And we have got someone to help us on the 444 lb object…
Here’s the deal. My marine tank is a wonderful tank, but we got it when we had the apartment, and it fits in a corner. I’ve been looking for a way to enlarge the tank so I can keep some fishes that I particularly like. So—I found a tank on special, probably made for an order that didn’t get picked up; and I have this monster coming in—444 lbs, pallet and crate. And we’re going to have to get it into the house.
Hopefully this will arrive on schedule, next Wednesday: hopefully it will be everything I hope it is: if not, well, I’ll make it work. It’s coming from New York on a pallet with crate, so it’s not as if this is all fish tank. There’s a stand and canopy, so I can bring it in as 3 pieces. Still—it’s going to weigh, and it’s fragile. We needed help, and friend Tim, bless him, is going to come over after work on Wednesday and help us get it up the steps. Til then, it will probably have to stand in our front yard.
The good news is—the most expensive part of a tank is not so much the tank as the gear—and it’s not a huge enough leap that I have to have new gear. So I can do this the ‘easy’ way and just plug one into the other. But it’s going to be a bit of an undertaking. I’m very excited. I love the hobby. I mentioned I’m doing a (of all things) fish book, how to, and I hope that will pay for it. And save a few pretty fish from untimely demise, with my how-to instructions. Anyway, I’ve looked forward to this for a dozen years, since I gave up my big tank when I moved, and I’m real excited.
When you take the doors off to get it in, take the hinges off the door frames. I have found this to be wise when dealing with glass. Cassandra speaks.
Oooo, good point.
Fingers crossed. Get Jane to show pix.
Exciting! Toes crossed for all to go well.
We brought our heavy Jotul wood stove upstairs last fall using a lot of thought, a wheeled cart, a come-along and time.
The process is going to be interesting, I think—even for me. Ordinarily, marine tanks don’t have canopies—this does. I’m going to do some surgery on it to accommodate our metal halide light kit (that’s a light too brilliant to look at and that has to be shielded from the room) AND that means I’m going to have to install two potent computer fans to keep it cool as well as figure how to hang that heavy light kit. And Jane’s served notice she wants the sparkle effect to go on the ceiling of the nook—as it does now—which means removing a section of the top of the canopy to let the bounced light (and the excess heat) rise. So we’ll see how that goes.
I’ve found a glass cleaner that will work inside: somebody’s got the notion of using a Mag-float with a scraper superglued to it, and it should let us get the bottom of the glass, which is deeper than my arm is long. A Mag-float is a magnet-centered block of stiff velcro, one on the inside of the tank, one on the outside, that scrapes algae off the inside as you move the outside block. Coralline, a hard, calcium-based pink encrustation, gets on the glass, too, and the scraper can pop those little bits off. Probably I will get a little algae ‘bloom’ because of the new sand and rock, but this passes, as the tank ages.
I’ve ordered medium grade sand instead of fine, which is proving harder to find. I really want to buy it local, without shipping—it’s like shipping rock. Fine sand blows in the current, and I want current.
I’m going to get a bit more ‘base’ rock, meaning just plain dry limestone, because there’s more water: this tank is 50 gallons larger than the other, and that means I need more rock and sand to support the ‘live’ rock. Live rock means rock that’s been in a functioning marine environment long enough to be permeated with bacteria, which will process surplus fish waste into harmless nitrogen gas. Snails (which aren’t land snails or pond snails, but the creatures that make sea-shells) help. So do tiny hermit crabs that live in old snail shells.
And I’ve got my corals, which are, believe it or not, far tougher than fish. I’m going to have to protect my fish during this transition and keep them out of it until the water is biologically ‘up’ to their waste. The corals—and I’m gambling on this, but I think I’m right—are going to go in just as soon as I can warm the water up. Fish produce waste; corals eat waste. And—if corals aren’t happy, they tuck down, expel all but essential water, and wait.
If you get interested in the process, I’m going to be publishing my book on how to do a tank RSN… a step by step. I’m going to publish it over on Amazon as well as here, since this is a specialized book and we probably have about 2-3 people on Wave who are involved in the hobby, if that. But it will be out there, for those of you with more questions, and who just want to know. It’s a hobby that involves managing a lifesupport system—and a marine reef doesn’t use filters: there are only 2 things we regularly throw out: an algae, which we cultivate in the sump; and nastiness that comes from ocean surf, which we call skimmate. If you heavily oxygenate water that’s loaded with amino acids, you get sea foam: a skimmer’s a simple chamber that collects foam, which, when it loses its oxygen, becomes anything from a mildly stained water to a dark disgusting green soup, depending on how bad it was. That’s it. That’s all we toss. Corals eat three things, to build a stony reef: fish poo, sunlight, and Mrs. Wages’ Pickling Lime, which provides the calcium.
In the book, there’s also instruction for how to do a 30 gallon very tiny, very old-fashioned marine tank that will actually work if you don’t push it beyond what we could do in the 1980’s.
Jane is our shutterbug, and she will be taking pix as we go.
Good luck with your marine tank upgrade. I’m sticking with freshwater which, for me, is so much easier. Just got a 75g set up from the local club which was used 3-4 days at the Puyallup Pet Expo and then given to the club to raise funds. Good deal but the tanks almost too large for me to maintain properly (I’m short). I’ll be relying on an ecosystem approach rather than lots of hardware to maintain the ecosystem. I decided long ago that I’ll stick with tanks that provide water for my house plants via water changes….so no salt water, brackish or African lake tanks for me!
For a tank too tall — there’s a new product: Easy-blade, either glass version or acrylic version. Takes a magfloat (square big one recommended) and some glue. Available on Amazon. Works in fresh or salt: gets glass clean.
And a height enhancer, (step stool), doesn’t hurt. What with the newer, very thick mattresses, I use a small one, about four inches tall, to get into bed at night.
I hear you about the very thick mattresses. I’m 5’4″ and my new mattress set comes up to the top of my leg. An inch taller and I’d need a “height enhancer” too. Hadda get a taller nightstand as I nearly fell off the bed a couple of times reaching for stuff on the one that came with the suite.
5’2 1/2″ Even with the low bedstead and the low rise box, the new one comes to halfway between the hip joint and the crest of my hip bone. Height enhancer good, jumping to get to bed bad.
I find that I was wr..wr..wr…. I lied, OK? the top of the mattress comes to 3″ BELOW the center of my hip joint. Height enhancer still good.
I have all the fancy glass-cleaning gadgets, but some of the chores I’m talking about involve working with live plants in the gravel since I always keep live plants in all my tanks. Yes, I also have the fancy planting tools, but that requires manual dexterity that is somewhat lacking these days in my stupid fingers. My hands work better used directly, and if the tank is too deep, it’s just impossible. My ideal tank would be no taller than 20″ and I’m probably going to have to use very deep gravel to make this 75g tank workable for me. It came with 2 buckets full (YAY).
What are the dimensions of your new set-up?? I keep seeing reference to it’s weight but may have missed something.
I wouldn’t consider a 30g tank a very small tank….that would be my 2.5g Boraras quarantine tank…before they go into the 5g breeding colony tank. We have lots of nano-tank fans in the local club….lots of shrimp/live plant set ups. Cool stuff!
This is 105 gallons, in a quarter-column shape, fits in a corner, too. But in our little house it’s going to BE Ari’s water-wall. It’s 3O” tall, when it comes to reaching the bottom, and I likely will have to lift the canopy off and stand on a ladder to do maintenance down deep. I’m also using a light that’s not rated for that deep, so I’m doing stony coral on the top tier of rocks and then I’m going to put some button corals (zooanthids) that don’t like so much light down lower. That 30″ is about 5″ too deep for my farthest reach, so I may have to place the zoas with tongs and hope. It’s 32″ on the 2 straight sides, and I don’t know how wide across, but the 32″ is the critical bit: it’ll fit in that corner.
Most of all, I can get one fish species that can keep any algae runaway in check, I can have my mandarin fish that needs a lot of rockwork, and I can keep, most of all, my beautiful damselfish that chase each other through the rockwork like flights of birds. So many people curse damsels—but that’s because the shops keep telling people they go in 30 gallon tanks. It’s sort of like trying to keep a greyhound in your parlor. They’re fast, they’re territorial, they’re colorful, and, in 100 gallons instead of 30—they nip at, but never connect. Everything’s always in motion. I’ve done as much as I can do with the 54 gallon, and I’ll either sell it or convert it for Jane’s baikurs, an African freshwater fish.
Yeah….for me tank height is the most critical parameter. This sounds like a fun tank if you can manage it. We have lots of 180g tanks in the club that become room dividers, but I’d hate to be the one maintaining them!
Bichirs/Polypterus are cool. I’ve never kept any because I prefer smaller fish, for the most part….but I do have 2 ryukin goldfish which are destined to move into the 75g tank when it’s set up. I bet your bichirs will LOVE moving to bigger digs! I have a 55g tank here at work that will be moving home with me when I retire. I originally used it as a marine tank back in the 70’s but now it’s a huge freshwater shrimp colony in a co-workiers office. I keep seeing it as an African lake cichlid tank but I’d really really dislike messing with the different water parameters for that type of biotope. It’ll probably become an Asian biotope with small gouramis, rasboras/boraras/danios and maybe some Darios or Badis.
You do know that greyhounds are total couch potatoes, right?? I know a lot who are rescue greyhounds from racetracks. Total goobers who just want a nice warm cushy sleeping spot. Not my breed, but they are easy parlor/housedogs. I think a better analogy would be a working border collie….they drive ME crazy and I live with Siberian huskies.
Have you reinforced the floor under its spot yet?
It’s next to a loadbearing wall, going clear to the basement floor: we’re good in that direction. It’ll weigh about like a loaded refrigerator. But I know how to sister a joist, and may do that while we’re arranging the plumbing. We’ve got the extra wood.
It took 8 guys to move a 340g tank into the fish store that one of our club members just opened recently. But no stairs were involved……
Length can mean torque if you don’t have enough people. 300 gallons is going to weigh about 400 lbs on its own…
And heaven help you if you left any water in it. Having even 10 gallons race down the tank and deliver itself to another handler is just not fun!
Good luck with the new tank! It sounds like a promise of much excitement for a long time.
My mother kept only freshwater tanks, but had one monster 75 gallon thing. I hated that tank every time we moved 😛
But the fish loved it. We had simple things mostly – tetras and assorted tropicals, I don’t remember what all. I do remember the fish who played catch – he was something Mom called an Oscar, who would, if you tossed a random thing into his tank, dash over, grab the item, and spit it back out at you. Accurately. One visitor got popped in the eye with a 20 sided die.
His name was Oscar, as well as his species; he was a grouch. Oscar had to have his very own 20g tank, though. He ate pretty much everything else, and even the three angelfish we tried “rooming” with him were terrified and fin-bitten. He was a mean, mean fish.
But this sounds really nifty!
We love oscars! We had one (named Oscar, of course) who lived to an old, old age who was a true character. He was quite honestly the most fun we ever had with a fish. Fairly early on in Oscar’s life, when he was still only a couple of inches long, we figured out that he was able to see outside his tank quite well. Whenever we would walk by, he would trail along beside you. If you stopped to look at him, he would show off for a bit. And beg for food, because Oscar was all about the food. Freeze dried shrimp turned Oscar into a bullet, speeding towards the surface of the water in such a way that you just knew he was about to have a nasty collision with the lid, until with a twist of his muscular body he would just skim the surface instead, his mouth open wide, to close around the shrimp with a loud ‘clomp!’ that set the water splashing and made friends and family alike jump back from the tank in surprise.
The kids, of course, loved it. Loved feeding him shrimp, but loved even more being able to make grownups jump back in fright at the sight and sound of Oscar’s wide open (and somewhat toothy) mouth as he hunted… and captured.
Oscar knew it, too. He was delighted to show off for strangers. A true exhibitionist at heart, he loved to play when people were watching. In the presence of people, he would flash his long body around, open those massive jaws, and give a funny fishy wiggle that served to make the water splash up into waves, some strong enough to splash bystanders with. If you put a ping pong ball in the tank and left the lid open, he would slap at it with his tail and nose until he managed to get the offending object out of his tank. If you put your hand in the tank and held it still, he would investigate your fingers and then rub his body up against you over and over again, not unlike a cat. And, strangest of all, he would laugh with the kids.
I suspect it was because he could see their facial expressions so clearly as they spent so very many hours with their noses pressed up against the glass, but Oscar learned that when kids laugh, it was his cue to open his mouth wide too. It got so the kids could walk up to his tank, make wide O’s of their mouths in his direction, and he would arrow to attention and open his own toothy mouth gaping wide in response. Fishy laughter. 🙂
He was an awesome fish and we loved him dearly. My son now has a Jack Dempsey cichlid in his room (named Jack, naturally) but he is nowhere near as personable as Oscar was. Mind you, he is still young, only a couple of years old, so there is hope for him yet. 🙂
I’ve kept fish tanks ever since I was 6. I used to like to go to the feed/hardware store, and the parents couldn’t get me out of it, because they had a fish tank. If they lost track of me, you could bet where I was, and I’d protest leaving, because I loved watching it.
Well, come my 6th birthday, Dad turns up with a 5 gallon Metaframe tank, a bag of sand, a filter, a ceramic grass hut, two Aeneas catfish and 3 zebra danios, plus some water weed. And it was up to me to take care of it.
I really was faithful about it. I learned how to dechlorinate water, and when I was 7 I tried cleaning it all the way, putting the fish into a pitcher. But I left a little water in the tank, and the sand, and when I carried it out the door, the water all sloshed forward.
I held onto it—nearly ruined both knees, but I held it. I did my scrub out and carried it back and set it up, sparkling clean. I didn’t tell anybody I’d nearly broken the tank and nearly landed myself in the hospital.
But I’ve had a tank ever after, of one sort and another, even while I was in college dorms and grad school. It’s one of those homey constants of my life. And when I moved on to marine tanks, it was the colors and the corals that lured me. I think in some ways I’m still the kid who wouldn’t leave the hardware store…
The tank sounds like it will be lots of fun. I’ve been wishing for more “fish stories,” and am certain this will have you frequently commenting/posting on the construction, upkeep and antics in said tank.
By the by, looks like much of the hullabaloo in Boston of today and this past week should be quieting down: the police just captured alive the 19 year old second suspect. I had two meetings in Boston today but both were cancelled. Not that I could have gotten in anyways since the subway and buses in the city were also shut down. I suspect everyone in the area knows someone who knows someone who was hurt (if not more directly) in the bombings. “Me and mine” are fine but a Head Start parent from the agency I worked at in Boston until April 1st (federal sequestration funding cuts have laid me off but somehow that hasn’t translated into lots of free time since I still am teaching evenings) lost a leg at the finish line of the Marathon… and a friend of my spouse used to teach art to the 19 who was just captured in Watertown a couple of towns over. It’s a small but at the moment not very happy world.
Have you ever thought about doing a story about an intelligent aquatic alien species?
I have loved reading all of your posts about the aquaria. I’ve lived by the sea for almost all of my life, had an uncle who was a fisherman and went out on a couple of runs when I was a teen. I did my science requirement on the ocean. And my favorite Mexican restaurant in WLA had a great salt water aquarium. I always sat where I could look at it. The owner was all about making sure he had everything in good shape because he was fully prepared to donate coral if something bad happened to our oceans.
So, I look forward to new tales as you get this behemoth into your basement.
Ah, fortunately this behemoth will go into our living room: just the sump is in the basement. 20 gallons of the sump is devoted to refugium (green algae/rock/sand) and is pretty strong (able to process waste really well)—and when I set up the new tank, I’m going to put old rock from the old tank, new rock to extend the rock structure, plus new sand AND THE CORALS into the 105 gallon, then add some of the old water from the old tank, and then fill the rest of the way with new water; and then—connect the 30 gallon sump in the basement with this new tank. Its worms, limpets, featherdusters, shrimp, ‘pods, and bacteria will circulate upstairs, meaning it will just start proliferating. The corals won’t have food for a few days, but they’ll have light. And the bacteria will begin setting up shop in the new sandbed: they already live in the old rock. Cycling a tank with coral in it isn’t the best choice, but the fish (much more fragile) will be protected meanwhile, and not put in until the tank is functioning properly.
That is ultimately the best place for it. We are now in a single story “age in place” home here in the outskirts of Atlanta (near my son) and nothing that needs to go into an attic can happen without help now.