My Saltwater Transition
by
, 05-15-2013 at 09:04 PM (3188 Views)
I've been working on this project for around a month. The planning has been going on for more than a year. With that being said, i'm a newb when it comes to this.
For many years, I have kept freshwater tanks. After a recent move, I got rid of everything except the tank itself, and I decided to change over to a saltwater tank. I sure that I am ready for the challenge and am interested in learning the new techniques for this new part of the hobby.
Heres the area before. unfortunately i could only fit a 30g. in the spot.
My first biggest challenge was that of deciding where to place the overflow. This tank being on the small side i decided to place the overflow bulkheads in the center. From my research i went with the most fail safe design i could find. The three overflow system i found at Bean Animal's website.
With that decision i decided to place a return on either side of the return
heres what i ended up with.
i didn't think that drilling the tank was too difficult. That was until i did a wet test. the end of the cut left small chips on two of the holes.
I couldn't get the leak to stop by tightening so i had to resort to silicone. I just hope that this fix wont cause problems down the road but it does not leak anymore.
Since the tank seemed to be in good order time to work on the sump. Sine i'm working on a budget i'm going the Rubbermaid path. This is what i came up with
I couldn't find anything that could adhere to the sterylite material. So instead of trying to get something to stick to the sides which bow anyway, i made a modular baffle cage for my return pump. I left it with no bottom because during testing i found that it had a tendency to float under some situations. Because of this some water does come from underneath the sides. I don think that this is a problem though.
Having the tank and sump mostly finished it was time to make the stand.
Heres the stand finished and in place
With the stand in completed and in place time it was time to finish the plumbing.
That's that it for the build. Now the waiting begins.