65g FW Journal

[Delphinus]

I have a couple clownloaches who are outgrowing their current tank so I'm in the process of setting up a 65g for them. They are currently in a tank I affectionatly dub "the abomination" due to its ability to grow algae better than any plant I've ever tried.

The plan is to use a sump with bioballs, hide the heater down there, and down the road hide any CO2 equipment down there (since I hope to keep this as a planted tank).

I bought the tank, stand and hood from Impreza who previously used the tank as a reef. It cleaned up pretty nice. First step is to drill a hole in the back for the overflow box.



The overflow will have a small box made of smoked glass, there will be a Durso-style overflow but with the standpipe on the exterior of the tank.

Here's the overflow being slapped together:



The box is just large enough to cover a 1" bulkhead and contain a 1" 90 degree elbow for the Durso intake. I measured this out as 4"x4"x5" (5" high).

I got lazy and just ordered glass pieces from the Glass Guild at 2 pieces of 4x5, and 1 of 5x5. Actually I made a mistake (well, two actually, but more on that later), I ordered 4 pieces of 4x5. I meant to order 3, just in case I elected to put the overflow box in the centre of the tank. In the end I decided to put it right up against the right hand side so one extra panel was not needed. Now I have two extra pieces of 4x5 4mm smoked glass. Even with the extra pieces though, the cost for the overflow box glass was a fairly thrifty $18.

The second mistake was to not compensate for the width of the glass. If I were to do this again, I would make it so that the bottom piece reaches out past the side edges. Right now I had to get a little creative to make sure the pieces all line up nice.

Next, was to find a way to mount my Coralife 30" unit in the hood. I have a 24" unit and a 30" unit just lying around as "surplus" (technically the 24" isn't surplus "yet" -- it's in use over my 30g right now -- when the 65g goes online, it will be surplus).

The real killer on these Coralife units is their resell value. So selling the 30" unit and buying a 36" unit instead works out pretty close to the same as just buying the 36" unit. So for now, I'm going to try to make use of the 30" unit.



I used 2" corner brackets to slide into the rails of the Coralife. These "just fit" (maybe with a little wiggling) into the rails. Then I used angle brackets to screw into those corner brackets, and then screwed those brackets into the hood.

I used nylon screws with wing nuts to make removing the unit somewhat easy for when it's time to replace lamps. Unfortunately to replace the lamp means to take the whole canopy off the tank, but at least it shouldn't be too bad to do that.




That's as far as I got today. Tomorrow I hope to get the overflow box installed on the tank and some of the plumbing started to the sump.