Big Tank Build in Tiny Apartment

[79chopperdr]

I cant remeber the thinkness but I am pretty sure I put a secondary piece of 1/4 think or more plexi under our 125lbs piece of live rock.

A friend of mine used that starboard type material. It was sealed to the bottom with silicone. He had trouble with coral in that tank, nothing would stay alive. We suspected the board was leaching something into the water. He ended up taking everything apart and removing the board. There was some amazing funk under the board! Hard to say if the problem was the board or the funk brewing under it...

Just food for thought.

Really enjoying you guys filling your apartment with tanks though

 

[hnnhflns]

The apartment doors are always open unless it is hotter outside than inside. At the moment the tank is pretty noisy, but we don't have the cabinet doors on yet. The doors will be held on with high strength (i.e. rare earth) magnets and will have insulation built in to the tank side. It should cut down the noise significantly.

 

[tcoral]

The apartment doors are always open unless it is hotter outside than inside. At the moment the tank is pretty noisy, but we don't have the cabinet doors on yet. The doors will be held on with high strength (i.e. rare earth) magnets and will have insulation built in to the tank side. It should cut down the noise significantly.

How are you dealing with humidity from evaporation? I saw a place with a lot of tanks and their windows had a lot of condensation. Your build looks nice though.

 

[hnnhflns]

The apartment sits so that we get a good breeze through when the doors are open, so a lot of the humidity is carried out. And it gets cool at night, so the only bad time is 2-3 pm.

 

[Paulca916]

Nice build.
I would suggest that you seal off the ends of your stand and leave no open area's.
If you leave them open no matter what you coat the outside with it will start to rust from the inside and works it's way through.
I've seen this happen a few times powder coated or painted.
I had tanks in a small apartment I would leave my Exhaust fan in the kitchen running to help with humidity when the apartment windows were all locked up
and I was gone.

 

[Tweakes182]

Great build. The only thing I would be most concerned with is humidity and noise. I had my 300 gallon display in the garage once and the humidity led to mold in one of my walls. The garage door always had condensation. With 1/4 of the area mostly water, you will have a tropical environment unless you keep that sliding door open.

Humidity was never too bad last summer. But there were a few less gallons. As for the Mold we plan to move out around Summer 2016 not looking forward to it. But they are supposed to tear down the apartments then so I am not super worried about the mold but then again I dont want to inhale it either. I have always like the windows and doors open in general and with the afternoon breeze it has not been a problem yet. We thought about getting a dehumidifier but so far the little miniture moisture things I have around the house have been very slow to fill. My dads fill up in a week and he has no aquariums.

The noise currently sucks though. I have to turn the tank off to pretty much watch a movie. Then again the pump that is in there is horrible and will be replace before months end with a DC Jebao 12000.

 

[Tweakes182]

A friend of mine used that starboard type material. It was sealed to the bottom with silicone. He had trouble with coral in that tank, nothing would stay alive. We suspected the board was leaching something into the water. He ended up taking everything apart and removing the board. There was some amazing funk under the board! Hard to say if the problem was the board or the funk brewing under it...

Just food for thought.

Really enjoying you guys filling your apartment with tanks though

I remember reading about this or some one that did it some where. And I honestly hope it was the board not just the area underneath. But I felt the need to put something under that rock that thing was a huge pain to put in the tank. It actually weighed in at 125 lbs dry I will post some pictures soon.

 

[Tweakes182]

Yes, it is crowded but it is not quite 25%. Per the website " One-bedroom units are approximately 450 square feet".
Given
~ 10 SQF for the 120 Gallon Tank
~ 36 SQF for the 300 Gallon Tank (When Finished)
~ 10 SQF for Turtle and shrimp tanks conviently placed ontop of dresser and alcohol cabinet.

Were only at about ~ 56 SQF or 12.5% so an 1/8 of the apartment LOL but some of it was prime living space.

Here is a layout of the apartment it actually looks worse than it is because it is not perfectly proportional.

Nice build.
I would suggest that you seal off the ends of your stand and leave no open area's.
If you leave them open no matter what you coat the outside with it will start to rust from the inside and works it's way through.
I've seen this happen a few times powder coated or painted.
I had tanks in a small apartment I would leave my Exhaust fan in the kitchen running to help with humidity when the apartment windows were all locked up
and I was gone.

And I believe I have six end camps I need to seal off I do undersand what you are saying and I completely agree. Overtime any moisture especially the salt water will cause it too rust out. I do wish we had a kitchen exhaust fan. the only fan we have is in the bathroom and I wish I could day it sucks. thankfully we can lock our windows in the cracked open positions. And we live directly across from the full time maintenace gentleman so he keeps an eye on everything.

 

[hnnhflns]

Ok guys, sorry for such a long delay between build updates. School keeps me really busy and last week and the first part of this week were midterms. But I have some time now, so back at it...

There was one aspect of the stand that I did not include in the stand post because we decided to do it a while after we had finalized the stand plans. We are putting a bar on the front!

The Bar
Because Chris and I are both so tall we built the stand so that the tank sits almost 4 feet off the ground. Because of the height we thought that we should build a bar into the stand so that we can lean our elbows on it to look in the tank, or to put some bar stools at to sit in front of the tank. The only problem was that we needed a solid 8 foot long piece of wood that was straight enough to use.

Well, good fortune smiled upon us because while driving around one day we found a rather large black walnut tree on the side of the road that someone had cut down and left to rot. After waiting a few weeks and making a few calls to get permission we returned to get the tree. Chris trimmed off any cracked unnecessary pieces. Then thankfully Chris foresaw the major problem of how to get such a large piece into his truck and installed an electric winch in the bed of his truck. Even with a 2500 lbs winch and a snatch block to double the pulling power we still barely got it into the truck using another come along and some help from a friend. Thank goodness we had the electric winch in his truck because there was no way that we could move it by ourselves.

The next task was to cut the log into boards that we could actually use. The log was 2 feet in diameter and had a slight curve (think of a Giant Banana), so it was really hard to get a usable piece. Chris has previously done a lot of tree work and firewood selling however never milled any logs, but he managed to make a jig and rough cut the log using his chain saw.

The bar that we will be using is the board on the bottom in the truck. It is currently at Chris's Step-dad's house. He is a custom cabinet maker once it is done drying he will run it through a joiner and planer, and then we can stain it. The final dimensions of the bar will be roughly: 8ft long, 3in thick, and 12in wide. He plans to make some nice welded braces for holding up the bar.

 

[tcoral]

Ok guys, sorry for such a long delay between build updates. School keeps me really busy and last week and the first part of this week were midterms. But I have some time now, so back at it...

There was one aspect of the stand that I did not include in the stand post because we decided to do it a while after we had finalized the stand plans. We are putting a bar on the front!

The Bar
Because Chris and I are both so tall we built the stand so that the tank sits almost 4 feet off the ground. Because of the height we thought that we should build a bar into the stand so that we can lean our elbows on it to look in the tank, or to put some bar stools at to sit in front of the tank. The only problem was that we needed a solid 8 foot long piece of wood that was straight enough to use.

Well, good fortune smiled upon us because while driving around one day we found a rather large black walnut tree on the side of the road that someone had cut down and left to rot. After waiting a few weeks and making a few calls to get permission we returned to get the tree. Chris trimmed off any cracked unnecessary pieces. Then thankfully Chris foresaw the major problem of how to get such a large piece into his truck and installed an electric winch in the bed of his truck. Even with a 2500 lbs winch and a snatch block to double the pulling power we still barely got it into the truck using another come along and some help from a friend. Thank goodness we had the electric winch in his truck because there was no way that we could move it by ourselves.

The next task was to cut the log into boards that we could actually use. The log was 2 feet in diameter and had a slight curve (think of a Giant Banana), so it was really hard to get a usable piece. Chris has previously done a lot of tree work and firewood selling however never milled any logs, but he managed to make a jig and rough cut the log using his chain saw.

The bar that we will be using is the board on the bottom in the truck. It is currently at Chris's Step-dad's house. He is a custom cabinet maker once it is done drying he will run it through a joiner and planer, and then we can stain it. The final dimensions of the bar will be roughly: 8ft long, 3in thick, and 12in wide. He plans to make some nice welded braces for holding up the bar.

That's so awesome! If you had any wood left over you should make some stand doors or something out of it too (or some trim pieces)

 

[CLeadfootS]

That's awesome! Way to think outside of the box. Can't wait to see how it turns out.

 

[hnnhflns]

That's so awesome! If you had any wood left over you should make some stand doors or something out of it too (or some trim pieces)

There is some wood left over, but because of the curve of the tree, we weren't able to get any other big pieces. Accents would be great for use for some of the left over wood.

We are planning on making the doors and siding removable so we can have complete access to the sump. The doors are going to be held on to the steel stand with high strength rare earth magnets. They are a little more expensive but because they are made from rare earth metals instead of steel, they should be able to withstand the saltwater better. We are hoping that Chris' Step-Dad can help us with the doors and sides of the tank because we don't really have the knowledge, skill set, or tools to make wood panels that big.

Just as an overall update, Chris is still working on the rockscaping. Between the engineer gobies and his terrible luck with cyanoacrilate epoxy and the hold fast epoxy, all the large pieces are proving to be difficult to work with. He has resigned himself to building the larger pieces out of the tank with hydraulic cement (which we cannot get to cure underwater). I will include and update with pictures of the rockwork when he is done.

 

[79chopperdr]

I had good success stacking rocks using the fiberglass road markers from HD. They are smaller diameter than acrylic road and the rock was easy to drill with a masonry bit. I made rock kabobs and stuck a big glob of JB waterweld at each end.

You still will need to pull the rocks to drill, but the water weld will cure while submerged.

http://m.homedepot.com/p/Blazer-Int...-Round-Orange-Fiberglass-Rod-381ODM/202498049