Hate to impose, but looking for help from Acrylic tank owners

benf

benf

Premium Member
Is there anyone local vicinity to North Tampa that has an Acrylic tank that i could look at? I am tyring desperately to decide on my new upgrade and i am having a hard time deciding between Starphire Glass and Acrylic. My biggest hesitation on the Acrylic is the scratches and i hear coraline likes the acrylic more which would cause me to clean more and more scratches....

what are your experiences??

I need to make my decision within the next couple days...please let me know what you think and if you own one can i see it.
 
If you keep up with the cleaning youll get fewer scrathches. if you do scratch your tank you ca pick up a sea visions magnet to polish it out. Just be carefull/. if you tend to let the cleaning go use a glass tank
 
Are your tanks acrylic? I magnet clean my glass every other day, i just dont want to find myself married to it either.

Seems like everything that has a lot of positives, has a strong negative attached.
 
My tank is acrylic and after 2 years I have a few scratches in it but that is because of my carelessness (picked up a small piece of sand in the mag float), you really only see them when algae starts to build on it. I use a credit card to remove coraline and it seems to work fine. I am in the process of testing a product that should make removing coraline a little easier.
 
I clean my acrylic every weekend with a magnavore. I have approx. 30 sq.ft. of surface area that I need to clean and it takes me less than 15 minutes to clean the entire tank.
It generally stays pretty clean through out the week and starts to show some algae growth on Saturday. If you have a high nutrient load you may have to clean it more often.
Every scratch I have ever made in an acrylic tank was cause by stupid mistakes on my part like leaving the magnet in the tank allowing coralline algae to grow on the pad thus causing scratches when I used it.
 
Triggerfish, any problems with your crosshatch in a coral tank(sps)?
love the colors
12461Crosshatch_trigger_male.jpg
 
Depends on what you would call problems. He would not bother corals at all but he did eat about 5 cleaner shrimp that I had in the tank. I never really saw him mess with snails or crabs but they have been known to eat those as well.
The biggest issue I had was the nutrient load that he added to the tank. They are very active fish, even more so than most tangs and require a heavy diet of green stuff and meaty foods thus adding a large amount of waste to the tank.
They are also aggressive and messy eaters and he would accidentally bite some of the other fish when he was going for food causing minor injuries. I also would have a hard time introducing passive fish to the tank because they would get overwhelmed by the trigger and would never come out of their hiding spots.
All in all they are beautiful fish and have great personalities but I would not recommend them if you are wanting a SPS dominated tank and are planning on having numerous fish as I feel they add to much bio load to the system.
 
acrylic is a coralline magnet. if you let that or any other algae go on in it you will almost have to scratch it. we are humans and of course all the scratches we make are due to carelessness. glass just gives you a little more carelessness, less coralline growth, and the ability to clean those little tough patches of green that tend to come with time with just a magnet. i had to scrub the hell out of those with my acrylic tank. yes starphire scratches easier than normal glass but it is still a lot harder to scrath than acrylic. go to a store and see a sample and try to scratch it. hairline scrathes tend to show up more on galss also.
 
I bought a 300 gal Acrylic tank after a year debating this very same question. Glass v.s. Acrylic. The benefits in the end outweighed the glass for me.
The tank I bought was used and full of scrathces top to bottom inside and out.
I knew this when I bought it. However the price was unbelievable and the previous owner thru in a 75 gal glass tank for a sump at a total of $800 .
After looking the tank over I started reading how to buff out the scratches and in the end it was a sinch to do.
After I was done with about a week 2-3 hours a night the tank looks brand spanking new again.

I would never have guessed it to be so easy and such a snap to buff this thing out but it really was.
With all that said I think I made the right choice for the simplicity of working (drilling C.L.) with acrylic and the various other benefits Im sold on it for a large tank.
Ive always had glass in the past and sooner or later the silicone gets torn at the corners, the glass gets scratched and fills in with algae you cant ever seem to get out with a magnetic cleaner.
Theres alot of other benefits to acrylic like its weight savings over glass. I was able to maneuver this 96 x 24 x 30 tank around by myself to its 40" high stand. This would have been impossible with glass.
Also, I know now if I ever do get scratches I can get rid of them anytime I want to.
You can also have peace of mind knowing it will be literally bullet proof as it is made of the same material as bullet proof glass. It has great properties for clarity and its better insuled than glass so temp fluctuations arent a concern. Glass, especailly the higher dollar "Low E" Or low iron glass is very clear too but you pay extra for it.
 
I could probably pursuade my wife to go with the acrylic had the price been lower. I dont want to spend the high dollar on top of high maintenance.. but i havent totally rulled it out. Just that $ is killing me!
 
When you think about it, the only two real benifits of acrylic are clarity and weight. If you are already thinking of the starphire glass that takes the clarity debate out of the way so the only real benifit is weight. How often do you plan on moving your tank? if its not often, then weight shuldnt be and issue either, and going glass takes away the issue of worrying about scratches.

Sure a glass tank will scratch and you cant buff it, but the fact remains that it is at least 10x harder to scratch than acrylic. If starphire is in your budget you should jump on it. you can debate the flexibility aspect of glass vs acrylic and talk about how acrylic may be more flexible and shock resistant, but when what the last time you dealt with an earthquake in florida?

As far as bullet-proof, they do use both glass AND acrylic for those applications.


My 2c

Wes
 
Starphire is typically more expensive than acrylic on larger tanks and unless you are going with 1" thickness or higher it is not necassary over standard glass IMOP.
 
i went with the acrylic for weight - clearity, ability to buff out scratches, and ease of drilling. i bought my tank used as well, and it was scratched to hell ... the guy that had it before, when he emptied it & moved the rock, he just didn't care .... took em a few hours & it was all gone - tank looks like its new now!!!
 
but how often do you find yourself having to buff out scratches now that you are up and running?
 
<a href=showthread.php?s=&postid=8662970#post8662970 target=_blank>Originally posted</a> by benf
but how often do you find yourself having to buff out scratches now that you are up and running?
Click to expand...

i really dont - because i am careful ... but what if a rock does fall - then it scratch the acrylic, and more than likely the glass as well.... but you can re-polish the acrylic ... in the end ... $$ still talks ... and if you can get a good deal on a glass tank - then i'd go for that.
 
if a tiny piece of calcium carbonate or silicate accumulates on acrylic and you rub it the wrong way just buff it. hell these new acrylic magnetic cleaners probably are buffing it all the time. but it really is hard to notice these little scratches unless you're focusing your eyes on the acrylic rather than into the tank. magnets of rare earth metals will scrub out the most stubborn of algae and the designs with a side blade will likely scrap off coralline and calceous tube worms.
 
I finally made a decision on acrylic!! specs may change to a little larger, but at the moment it is 72Lx27Wx24H.

Thanks to everyone that offered their opinion and experiences.
 
I consider my self lucky as it is...wife didnt kill me yet...that comes with the first flood!
 
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