Uhhh, is this bad?

[fkshiu]

Well, I've had the fans going full out now since Sunday and the floor and stand actually look none the worse for wear (knock on wood - or laminate in the floor's case). Everything is also passing the sniff test for the telltale musty smell.

I believe that the floors are not warped despite all that water in part because much of the water went UNDER the laminate planks. How do I know this? While I was cleaning up Sunday I discovered a mysterious puddle of water a good 10 - 12 feet away from the tank under the stairs by the laundry room. It was steadily growing and did not appear to have a source. It was saltwater according to the refractometer and I eventually traced it to the wall that is shared with the rec room where the tank was. It seems that a river of water flowed under the floor down to where this puddle was.

Anyway, my theory on the cause is that I had a number of really heavy live rocks in there. We're talking 30-35 pounders here. I had used HDPE (a.k.a. plastic cutting boards) to spread the weight and protect the glass. I think that something must have shifted and a great amount of weight ended up pressed against one point on the glass. Lesson learned - cover the whole bottom with HDPE if going SSB or BB.

I was fortunate that I had the tank sitting on top of the foam which was in turn sitting on a sheet of plywood. I had briefly toyed with the idea of only using foam along the perimeter since that's where the frame of the tank would be transferring all the weight. I thought it would be neat to be able to look up through the bottom of a BB tank. Good thing that prudence and paranoia won the day. I'm pretty sure that the whole bottom pane would've given out without the foam/plywood.

After expert consultation with Seahorse_Fanatic, I'm probably going to order a 72x24x19 tank from Seastar (the cracked one was a custom 72x24x16 - very weird size). I have a low ceiling in the basement and built the stand higher for the old stumpy tank so I am limited in what I can replace it with. A standard 180 gallon (72x24x24) would leave precious little ceiling clearance.

Oh well, stay tuned for a reef re-birth thread in the tank journal section and RIP to the tank that I affectionately called the "coffin" (which the wife now wants to use for a planter).