Need Suggestions And Tips For New Freaswater Aquarium Setup

[Snazi]

Hi,

First thread here but a long time reader.

Okay people I have a 35 gallon fresh water aquarium which I think is small and hard to maintain as I like to keep a good species of fish.

Also my current setup is just a basic rectangle aquarium with no special filtration or water change system of any kind. I do have air stones and internal filtration mind you.

What I am think of building is a 100 gallon fresh water aquarium, it will be rectangular as I have to keep up with the place to put it. Every thing will be order made but unfortunately me and people in my area don't have much expertise or knowledge for making good setups.

Here are the dimensions I have thought for my new aquarium :

Length: 72 inches ( 182.88 cm) or 6ft
Width: 18 inches (45.72 cm) or 1.5ft
Height: 18 inches (45.72 cm) or 1.5ft

It will hold about a 100 gallons of water and will be build using a 8mm thick glass. Calculations have been made using this calculator: http://www.theaquatools.com/building-your-aquarium , with a safety factor of 3.8. Please let me know if my calculations are practical as I would like the aquarium to be easily maintained. Here is a screen shot of my calculations:

This will have a metal rot iron stand with some wood work and a wooden canopy. I have chosen metal for the stand as wood is really expensive here.

What I need from you guys are any suggestion or tips that I should Keep in mind before getting this build.
I would really appreciate any schematics/ideas for aquarium builds or any custom made special filtration or maintenance systems as not many ready made systems are available here just common filters and air pumps also I need suggestions for internal/under-gravel piping that goes around the aquarium.

I also need ideas for the metal stand and the canopy as I have no clue what to tell the metal worker to build. I would love some hidden space to put any external pumps in the stand and also maybe a hospital stand.

Looking forward for your comments and suggestions, I will share pics of the build and also the final result if requested.

Regards.

 

[moochy13]

make sure you get the wooden lid well sealed. i recently binned a wooden lid i made because it seems 5 coats of varnish wasnt enough to stop damp and mould.

 

[Snazi]

make sure you get the wooden lid well sealed. i recently binned a wooden lid i made because it seems 5 coats of varnish wasnt enough to stop damp and mould.

Thanks for your reply mate but in my experience using solid hard wood is best for aquariums, no problems if not painted at all.

 

[waterdrop]

Wow, that sounds like a great size and shape. I'd love to have an aquarium like that and the whole project itself would all be part of the fun! There may be some good comments coming from our beginner forum here and the experienced members who look in on us pretty regularly, but be aware that TFF also has a hardware forum (hardware and DIY) and you might manage to get a look by some of the members actually experienced with building custom tank systems.

I've owned a couple of different styles of iron stands, both decorative, where legs splay outward slightly and of course the totally plain kind of straight up vertical angle iron stands that have no decorative qualities. The modern cabinets that people use are quite practical in hiding external filters and other equipment common to larger tanks. Anyway, I have no structural/mechanical engineering training so I can't advise you there, although you should be able to find a firm that has engineers like that and talk an individual into an inexpensive consultation I would think.

A 100g sits in the range where it's popular to use either two fairly normal large external cannister filters or one very large external cannister filter or just go ahead and graduate to a sump filter (I would not consider undergravel filters as this older technology has pretty much been superseeded by more modern filters that are easier to maintain.) It sounds like you could go down two project paths on the filters: you could either work on how you would get two good ones like most of us use (Eheims, Fluvals, Renas, AllPonds etc.) shipped to you somehow... OR, you could poke around the web and get into the active world of designing your own sump filter out of a smaller aquarium or purpose built glass box that would sit on your lower shelf of the new aquarium stand. If you go with the sump idea then it might also have an impact on the aquarium design as you might want a built-in "weir" or such to serve as your filter input drain out of the aquarium. Sumps have the advantage that you can have a huge media volume and of course media volume is probably one of the most important specifications of filtration.

[What I'm thinking about are that you can design a tank with -internal- (so-called "reef ready" overflows, where there is a weir (a dam wall with little slits aroung the top that takes up part of the tank volume.. when the water level in the tank reaches the slits, it flows down into the overflow area and inside that area is a drain pipe that goes through the bottom of the tank through a bulkhead drilled hole. This is different from an -external- overflow box where there is a u-tube siphoning water from the tank into the external box and then it goes down to the sump box. Of course in all these cases there's a pump bringing water back to the tank. You probably are familiar with all this.]

~~waterdrop~~