My Pico Idea

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AndyS

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Apr 9, 2007
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Tamworth, Midlands, UK
Hey

Have been thinking about setting up a pico tank, just for small inverts like hermits, and a few coral frags. Here are my ideas:

-: 1 gallon tank (thats just under 5 litres here in the UK)
-: Live rock and aragonite sand, obviously very minimum
-: small powerhead for water movement
-: livestock: a few blue leg hermits, one or 2 snails, small coral frags taken from my main 10 gallon tank, no fish or large inverts.
-: lighting using a mini PC, hard to find but look like desk lamps, 50/50 versions are available

Now heres my problem - heat

The tank is going to be too small for even the smallest heater without it looking odd, does anyone know of any alternatives to traditional aquarium heaters that could be used? could i submerse the heater into the sand bed?

Im not sure if this is more a dream than a reality but i would really like to give it a go, if anyone has any input that would be great.

Thanks, Andy
 
you could look at heating cable thats used in planted tanks.

I have seen a tank like this but they used a closed loop system with a inline heater and hid all the bit behide it
 
The lighting will provide you with way more heat than you will need in the day. At night will be the problem. Also fluctuations in the temp happen very quickly and very often.

When I was running my 1.5 litre pico I found that room temp was fine during the night. If it's too cold where you are then there are some really small heaters around. There is a small flat heater about the size of a playing card which I think is made by Hydor. Costs around £8. Other than that the heating wire could work or an easier option would be a reptile heat mat which are really cheap. The problem you will have is that the smaller heaters don't tend to have a thermostat so you could end up cooking the inhabitants of your tank. Another cheap option is to have a desk lamp with a red bulb on over your tank at night which is what I did. The lamp cost me around £3 and I used a normal 40w household bulb.

You will get masses of evaporation too which means your SG is going to fluctuate wildly unless you top off with RO 2 or 3 times a day at least. I had RO constantly dripping into my pico. I used an airline and an empty sterilised baby bottle. Not pretty but really effective.

You may have trouble finding a small enough powerhead. In my super tiny pico I used an airline for movement which was fine. In your bigger tank you may be best getting a small filter and remove the media.

Ooooh this makes me wanna go pico again :hyper:
 

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