Midnight
Midnight's 300g Build Concrete Day (warning lots of pictures )
by
, 03-08-2012 at 08:28 AM (2555 Views)
On Tuesday the concrete guys showed up to get the aquarium pad done and open up the brick wall.
In preparation I had to move some old electrical and pull a fascia board from the top. To my pleasant surprise the brick stopped short of the ceiling, this meant that we could take down the whole wall and not support upper brick work.
I wasn't able to stay all day so I didn't get any pictures of them cutting the main portion of the brick. Essentially what they did was ran a chop saw up both sides and then sledge hammered the wall into pieces.
Once they got to the house support level they had to asses the foundation footers and decide how far down to take the brick. In the end the footer stayed but all the brick came out.
Next came the forms.
Then came the concrete truck, the concrete that was used was an industrial grade with fiber and calcium added. The fiber is for strength. The calcium and the dry mixing are because of the thickness of the pour. The height of this pad is 11 to 12" thick which would not cure properly with regular concrete.
They used a giant vibrator to spread the concrete into all the nooks and crannies.
Floating and leveling this mix was not easy because of the dryness of the material.
In the end you end up with a nice solid stable foundation to place your reef on. The reason for the size and thickness of this pad is the difference in floor height between the house and the garage. The top of this pad is at the bottom of the floor joists for the house. That coupled with a four foot stand will put the reef at 3 feet in the house and four from the pad for me to view from the garage side.
Pictured to the left is the 200 gallon mixing container that I will be using for salt water. This was picked up from Plastic Mart for $220 plus shipping. However while linking this I realized the price has just gone up 20 bucks on this container. This particular container has gallon marks and the 200 gallons does not go all the way to the top so there is room for salt.
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