflow in lieu of trying to install a giant bulkhead through a bunch of 6x6's. This overflow sits in a 6in diameter sump feed. This setup also allows me to easily adjust water depth. Eventually, I would ditch the open sump and go with a dual canister system. I also installed a utility sink and drain, 3 power lines and water. I put in four overflowing bulkheads that dump into the sink from the sump. This allows a drip system and quick water changes and a safety. The tub and sump were filled almost solid with 3 grades of Mattala matting. I determined that a full sheet of the finest weave of this stuff is about equal to 200 pot scrubbies. At $30 a sheet, it was a close trade off, except that I think these sheets are way more convenient. Also, I can get more of this matting in since it stacks cleanly versus a jumble of pot scrubbies. At the end of the siphon overflow as it dumps into the filter, I also have an old pillow. The pillow with the stuffing in a mesh bag is like a nice ready made filter sock. Just rinse and use. And finally, I had a spot at the end of the sump where I can put a charcoal filter. A kitchen trashcan fits nicely into this spot and with slotted holes only cut on the bottom, allows the water to back up and create the pressure needed to force it through even a thick sock full of charcoal. Some LBR from Sanitred also had a secondary function of providing an easy self-leveling mechanism for the sump on my sloped basement floor. Other self leveling products I wouldn't trust to not deform or crack from the weight of the sump aquarium, especially as it thins out to nothingness. The LBR is a very solid polyurethane that is impervious to just about everything.
I'm now using a couple Reeflo Dart pumps rated at 3800gph. Pump head height is 0ft. Balancing the sump was a trick. Basically, it would dump around 4x sumps worth into the aquarium before the overflow could keep up with just one pump. My 4in overflow into the sump was running at 100%, as in it barely accommodated the flow. This meant that when the pump stopped, then four to five inches of water kept pouring into the sump and overflowing down the drain. That amounted to 200+gallons of wasted water and took about 5 minutes until it slowed to a trickle. My four little overflows on the sump could barely keep up with this deluge and the drain on the sink couldn't keep up at all. If there was any suds accumulation, then they were ejected from every seam at the top of the sump as the water rose and made a mess. These suds were also a problem if the flow was too fast as they would build up and overflow even while the pump was running if I had recently added any foam generating products like dechlor. Because of these and other issues I ditched the open sump and went with a dual closed loop canister setup. The main reason that I did this was that there was still a major vulnerabilty with the sump since that if the pump stopped, the overflow would still outpace my drain and I would get around 50 to 100 gallons of water on the floor if I wasn't there to turn the pump back on at a key moment or lift the overflow up higher before the 30gallon sink filled to the brim. So I swapped systems before this eventuality since I lose power about once a year due to something or another, like a leaf landing on the cable to my house.
Only picture I had of early sump. This was originally filled with plastic trash from the recycle bin for bio media and worked just fine. On the floor in front you see the 6inch overflow that the 4in syphon tube sat in and that 4in pipe going off to the right would dump into the sump. It could barely keep up with one pump, much less two.
For the upgrade, I went with two Ultima 2 4000's and an LFI sock filter. I also have an auxiliary UV that I can slap in with a submersible Max drive if/when I need it. That I also use in conjunction with a cat litter pail with the bottom cut out for a screen that can be suspended as any sort of auxiliary filter for charcoal or anything else when I need it. This was handy to get the new canisters to cycle while I had some of the old media in the bucket still filtering with a Mag drive.
With the upgrade, I also moved all my deep-cycling air pumps upstairs by feeding the lines through my duct work since the air pumps were by-far the loudest things running. Now with out the water noise from the sump and overflow and the loud air pumps, the only noise left is the soft hum from the two pumps. I'm building an enclosure around both pumps to help contain the noise from them, making sure to still provide for ventilation as they do get hot. Finally, a thick noise reducing curtain will eventually go around the utility area to prevent more noise and give it a finished look. Since this area is my primary living area(yes, I live in my basement, basements are cool!), I wanted to control noise. Then I can swivel my chair to either look at the tank, or to the PC/entertainment system, and I don't have to crank up the volume to drown out the background noise. Without the sump overflow I lost my drip system, but these Ultima 2 4000's have a waste setting that allows it to quickly drain into the sink, so water changes are still a breeze. As before, the bottleneck for flow is the 1.5inch drain on my sink.
Speghetti. There is the small hole to get in.
Other things worth mentioning; the support rods as they cross over the top and are exposed to the moist tank air were epoxied and siliconed. The top part of the tank was completely closed in so that I can control air flow and moisture with an exhaust fan venting to outside. This was why I only have a 14" by 20" access hole to get in. I should have closed the top in last but I didn't anticipate the problems. I must have climbed in and out of that hole a hundred times. Its not as easy as it looks to get in and out either as the support rods in the inside restrict movement big time. I think the threads from the overhead rods have been permanently etched into my skull from all the collisions. Five layers of drylok was used to seal the upper wood and ceiling with seams and corners siliconed and/or Greatstuffed. Three cheapo shop lights and six aquarium bulbs make up the primary lighting. I mixed it up with the blue and pink tinged. Seeing the blue dapple on one side of the tank against the pink on the other is actually a pretty cool effect. I also have a 400watt HID installed for display purposes, but its kept off most of the time, especially in the warmer months.
The rocks were off free cycle, all yard acquisitions. Some are seriously cool looking. Too bad they're so buried in the 600lbs of play sand I dumped in. The rocks took up more space than I anticipated so the sand ended up deeper than I wanted. I'm sure that the loaches love it, but eventually some will be taken out. Basically, the first one hundred or so sand vacuumings I do, I won't be too worried about sucking up and wasting sand. Under all large rocks (some 50lbs+) I put layers of impact proof plastic that I cut from various types of cat litter containers to protect the floor. All the driftwood I got during a 1 hour trip to a local conservation area by my house and was one car load's worth. All of it is true driftwood, preweathered and ready to go. I only rinsed it, which left me susceptible to some micro-nasties, but was a risk I was willing to take. They are just too big to treat, unless I bought a kiddie pool or something to bleach them in. I didn't feel like doing all that. They're currently not stacked the way I want either, and their best attributes are hidden as I had to stack them together and then weigh them down with rocks while they rewaterlog. The plan is to only get into the tank maybe every year or even less for maintenance. But when I do, then I'll restack things. Its hard to tell from the pictures, but there are nine pieces in the tank and they're all over 4.5 feet long. Three of them are totally hollow shell logs, which will be incredible looking once I have them placed as I like.
Window cleaning is primarily done from outside the tank with telescoping poles I made using threaded 1" PVC and a modified dust mop with an extra layer of a super fluffy thick nap terry towel wrapped around it. Heat is provided by two 1500w titanium pond heaters.
2 pumps, one in front of the other. And the bottleneck for water flow is this sink with only a 1.5in drain. Between the canisters is my DIY extension pole for window cleaning.
For cycling the tank, I dumped all the rocks and water from a 140gal and a 20gal into it, plus 12 comet goldfish that I had. Even after it was technically cycled, I still added ammonia a bit everyday for a couple days before the first planned mass fish purchase. This was to help minimize any spikes caused by the addition of so many fish at one time. I ordered close to 200 fish, but costs were reasonable as I got the fish as small as possible and received a discount with the mass order. The average fish size came in at around an inch. This is a community tank, so I wanted all non aggressive and compatible fish. Most of the fish I got are only supposed get around 3-4 inches, but I see already that they will get bigger than normal being raised with extra space. The clown loaches get large, but they are very docile and hopefully won't mess to much with other tank mates. Of course there's a limit to this, I expect that some Neons and maybe others to be slowly ate as tankmates get big since these fish will remain very small in comparison. The hope is that some of these smaller fish will be prolific enough to keep a population going and that their speed will keep them around for a while. There is also tons of hiding places for smaller fish to take refuge in if needed including giant root balls, dense wads of fake plants, tight piles of rocks, and some tiny openings purposely left for access to tiny pockets behind the rock wall.(these pockets behind the wall are very small, most of this space was filled with greatstuff foam.) This will also help with fry as they have a chance of surviving in these area's of the tank. I nixed the plan for Tinfoil barbs and Bala sharks as I thought they were going to get a bit too big and ornery.
The effect of the many schooling fish is exactly what I was looking for. Its like little balls of life with minds of their own that zoom all over the tank. They'll split up sometimes so that you have several balls off each species zipping around, only to eventually split up to even smaller groups just to eventually wind up as a one ball again. Its very cool. Even the goldfish like to school together now and surprisingly, they do more synchronized swimming together than fish more commonly associated as schooling fish, like the Danios. The goldfish do fine in this mostly tropical community tank. Parameters are approximately 120gh, 7.0ph at 75-80F, which is conducive to all occupants.
Growth rates on some of the fish are insane. The baby comets I put in to help cycle the tank went from an inch average to 4 inches in 3 weeks. A couple of them were over 5 inches long before they even started to loose their baby color and turn orange. If I remove them it'll be because they're such hogs on food. I have to create huge food clouds in the tank for some of the smaller fish that stay close to the bottom to have any chance of getting any. This means that the goldfish are totally gorged to the limit at every feeding, but at least they do clean up. The fantails are an exception as they're so dopey and slow that the rest can compete with them. The Dojo loaches went from 2.5 to 4.5 in the same period. Luckily the clowns seem to control their eating, only snapping up what they need before going back to playing. But even with the huge clouds of food, its all gone in a couple minutes. I use a mix of goldfish flake, tropical flake, frozen brine shrimp, frozen chopped baby spinach, fine-diced pieces of whatever fruit I happen to have in the house, usually bananna, crushed cat food pellets, shrimp pellets and sometimes various chopped meats from the supermarket like shrimp, hearts, ect. Also, the cleanings from a bug zapper, which in the early summer is almost a staple.
I'll post pictures months later when the fish mature.
Here are some more pictures and an article of my documenting of what I did.
This build is the culmination of over a year of planning and work. The result is a two window aquarium with a capacity of 1600 to 2000 gallons, depending on depth used. It has a 4'x8' and a 4'x4' acrylic window.
This picture was a long time ago. Its looking down the length of the two pieces of acrylic, the 2in 4x8 and 1in 4x4.
I did some online research into other people's large DIY builds, but never found anything that I would want to do. The closest thing I found was poured concrete builds. But I figured there were ways to save on materials. There are lots of different purchasable units available out there too that would come close to the cost of building it, but it would be impossible to get it into the basement or would very much limit the size. We can't have that.
My plan was to use a corner of the basement, taking advantage of the 8" thick poured concrete walls and the floor of the house. Building a free-standing unit seemed like a waste of resources, as something that large would never get moved regardless. So I decided that I might as well use as much existing structure as possible, and I found my basement corner perfect for this.
Good footage of the rod support.
My home is around 50 years old and there is no evidence that the floor has ever moved in relation to the walls. If the floors did drop a bit from the weight of the water, I was prepared to bolt the floor and walls together every foot or so, but luckily this didn't happen. I would then use cedar 6x6's as the window framing, using .75 inch threaded rod and .25 plate steel "washers" to hold it all together. If everything went perfect, I would have spent around 6-8k and been done in 3-4 months. In hindsight, I'm not sure that I would recommend this sort of build unless you have lots of skill and access to resources and can take a degree of personal defeat because its almost inevitable on something like this. Everything seemed so simple in theory and on paper, but doing it is another matter. I'm inherently lazy, so there was quite a bit of procrastinating also as this was mostly one miserably ponderous task after another or it could of been finished much faster. Like VLDesigns work, I don't know where he got the energy to knock that thing out so fast. He must be a mutant. Needless to say, I went over my planned budget and time expectancy on this. And after several debacles I just had to take some breaks as well. An occasional smashed finger and being laid off also caused delays. I had help with the 400lb window and moving the rocks and sand into the tank, the rest I did by myself.
I started with clearing out a corner of the basement. Removing the paneling and wiring was easy, but the floor was a chore. Both the carpet backing and the tile were firmly stuck to the concrete floor and required scrapping. Lots of it. It took a better part of a week of working a few hours after getting home from work and several vertebra to clear a 12x6 spot on the floor. If I had known the work required, I probably would have bit the bullet and rented some sort of stripper. Off to the east-side...
Then it was time to prepare the concrete. This was undoubtedly the lousiest task of all. If this was outdoors, there would be no problem, but indoors with almost no ventilation; really it shouldn't be done at all. First was the wire wheeling of the effervescence off the basement walls. I tested acid-etching on this stuff and it doesnt penetrate it what so ever. So I had to wire wheel it with a right angle grinder which makes a huge mess of things. I used some greatstuff foam in a can to create a little levee around the perimeter of my work area so that I could continually hose it down, with the run-off dregs accumulating in the lowest corner. Then I had my shop vac set up with a drain hose and valve going across the basement (finished) to the floor drain and I would vacuum up water as it accumulated. I used a non-toxic alternative to acid-etching since I was indoors. This was probably why it didn't do to much to the effervescence on the walls as its not nearly as powerful as hydrochloric acid.
Efforts to prevent a mess were moot. I had buckets for washing feet, curtains of visqueen around everything and lots of duct tape around the work area. It didn't matter, even with the constant hosing to try keeping the dust down. The house wound up with a nice layer of concrete dust on everything, looking like some sort of indoor winter wonderland. There is nothing neater than watching a dust storm get kicked up from just trying to climb into bed at night and for two weeks my nose was like a 30guage shotgun. It took two weeks of grinding to get the concrete surface to be an acceptable condition for epoxy or other coating. Another hindsight; I should have just rented a blasted sandblaster.
Next came the cedar framing. I opted for wood over concrete because I thought that using wood would be easier and less of a mess. I might regret that decision 20+ years down the road though. But realistically, I don't foresee a problem as the wood is always dry as the rest of the basement, so I doubt there will be any rot. The wood structure does flex a bit, so any constant filling and emptying could work a seal loose eventually. So I leave it full to minimize this effect using incremental water changes of only 4 inches at a time and just do them a bit more frequently or several in a row. But the flexibility might be an advantage in an earthquake over a rigid concrete unit, which we seem to have at least every decade.
Corner work and tools of force.
I did a rough build first before I started drilling anchor holes to get things the way I wanted it. I went totally freehand on this and didn't worry too much about being square since I knew it was impossible when working with my sloping basement floor. All that had to be square were the window frames that I routed out and even that doesn't need to be perfect. I did regret this decision later once I noticed that my bolt holes were not even and didn't look as clean as it could be. But the Mad Max look is cool too. It took forty, 3" x 1" female anchors for the .75" threaded rod. I rented a Hilti drill for this, and even with it, drilling all the four inch deep or more, one inch holes was still some serious work as I hit solid aggregate and re-bar pretty much every time. Each of these anchors are good for at least 19,000lbs of pull out strength at 3" deep or 25,000lbs at 4" deep. The weight of the water is around 15,000lbs so each anchor could in theory hold the entire weight of the water easily not to mention just the lateral pressure that they'll be subjected to. Piece of mind was the name of the game here since I'm not a structural engineer and I didn't consult one.
My design ended up with the window being a foot off the floor for several reasons. This allowed room for the four rods that hold the corner piece in place to keep them from intersecting on the same horizontal plane. If I tried to only use one 6x6 as the base, then having the intersecting rods meet in that corner piece from two different sides would have effectively cut it in half, seriously compromising its strength. The four rods you see on the corner piece go through the wood structure in both directions and are anchored in the far concrete walls and help pull the whole structure together. The other reason was for more volume and I like the way it looks. It worked out great as there is only about a 4" blind spot strip at the bottom of the 1' base when you stick your face against the window. Then I used large pieces of .25 plate steel as the holding washers for these four rods in this important corner piece as well as a few other crucial spots. The largest of these support washers is 2'x3', the smallest are 1'x1' and they are screwed on in addition to being just a washer and help reinforce the wood junctions.
Once I had my window frames routed out, I Pond Armored it and siliconed the windows in. These were the two biggest mistakes I made. I had routed the corner piece to allow both windows to intersect together, leaving a nice 2x2 inch slot to slide the smaller window along side the bigger one. The problem ended up that when the window is slid into this slot its a total blind shot. I found that an air bubble was caught in this slot and displaced the silicon in some places. The result was a leak about 3.5 feet deep where the windows meet. Once drained and the window removed, I was able to see the bubble on both sides of the window cast in the silicon leaving only about 1/8 inch or less of actual sealant in spots. The solution was to fill the entire 2x2inch(4ft tall) slot solid with silicon before pushing the window into it. A waste of silicon, but at least there was no chance of air being trapped again as only silicon was being displaced as the window was pushed in this time.
I used GE1, and the edges of the acrylic was sanded and cleaned thoroughly with denatured alcohol to give the silicon every chance to bond. The resealing of the window was another month+ delay. It took several days to remove enough silicon to be able to remove the window, a day just to work the panel out, and then another few weeks to completely strip it down to be ready for the resealing and touching up the epoxy window frame. And then yet another month for the super-thick silicon beads to cure again. Everything about this project would take large time spans...
The biggest (and most expensive) mistake of all was going with the Pond Armor. The stuff works great, but not in any application where there is the slightest bit of flexing. Its too brittle. The manufacturer's touting of flexibility enduring properties is hogwash. Even the most infinitesimal movement causes cracking with this stuff. I had the tank at 6ft deep, but ended up draining it and taking it down again and restriping it and using Sanitred instead because the Pond Armor would stress crack at places while under load. I won't mention the fun I was having at this point. Once drained, these stress cracks would close again and would literally be invisible. All of these stress cracks were between pieces of wood. Surprisingly, the wood to concrete seams were solid. I think the acrobatics required for me to climb in and out of the tank was responsible for most of the flex cracking. (the only access once the windows were in was a 14" x 20" inch hole 6ft off the ground- everything went through this hole, driftwood, rocks, background paneling, ect- as well as myself) And don't get me started on the billion pin-holes in the epoxy. All of this resulted in a long and expensive 8 months of delay, trying to get the stupid pond armor to work, and finding out the hard way that it wouldn't. Reinforcing the epoxy with fiberglass matte tape just meant that instead of getting a nice clean crack on a seam, it went all over the place. I also spent time trying to seal the pond armor flex points with silicon from the inside. Just another wasted effort. Another month to scrape 2 dozen tubes worth of silicon out just so that I can continue. So eventually I bailed on the epoxy and went with Sanitred which worked right the first time and was as easy to put on as painting versus the spreading of a silly putty like epoxy. With the Sanitred, all these flex spots were generously coated with the LBR base before given 4 top coats. Four coats wasn't nessessary, but I sure liked the piece of mind that this almost 1/8" thick rubber armored coating gives me, especially after the Pond Armor debacle.
Once I went with the Sanitred, I was up again in no time. I'm glad this happened though since before I would have left it with the plain blue, uninsulated Pond Armor background. With the extra delay, I put in this cool looking rock wall background from Replications Unlimited. The owner hooked me up with his new super flex panel that I was able to fold times four to get it into the tank. Any other of the products would have been too stiff to get it in between the overhead support rods. Lots of Greatstuff foam later, and its glued to the 2" styrofoam sheeting that I also greatstuffed to the wall all the way up to the ceiling. This leaves an average of about 4" of insulation on the walls of the tank, eating into the volume a bit more than I would have liked, but will make up for it in the winter months when I have to heat it. Besides, I couldn't be happier with the look of the rock wall panels. I was worried that the buoyancy would rip it off the wall once under close to 5 feet of water, but so far it seems unfounded. If it ever does detach, I'll set it on a frame of .50 PVC lattice work hung from the ceiling.
After the rebuild, I also decided not to continue to press my luck with the original 6' depth. The Sanitred probably would have succeeded at 6ft, and the structure already supported that much depth previously with the PondArmor. But the rockwall panel didn't go that high either and I didn't want to buy a whole new panel for just 12" or less. So now its just shy of 5ft deep, or around 1600gallons. This means I had to lose one of my two 55gallon rubbermaid preliminary sump containers. That just left the other 55gallon tub and the 90gal acrylic sump. Plumbing was kept ultra-simple with a solitary 4in siphon-overflow in lieu of trying to install a giant bulkhead through a bunch of 6x6's. This overflow sits in a 6in diameter sump feed. This setup also allows me to easily adjust water depth. Eventually, I would ditch the open sump and go with a dual canister system. I also installed a utility sink and drain, 3 power lines and water. I put in four overflowing bulkheads that dump into the sink from the sump. This allows a drip system and quick water changes and a safety. The tub and sump were filled almost solid with 3 grades of Mattala matting. I determined that a full sheet of the finest weave of this stuff is about equal to 200 pot scrubbies. At $30 a sheet, it was a close trade off, except that I think these sheets are way more convenient. Also, I can get more of this matting in since it stacks cleanly versus a jumble of pot scrubbies. At the end of the siphon overflow as it dumps into the filter, I also have an old pillow. The pillow with the stuffing in a mesh bag is like a nice ready made filter sock. Just rinse and use. And finally, I had a spot at the end of the sump where I can put a charcoal filter. A kitchen trashcan fits nicely into this spot and with slotted holes only cut on the bottom, allows the water to back up and create the pressure needed to force it through even a thick sock full of charcoal. Some LBR from Sanitred also had a secondary function of providing an easy self-leveling mechanism for the sump on my sloped basement floor. Other self leveling products I wouldn't trust to not deform or crack from the weight of the sump aquarium, especially as it thins out to nothingness. The LBR is a very solid polyurethane that is impervious to just about everything.
I'm now using a couple Reeflo Dart pumps rated at 3800gph. Pump head height is 0ft. Balancing the sump was a trick. Basically, it would dump around 4x sumps worth into the aquarium before the overflow could keep up with just one pump. My 4in overflow into the sump was running at 100%, as in it barely accommodated the flow. This meant that when the pump stopped, then four to five inches of water kept pouring into the sump and overflowing down the drain. That amounted to 200+gallons of wasted water and took about 5 minutes until it slowed to a trickle. My four little overflows on the sump could barely keep up with this deluge and the drain on the sink couldn't keep up at all. If there was any suds accumulation, then they were ejected from every seam at the top of the sump as the water rose and made a mess. These suds were also a problem if the flow was too fast as they would build up and overflow even while the pump was running if I had recently added any foam generating products like dechlor. Because of these and other issues I ditched the open sump and went with a dual closed loop canister setup. The main reason that I did this was that there was still a major vulnerabilty with the sump since that if the pump stopped, the overflow would still outpace my drain and I would get around 50 to 100 gallons of water on the floor if I wasn't there to turn the pump back on at a key moment or lift the overflow up higher before the 30gallon sink filled to the brim. So I swapped systems before this eventuality since I lose power about once a year due to something or another, like a leaf landing on the cable to my house.
Only picture I had of early sump. This was originally filled with plastic trash from the recycle bin for bio media and worked just fine. On the floor in front you see the 6inch overflow that the 4in syphon tube sat in and that 4in pipe going off to the right would dump into the sump. It could barely keep up with one pump, much less two.
For the upgrade, I went with two Ultima 2 4000's and an LFI sock filter. I also have an auxiliary UV that I can slap in with a submersible Max drive if/when I need it. That I also use in conjunction with a cat litter pail with the bottom cut out for a screen that can be suspended as any sort of auxiliary filter for charcoal or anything else when I need it. This was handy to get the new canisters to cycle while I had some of the old media in the bucket still filtering with a Mag drive.
With the upgrade, I also moved all my deep-cycling air pumps upstairs by feeding the lines through my duct work since the air pumps were by-far the loudest things running. Now with out the water noise from the sump and overflow and the loud air pumps, the only noise left is the soft hum from the two pumps. I'm building an enclosure around both pumps to help contain the noise from them, making sure to still provide for ventilation as they do get hot. Finally, a thick noise reducing curtain will eventually go around the utility area to prevent more noise and give it a finished look. Since this area is my primary living area(yes, I live in my basement, basements are cool!), I wanted to control noise. Then I can swivel my chair to either look at the tank, or to the PC/entertainment system, and I don't have to crank up the volume to drown out the background noise. Without the sump overflow I lost my drip system, but these Ultima 2 4000's have a waste setting that allows it to quickly drain into the sink, so water changes are still a breeze. As before, the bottleneck for flow is the 1.5inch drain on my sink.
Speghetti. There is the small hole to get in.
Other things worth mentioning; the support rods as they cross over the top and are exposed to the moist tank air were epoxied and siliconed. The top part of the tank was completely closed in so that I can control air flow and moisture with an exhaust fan venting to outside. This was why I only have a 14" by 20" access hole to get in. I should have closed the top in last but I didn't anticipate the problems. I must have climbed in and out of that hole a hundred times. Its not as easy as it looks to get in and out either as the support rods in the inside restrict movement big time. I think the threads from the overhead rods have been permanently etched into my skull from all the collisions. Five layers of drylok was used to seal the upper wood and ceiling with seams and corners siliconed and/or Greatstuffed. Three cheapo shop lights and six aquarium bulbs make up the primary lighting. I mixed it up with the blue and pink tinged. Seeing the blue dapple on one side of the tank against the pink on the other is actually a pretty cool effect. I also have a 400watt HID installed for display purposes, but its kept off most of the time, especially in the warmer months.
The rocks were off free cycle, all yard acquisitions. Some are seriously cool looking. Too bad they're so buried in the 600lbs of play sand I dumped in. The rocks took up more space than I anticipated so the sand ended up deeper than I wanted. I'm sure that the loaches love it, but eventually some will be taken out. Basically, the first one hundred or so sand vacuumings I do, I won't be too worried about sucking up and wasting sand. Under all large rocks (some 50lbs+) I put layers of impact proof plastic that I cut from various types of cat litter containers to protect the floor. All the driftwood I got during a 1 hour trip to a local conservation area by my house and was one car load's worth. All of it is true driftwood, preweathered and ready to go. I only rinsed it, which left me susceptible to some micro-nasties, but was a risk I was willing to take. They are just too big to treat, unless I bought a kiddie pool or something to bleach them in. I didn't feel like doing all that. They're currently not stacked the way I want either, and their best attributes are hidden as I had to stack them together and then weigh them down with rocks while they rewaterlog. The plan is to only get into the tank maybe every year or even less for maintenance. But when I do, then I'll restack things. Its hard to tell from the pictures, but there are nine pieces in the tank and they're all over 4.5 feet long. Three of them are totally hollow shell logs, which will be incredible looking once I have them placed as I like.
Window cleaning is primarily done from outside the tank with telescoping poles I made using threaded 1" PVC and a modified dust mop with an extra layer of a super fluffy thick nap terry towel wrapped around it. Heat is provided by two 1500w titanium pond heaters.
2 pumps, one in front of the other. And the bottleneck for water flow is this sink with only a 1.5in drain. Between the canisters is my DIY extension pole for window cleaning.
For cycling the tank, I dumped all the rocks and water from a 140gal and a 20gal into it, plus 12 comet goldfish that I had. Even after it was technically cycled, I still added ammonia a bit everyday for a couple days before the first planned mass fish purchase. This was to help minimize any spikes caused by the addition of so many fish at one time. I ordered close to 200 fish, but costs were reasonable as I got the fish as small as possible and received a discount with the mass order. The average fish size came in at around an inch. This is a community tank, so I wanted all non aggressive and compatible fish. Most of the fish I got are only supposed get around 3-4 inches, but I see already that they will get bigger than normal being raised with extra space. The clown loaches get large, but they are very docile and hopefully won't mess to much with other tank mates. Of course there's a limit to this, I expect that some Neons and maybe others to be slowly ate as tankmates get big since these fish will remain very small in comparison. The hope is that some of these smaller fish will be prolific enough to keep a population going and that their speed will keep them around for a while. There is also tons of hiding places for smaller fish to take refuge in if needed including giant root balls, dense wads of fake plants, tight piles of rocks, and some tiny openings purposely left for access to tiny pockets behind the rock wall.(these pockets behind the wall are very small, most of this space was filled with greatstuff foam.) This will also help with fry as they have a chance of surviving in these area's of the tank. I nixed the plan for Tinfoil barbs and Bala sharks as I thought they were going to get a bit too big and ornery.
The effect of the many schooling fish is exactly what I was looking for. Its like little balls of life with minds of their own that zoom all over the tank. They'll split up sometimes so that you have several balls off each species zipping around, only to eventually split up to even smaller groups just to eventually wind up as a one ball again. Its very cool. Even the goldfish like to school together now and surprisingly, they do more synchronized swimming together than fish more commonly associated as schooling fish, like the Danios. The goldfish do fine in this mostly tropical community tank. Parameters are approximately 120gh, 7.0ph at 75-80F, which is conducive to all occupants.
Growth rates on some of the fish are insane. The baby comets I put in to help cycle the tank went from an inch average to 4 inches in 3 weeks. A couple of them were over 5 inches long before they even started to loose their baby color and turn orange. If I remove them it'll be because they're such hogs on food. I have to create huge food clouds in the tank for some of the smaller fish that stay close to the bottom to have any chance of getting any. This means that the goldfish are totally gorged to the limit at every feeding, but at least they do clean up. The fantails are an exception as they're so dopey and slow that the rest can compete with them. The Dojo loaches went from 2.5 to 4.5 in the same period. Luckily the clowns seem to control their eating, only snapping up what they need before going back to playing. But even with the huge clouds of food, its all gone in a couple minutes. I use a mix of goldfish flake, tropical flake, frozen brine shrimp, frozen chopped baby spinach, fine-diced pieces of whatever fruit I happen to have in the house, usually bananna, crushed cat food pellets, shrimp pellets and sometimes various chopped meats from the supermarket like shrimp, hearts, ect. Also, the cleanings from a bug zapper, which in the early summer is almost a staple.
I'll post pictures months later when the fish mature.
i think it would look BA if it was an african tank but ill settle for small fish in a big tank look.....congrats
This is a beautiful tank. Thank you for taking them time to write all this up! It will be a big help when ever I get around to starting my DIY tanks.
