Tank hunt

gwand said:

I’ll share a frustrating story too. I ordered an aquarium scan for my new breeder tank. The FedEx driver left the 54 pound box on the road at my mailbox box 150 yards from my front door at 10 PM. The box was stolen. I gave explicit directions on their website to leave the box at my front door. Fed Ex claims no responsibility. Now I have to deal with Amazon.

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I hear ya! In my opinion since delivery instructions were explicit and not followed FedEx should be responsible. Another issue with the FedEx delivery is that it should never have been left. From years of experience with FedEx deliveries they seem to have a 9:00 PM limit as to how late a delivery should be left. This looks like a case where either you or the seller will take the hit when it should be FedEx.

As to my case with the hood/light I should probably return just because but will keep. I already have the spacers that I will need to make the unit fit. May seem like an odd fix but I think it will work well.

A while back I bought some new furniture and needed to run some wires across my living room floor for some USB powered devices. I ran the wires along the floor board and then from a powered USB hub under my 'easy chair' to the new coffee table. I used those floor wire covers to hide and not trip over wires and have some left over that should meet my needs as to length. I'll trim off an edge on the wire cover which will leave a thin triangle opening that should fit snug on the sides of the hood. I haven't done any cutting but I DID lay things out and it should work fine.

One thing looks really good as to the new hood/light. As I've said I intend to mount my existing white/red/green/blue tube LED in the hood's space for a second LED tube. It looks like the power cable for the second hood light is the same as the one on my old light. I'll have to check the power adapters to be sure they are the same voltage but it looks like I may be able to mount the second LED tube without the need for running a second power line for the second tube. No big deal either way but would be nice if the power supplies match.

Hood showed up almost a week early, yesterday, and the rest showed up today. Ready to build so, of course,I feel kind of queasy today so may put off until tomorrow...

Building the tank will be easy but breaking down the cube will likely be a pain. Always easier to build a tank than it is to tear one down.

So you now have five pieces of glass and will use silicone to create a cube? Any other adhesive required in building a tank?

gwand said:

So you now have five pieces of glass and will use silicone to create a cube? Any other adhesive required in building a tank?

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No, the new tank is built as a 21 gallon high. The old tank is a 20 gallon cube that is being replaced with the new tank.

When I said break down the cube I just meant emptying the thing and cleaning to store or get rid of. Building the new tank is just setting up with the filtration, plants and such.

I have built tanks before out of panes of glass but not doing so now. If doing from separate panes of glass silicone is all that is really needed but it helps if you have something to make sure everything is square to everything else.

Working on some fine points with the new tank such as how I'm going to mount the heater which is 100 watt and will be carried over from the old cube tank. I like my heater to be mounted horizontal as I believe the wider heat source causes more convection for even heat distribution. With the cube the under gravel filter air risers were close enough to just use plastic wire ties to attach the heater to the risers but this will not be the case with the new tank. I THINK that I still have the original suction cup mounts for the heater and, if so, I'll just either super glue or silicone the mounts, without the suction cups, to the back glass a little above the substrate. Although this may change according to what I do with the filtration air risers as described below.

The other thing I'll need to do is to widen the width of the tank hood/light. A couple of possibilities on this and not sure which way I'll go.

1) Use some left over black floor wire covers with some on each side.
2) Tear apart the built in hood from the cube and use strips to widen the new hood. This actually has an advantage as I can use sections that have ventilation slots. Problem with this is that the cube's hood material is REALLY tough and will be hard for me to cut as, living in an apartment, I tend to not have much as to cutting tools.

Last to figure is the air risers for the new tank. I have mounts for four risers but only two risers that will mount correctly. The air risers for the filter plates in the old cube are square and flat. They slide into the plate mounts. With the new filter plates the risers mount with tabs that go into slots and turn to lock. I DO want to use all four air riser mounts on the filter plates for a few reasons.

1) Since I'm going to feature Panda Garra I need high oxygen levels and four risers should cause enough surface agitation to max out the oxygen.
2) Pandas like high water movement and four air risers may provide enough as each would be powered by separate Whisper 20 air pumps. This could cause enough water movement to make the Pandas happy. If I find that I need more water movement I can just replace the two center air risers with small power heads.
3) The center two air risers would remove the need to glue heater mounts on the back glass as I can just attach the heater to the two center risers with plastic wire ties as I did in the old cube.

I'd just super glue or silicone the old cube risers to the new center plate mounts. I know this would work and is probably what I will do. The only real decision with this is whether to use super glue or silicone. I think I'd probably go with silicone as I think it would give better longevity as super glue tends to get a bit brittle even though it would make for an extra day of setup while I gave the silicone a proper 24 hours to cure.

Doing the new setup has been delayed a few days. The 12 pound bag of river pebbles I got for the substrate is not going to be enough so just ordered another bag.

I 'm considering actually making use of my old 20 gallon cube tank after I finally get around to setting up my new 20 gallon high.

Not sure that I'll actually do but I'm thinking of turning it into a desert environment with a couple of horned lizards. The awesome little beasties are pretty easy to keep and are happy with crickets as a main food although ants are suggested as at least a supplement. The only other downside is that they only have a life span of around 2 years so would need to be often replaced.

They are just so cool and will actually change their size by inflating and deflating their bodies according the the situation. When I was forced, as a young teen, to do a cross country trek by car with my parents I caught one in either Arizona or New Mexico and was able to keep it hidden in the car until we were back home in Ohio. My parents gave me weird looks when we stopped and I'd go hunting in shrubbery and stuff. Of course I was hunting for lizard food.

Except for the short life span they are just the coolest little beasties. They look quite ferocious but it is mostly show. The one I had as a young teen was totally fine with being picked up and played with even though it was as wild caught as it could be.

They also seem to be immune to bee type stings. The one I had would sit at the opening of a ground hornet nest in a garden area my mom had and suck down the hornets as fast as they would come out of the entry hole. Ya, I could just leave the beastie in the garden area and it would still be there when I went to get and bring back inside. Of course I sometimes had to look around a bit to find the thing but it was never hard to find as it never really tried to hide or avoid. Put my hand in front of it and it would climb on. Another one of those beasties that seem to have no fear of humans just like Panda Garra are as fish.

LOL! Looks like a throwback to a mini vicious dinosaur but are surprisingly friendly.