Corner Tank

In other news I went ahead and bought that corner tank. The tank itself looks to be in good condition. A good cleaning should deal with it. The stand is a piece of crap. It's made out of particle board, you know, sawdust and glue. The stuff that turns into oatmeal when it gets wet. Yeah, that's the material you want to make a fish tank stand out of. So I got a new tank stand made. The guys that made it for me made it out of the scrap they had laying around and what they had laying around was 1/4" stainless steel. Because of this the stand weighs a ton, easily a hundred pounds, maybe one twenty five. The upside is you could park a truck on top of it and it'd hold up fine. Seriously, I ran the numbers.

It also came with a Penguin 170 filter, what is it with me and collecting legacy filters? Anyways, I cleaned that one up and went ahead with putting it in my existing tank. I didn't bother with the cartridges, just some biomax pellets and a load of filter floss. I figured I'd use it to help polish the water and get some flow in the left hand corner of my tank where there isn't much. When I first started it up the thing sounded like a gravel tumbler and for about 24 hours afterwards. However whatever seemed to be the problem worked itself out and now its as quiet as my other filter. Well, almost. For some reason this one sits higher on my tank and the water splashes down into the tank from a height of about an inch or two. This does two things, one it makes a racket just like you'd expect a waterfall to and second it makes one heck of a falling current in the tank. The circulation is good in that part of the tank, its always been a bit of a dead zone, but this is spinning my fish around if they get caught in it. I've got to cut some holes in the lid that came with this thing so I might use that plastic to make a comb to break up the flow going back into the tank. Not likely to do much about the noise but if it can break up the flow I'll be happy.

All that being said my sweetie loves the corner tank. She loves it too much in fact. After telling me how much she loved it the first thing she said was, "Why don't you move your tank into this one?" Well because this corner tank was going to be a briny mess and home to a homicidal little mantis shrimp. Then I got to thinking about it. The tank really does look good and I'd love to get a tank out into the part of the house where everyone is, really let everyone appreciate my fish. So I'm going to be moving tanks.

Yikes.

So I've got more work to do on my hobby which I never mind. My first step is going to be getting some plywood feet cut out for the stand, both to protect the floor and distribute the load. After that I'm going to be spray painting the back panel of the tank with this granite looking stuff.

http://www.rchuntingstore.com/servlet/the-171/KRYLON-MAKE-IT-STONE/Detail

I've seen someone else do it on their tank and it looks awesome. It give the background some character rather than being flat black. That particle board stand is going to be sacrificed as a spray stand, about all its good for. I'd burn it but the fumes from the glue would probably make my babies be born naked.

After that its back to rinsing sand and then filling up.

As for the move itself, well some of the decor is getting left behind. I've only got about 74% as much surface area on the bottom so I won't have room for all the rock work, I think. My fish are going to be very unhappy because before I move any of them I'm taking all the decor from their tank, nuking it again with bleach water, then stuffing it in the new tank. For about a day they're going to have to just deal with living in an empty tank. I'll probably leave the lights off. Once I get all the stuff in the new tank I'll net all the fish out and move them along with the filter to the new tank. Oh, right now I'm planning on moving the 170 first and use it as a water polisher over there as well. All the new sand will no doubt raise a sand storm in the new tank.

All that being said I'm going to have to alter my stocking plans a bit. I was thinking red tailed black shark and a German blue ram because of the length of my tank and the cover available. With the different shape of my tank though I'm not sure I'll have the space on the bottom for both fish to stake out their areas and not get into it with one another. I'll probably leave the GBR by the wayside and just got with the RTBS.

Oh, one thing that's not going to cut it on this tank is the light. It's a wennie little 18" 15W deal who's bulb is ugly right now. I was already planning on upgrading the 55's lights eventually to support plant growth, so now upgrading the new tank's lights is still in the plan. I've done the math and a 24" light could fit on top of the tank, it's just going to take some cutting of the plastic to fit it all in. I'll have a little over hang but just like a quarter inch nubbin. Right now I'm thinking the 24" version of this:
http://www.drsfostersmith.com/product/prod_display.cfm?c=3578+3733+9654+12109&pcatid=12109
That would give me 2.9 watts per gallon and that should be enough to grow whatever I please in the tank.

What am I going to do with the 55? Well I do still want a GBR and maybe some gouramis. Oh, and rummy nose tetras and harlequin rasboras are always nice.