Why Glass Bottoms?

[This Younger Spouse]

I've been snooping back through the posts here and don't see this mentioned.

It's something I've wondered. Why don't aquarium designers incorporate some sort of inert polymer plastic or Kevlar type material to use for aquarium bottoms? The are invisible most of the time, and one would not have to take careful preventive steps when putting heavy rocks in the tank as we do with glass.

Maybe that's a dumb question with an obvious answer.

 

[StandbySetting]

Kevlar is incredibly expensive and plastic polymers are easily scratched, some tanks are built with Acrylic, some are even built out of ply utilising a glass front only, but Glass is the one of the cheapest and readily available materials available.

 

[nurglespuss]

Also, its why they stopped using materials like slate... other materials are stronger, more flexible, more forgiving etc. but (unless your tank has a decent (metal really) full frame, working out the pressure points and evening the stress becomes much much harder, because the base reacts differently to the glass, increasing the risk of leakage etc.

 

[coldcazzie]

I guess though, they could do glass base with some kind of internal plastic coating to protect it...?

 

[nurglespuss]

They used to do glass reinforced with metal mesh... My old 6ft has that...

 

[fishguy2727]

Really it doesn't need it. Glass is very strong. In addition, silicone sticks very well to glass. If you used glass and anything else it would be very hard to find something that would seal as well. It is also easier to quality control glass. It is much harder to detect a defect in other materials that are not clear.

Adding an internal protection barrier would really do nothing. If you drop a rock on a tank bottom hard enough to break it, a thin coating of anything will probably not save it.

You can use egg crate to spread out the weight of rock work, give the rocks something to grip, and spread out the impact if a fall was to occur.

 

[james_fish]

I'd be too tempted to shoot a kevlar tank

James.

 

[Harlequins]

The bottom of my rena has a glass base with polysterene in the middle section,then another glass panel on top.double thinkness of glass so all good