Asylumdown's 275 Tank build

[asylumdown]

Met with Kevin, the project manager, and the interior designer yesterday to discuss the finishes around the aquarium. The dining room side is going to be a clean white wall with a tank hovering in the middle. They'll put a wooden panel in front of the stand and build the entire wall around the aquarium out of mdf that's been treated with a marine level of water-proofing. The tank will be rimmed with a thin strip of stainless steel to hide the returns of the wall panels. Should look hot. The access panels will be as low profile as possible with the goal of making it look like they don't exist.

The office side is where most of the business of maintenance will occur, so the access needs to be equally scaled up. They will be building a frame for a large set of vented/louvered cabinet doors for access to the sump area, with solid panels acting as doors above. Originally the doors above were supposed to be louvered/vented to help deal with heat from the MH, but with the fan running at all times, we wanted to create a bottom up vacuum of air that would also evacuate humidity from the sump cabinet. The fan's a 90 CFM, so it will hopefully be able to evacuate enough heat from the canopy to prevent things from getting dangerous.

[asylumdown]

The house is fully insulated and should be getting drywalled at this very moment. Took these pics on Friday:




Just in case any of the drywallers were confused as to whether or not they should stand on the vertical surfaces of of the sump/stand's protective box, we left them a handy sign.

[phi delt reefer]

$100 says you catch one of those idiots standing on it with a smoke dangling out his mouth when you swing by for a surprise look in the near future

[Zoaelite]

Originally Posted by asylumdown

I want to start off by giving the specs, and posting the pictures I have so far.

The tank will be 6ft long X 34inches wide X 26 inches high for a total display volume of approximately 275 gallons. It's being built right in to the house as a divider between two rooms, the dining room and the office, so it will be open on two sides. I don't have a fish room in this house (some battles you have to 'compromise' on in marriage I suppose), so 99% of the equipment will be under the stand, with the only remote equipment being an R/O storage container in the basement below the tank.

Derp.

[Zoaelite]

Any idea how you want to position the radions as of now?

[asylumdown]

I had thought long and hard about those overflows. It sucks monster balls to need to have them internal, but it was part of the trade off process that got me the longest tank possible. The tank is flanked on either side by 2X6 studs, which support walls one either side, like in this pic:

.

I had them use 2X6 boards instead of 2X4 boards to give me extra depth in the stud cavities, but then as the house construction process went on, we ended up needing to put more and more stuff in to those walls. It's kind of hard to tell cuz they've already started painting, but here's the stud spaces:

North side:

One of the two stud spaces is blocked off so a bank of switches for the opposite wall could be installed (I fought this, but there was no where else to put them). Those switches will eventually be completely sealed in from the tank space. I had them position the switches so there will still be enough space above them for an MP40/60 motor

South side:

From left to right there's a partial stud space that had to be sealed as it's part of the cold air return system from upstairs, drain and water lines (that get way busier under the tank) for the aquarium and R/O unit, and a drain line for a bathroom that's on the floor above the tank.

At best, having external overflows would have made the stud spaces too crowded to work in them, at worst, I would have had to reduce the length of the tank significantly to get them in.

I would say the biggest 'theme' of this tank so far has been compromise. I'm asking it to be viewable on both sides, while being as large as physically possible in the space, and to do things that would normally require a whole fish room (automated water changes and such), but with only the space of the cabinet to work with. It will be interesting to see if it all works out as planned...

As for the lights, I think I'm going to put them in 2 rows of 3, but probably not evenly spaced. I'm thinking I'm going to do three 'islands' for the aquascaping, so I'll focus the pairs of lights on to those islands. We still haven't worked out what the lights are going to hang from, I'm thinking some sort of frame that hangs from the ceiling that I can raise and lower as one unit, but I would also like to be able to adjust the position of individual light fixtures on that frame.

[asylumdown]

Le Sigh....

The stairs got delivered on Wednesday. Turns out they measured from the outside of one of the support walls, not from the inside, so the landing and both runs of stairs coming off it are the wrong size. This throws off completion date by at least a month.

And last night, the cabinet installers must have punctured one of the in-floor heating lines as there was glycol leaking from the ceiling in the basement. Not sure what that's going to do to completion date, but I assume that a whole bunch of floor tile and several walls will need to be pulled out, so I can't imagine that it will be helpful.

On the bright side, the tank should be finished and installed at least a month before we move in now, so I'll be able to cycle it before we move in...

[mseepman]

Well, the news about the tank is good! I know how you feel...house delays suck. Do you figure you will "setup" the tank and just visit daily to check on how the cycle is going or will you do things off-site and move them into the tank once you move in?

[asylumdown]

I'm at my house now (cuz staying at school till 10:30 is just the tops), and it looks like they've corrected the problem, I just can't tell how. The back panel is on the tank, so I can't see where the foam meets the plywood anymore, but I crawled underneath and looked at the holes for the overflow and there's no longer any gap (I could stick my pinkey finger in that space yesterday). The tank now appears to be sitting completely flush to the plywood on both the right and left sides.

I can't see and extra expanding foam under there, so they must have figured out a way to force the wood to cooperate. The site foreman had said he was going to try brute force first, it appears to have worked.

I'm gonna find out what they did tomorrow.

Now the only remaining issue that I can see is that the back framing panel is smaller than the front, so the top of the tank, where the euro bracing is joined to the glass, is totally visible. Oy. That's gonna be getting fixed!

[asylumdown]

Originally Posted by fishytime

I understand why you wernt impressed with the radions over the display at RCE.... but in all fairness, the tank design and the way the light rack is built made it hard to get the lights hanging where they will do the most good......did you ever get over to see anyones tank that was lit by them?

No, I would still like to, but I ended up having way less time over the holidays than I thought before I left town. I also stopped in at... Aquarium Illusions (I think that's what it's called) and they have a single radion over a clam tank. I thought the same thing there. I need to see if Levi is available again soon though cuz his pics are baller, but I have a boat load of scholarship/grant applications due in the next week and Kelly is moving back to Calgary, so it might be a bit before I have time.