130 Gallon Set up and weight?
 

I am thinking of setting up a 130g tank with sump in my living room. Do you think the weight of this setup once completed (over 1500 lbs give or take), can or is this safe in the living room? Can my the beams/floor structure handle such a load?

What color is your house?

Are you trying to be funny? Colour of my house?

In general yes but there are things you need to consider.

First is the overall condition of the house structure, it's important to verify things are built to current code regulations and nothing has compromised it's integrity nor has anything degraded.

Second is the type of floor, ie hardwood which can offer additional strength or tile which requires additional consideration to prevent it cracking. Carpet can compress creating an off-level or unstable tank.

Room size is important, I believe current residential code is something like 40 pounds per square foot but this is based on room size and not actually by the square foot. For example 10'x10' room needs to be able to hold 4000lbs dead weight. You have to consider everything that's already in the room and anything you plan on adding in this calculation.

Placement is also key, generally you want such items placed perpendicular to flooring joists and against load bearing or outside walls.

Others can chime in if something I pointed out isn't accurate as it may not be, this is all off the top of my head.

Yes. Did it work? :) You provided absolutely no info on the floor, the house, the age, what's underneath it, etc. I figure color is as good as anything to work off of -lol

Let's not get too technical, way too much math involved when you consider color.

How close; to an outside wall, load bearing wall, what is directly under it, can you place across the floor beams instead of with them in direction, base of your stand can also distribute weight,.....




Sent Via The Pirate Ship...

oh one last thing to consider, this is a forum and offers no accountability. If the tank crashes through your floor you can't say "but the guys on the interweb said it would be fine". :mrgreen:

I see...haha. The information you provided on the room size was important and the weight ratio, plus the placement of the tank within the structure. Thank you

Now thats funny! lol But your Honour the guy on Canreef said it was safe!

Does anyone on this website have 120 gallon or larger tank setup in their living room??

lots of people do ive kept a 180,200,110 and a 33g all in my living room lol

like mentioned it depends on your house;)

I've seen your living and its full of tanks lol BTW my house is blue, hardwood floors (the real hardwood stuff) and its a 16 x 20 living room.

no not my place now, all my tanks now are small and under 50g , but i use to loveeee big tanks lol


ill admit i USE to have a problem:)

:lol: use to...

yes use to lol i believe i have a handle on it now .....ok i couldnt say that witout laughing so thats i lie i buy any coral i see and i have a mild case of hoarding lol

BUT...

i did downsize ...

BUT....

i again upgrading...


ok...i still have a mild problem

we all have a mild problem :wink:

I had a 90 gallon in my house no problem for years and it was parallel to the joist in the center of the room. My current 120 with 40g sump is against an outside wall but still parallel with the joists. I haven't notices any sag yet but it has only been up less than year. I did all the same research as you are doing now and I determined for my house "I should be" safe. I also have I -beams for joists which I believe are better. I really does depend on the structure of your floor and where you are going to put it in your house.

If you don't know what way the joists run in your home you can take a good guess by looking at your hardwood, usually it's installed perpendicular to joists. Not always though but's a good rule of thumb.

also you can look for your load bearing wall in your basement, joists will run across;)

Mine is 165 Gallons in the living room. It is on the outside wall across the main support beam in the house. The part that worried me is that it is not across multiple floor joists it is running with them. That is why we decided to put it across the beam. :biggrin:

Here's an interesting read on floor loading:
http://badmanstropicalfish.com/articles/article28.html

Ultimately, you need someone (eg. an engineer) to look at your specific set of circumstances to answer your question. Just because I was told I'm good to go for my 210 gallon in my dining room upstairs with no needed floor modification doesn't mean everyone can.
There are ton's of factors to consider, only some of which include:
What is the span of the floor joists in that room?
What are those joists made of? TJI's, Fir, Spruce, Hemlock... these all have different loading parameters
What is the floor joist spacing? 16", 19.2", 24"
What load are those joists already carrying?
There may even be a possibility to find out what size footing there is under your foundation. Tons of info needed to make a proper and educated decision on a tank that size.

Great article you have posted. I will consider all angles before setting this up.

130Gal is close to 500L which is 500 kg of water alone (about 1100lbs) plus tank weight and rocks, stand and equipment I would say your estimate of 1500lbs is pretty close.

1500Lbs in a fairly small area is a significant amount of weight so it would really depend on several factors; age of your home (materials have changed) and where you are going to put the tank.

If it is going to be against a wall I would say you would be fine because the floor Joists would intersect the wall which would be the strongest point on the floor.

If you wanted to do a room divider tank then you may have to look at direction of joists as you would want to be perpendicular to their longitudinal direction so you would 'catch' as many as possible. If your place has a central support beam running down the middle of your basement, they usually have at least two telescoping support posts, so if you are close to one of those you would likely be okay. The standard support posts are designed for 5K lbs of load so there is some safety factor.

One more thing to consider, if you have a rock counter top in your kitchen (granite, marble, quartz) can add a significant amount of load. We had to install a dedicated engineering post into a friends house when he put in his 300 Gal room divider tank because he also had granite counter tops in his kitchen.

300g ROOM DIVIDER?!?! wow, now that's something I'd like to see :biggrin:

so did we ever figure out what colour your house is?? (the OP that is)

I wonder if he knows that this was from October 2012 lol.

or about 2080 cups
or about 99840 teaspoons
or about 1040 pints
or about 11,809,200 drops

thats alot of drops:mrgreen:

How much volume is in a drop????

it doesn't matter, we still want to know what colour his house is!

Also consider the footprint of the tank/stand and how the weight will be distributed. If it's on a metal stand which usually have 4 feet of about 4-6 square inches, all that weight will be put onto 4 high PSI points.

Or think of it in another way... 1300 lbs is about 7 to 8 people. If your tank's foot print is say 4'x2' that's 8 square feet, then you get 8 people to stand in that area, does your floor squeak and squawk under that pressure?

This is a good point. I would never recommend putting a stand that has 4 feet right onto your main floor. I read recently on RC where a guy's tank had one of those feet push through the sub floor! It may be ok if you had hardwood floors but on carpet you're asking for trouble. That's a lot of PSI on the sub floor if it's landing in between two joists.

:twised::twised::twised::twised:

@Kien
let me guess your teacher was always telling you to stop looking out the window :razz: