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75 gallons or de-rimmed redemption! Back in the game and better than ever

4K views 11 replies 6 participants last post by  thezachammer 
#1 · (Edited)
If anyone saw the 75 gallon I had previously de-rimmed, it didn't run for long...mostly because I moved and wanted to do something different, this is this tanks third and possibly final thread...only makes sense that it should be epic! Here's a couple shots of the tank before I took it down
it was a cool hardscape on its way to being an awesome tank, but life happens. I was sad to see it go, but I'm more excited about its new home. I was able to drag a friend into the long, dark, rabbit hole of planted aquaria. He saw my little 6.25 arc on the counter and said something to the effect of "hey, I wouldn't mind having one of those" so I said its your lucky day, I have a rimless 75 that we can totally rearrange your house and drill holes in walls and ceilings to put in. Somehow he was on board with that. But this guy is a lot like me, which helps because I get a lot of crazy ideas that I'd hate to implement in an apartment, so the idea of a house to play with was pretty appealing.

First things first. The tank is going to live in the dining room, so the short stand wouldn't let the tank be visible with the table and chairs, he also has about a foot on me and didn't want to do tank maintenance on his knees. So we "lifted" the stand
that was fun, what else can we lift...how about the suburban
funny thing about inertia, it's hard to stop:/
Anyway with the stand all jacked up and covered in body filler, we had to take care of the lighting situation, since the kessils and light bar have been sold to a man growing what he said were tomatoes in his basement, how many tomatoes would you have to grow to get the r.o.i. of a set of kessils!? Oh well. not my tomatoes, not my problem. Oh yeah, lights...as a first timer, he wanted a relatively low tech set up, low lighting, low dosing, slow growers, you get it...keep in mind when he said low tech, he meant low maintenance, we have a tendency to feed off of each other in terms of over building and weird inventions, so with that being said, here's the box to hold the two t5s, because low tech
not even a whole day after the box was built, he said something like "hey you know I get all that acrylic stuff at work, do you think we could use any of that?" So obviously the light has to have a cool acrylic shelf floating above it, because you know...still low tech


Next we had to finish the stand before we got sidetracked and built a rock crawler or something, so we did. Actually looks better standing tall!
"hey man, remember that acrylic? Do you think we could make a floor for the stand with it? Also I get black corrugated plastic too"
while admiring our work, I opened my big stupid mouth, like I should never do at floyds house. I think I said something like "man it would look super clean without that center brace" so after about 3-4 minutes of thinking about it I grabbed a sledge hammer and made it so...
for support (and keeping with the grossly overbuilt theme) I glued and screwed two 3/4 sheets of plywood together, then glued and screwed the small lvb to the 2x4 on the back. Just because everything we ever need seems to be hiding in his garage for no apparent reason, we found a multi plug the exact length of the inside of the stand to mount behind it
nevermind the random 29 gallon that keeps appearing in all of the pictures, I have no idea where it came from of why it's even here, but it's not hurting anyone so I let it be.
With the stand looking clean and versatile as ever, we decided to wire the light fixture...obviously with the bulbs we had to eventually put in it, I mean it's not like he ordered like 5 sets of remote control rgb strips and had any more ideas..."hey man" he said "I ordered like 5 sets of remote control rgbs from Amazon" he said "maybe we can put them in the fixture, and edge light the acrylic shelf" so out comes the router table and we put a nice round bevel into the back edge where the strip mounted oh so nicely:) because you know, low tech

I would like to add that we did finally wire up the t5s, so glad we're doing a low tech build. "What's that tube in the back for" he asked. I explained that I originally intended to do a drip water change in the tank so it was a little standpipe that it could overflow out of. Obviously he wants to punch holes in the wall just as much as I do, so we went to lowes and got a carbon filter and all the tubing necessary to make that happen. Funny thing about that light fixture, it's just too hard not to mess with it, and while we were working on the tank he had set a flower pot on top of it that he wanted to put ferns or something in. Obviously something's gotta water those plants, so why not make the tank do it, because you know...low tech.
Good thing we only used two t5s because now we had all this room in the middle of the fixture for something like a crazy, edge lit, moss and fern filled, wabi-kusa temple to rain through. So we drilled some holes and inserted 3/8 tubing for a sort of " drip channel"

And also found a very convinently sized picture frame and siliconed it in...a few coats of paint later, we made it rain. Because you know...low tech



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#2 · (Edited)
" this is this tanks third and possibly final thread...only makes sense that it should be epic!"
Isn't it, yea...roll your eyes I think would be what happened when first I read those
words. So after I went through the entire first post...
You may be right using that Epic word...LOL...
As much as I like wood sticking up out of the water I'd suggest you only let it stick up a
minimal amount. That would be my only real suggestion as I can see you have very
little lack of creativity.

And BTW: I'll be watching this one for sure.
 
#8 ·
I don't, mostly because it came off so easily....I didn't even have to try, then I filled with water and stuck in a circulation pump for a little extra water pressure and ran it overnight...I only tested a day because mine only bowed a couple mm


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#9 ·
We've had a couple very productive days this week, so we got back to the tank. We've made it a point to finish the plumbing so we didn't have to worry about messing with it later...the plan at the time was run a 3/8" line from the sink to the light fixture (wabi kusa temple), and 1" drain line from the bulkhead under the tank to the sink drain. Simple enough, but why do simple...simple is boring! Floyd had the idea to use Debra as a quarantine tank under the display. Apparently the mysterious 29 gallon that's been lurking around the tank has a name, and it's Debra...
go figure...

We sat Debra under the stand and she was just too long and tall for a qt...she wanted to be included, but in all honesty she makes a much better stuff holder...we needed a tank that would be relatively short, preferably wide-ish, and less than 2 feet long since other things have to go down there. We were looking at random smaller tanks when floyd said "if the display is rimless, it only makes sense that the qt should be rimless too, right!?" Of course! It should definitely be rimless! So we found the perfect tank, the mr Aqua 11.8 gallon! At roughly 12x12 and 18 inches long it fit the spot like a glove and looks super sexy down there. And because low tech...nobody wants to acclimate fish more than once, so we plumbed the overflow from the display, drilled the mr Aqua, and put an overflow in that as well...here's the line to the qt

And the new overflow that goes to the drain in the corner of the qt, along with the carbon block that will filter the water for the drip system


Then we just had to paint the line

Looking super sexy!


We will be running co2, so we put the reactor (aquamedic reaktor 1000) behind the filter on the corner brace


We ran the lines into the stand, 3/8 supply line and 1" drain


Here's a shot of everything sitting somewhat in place, stuff piled up on the light, and the ever faithful Debra holding all of our stuff like she's done every time
thanks Debra!


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#11 ·
I know I'm the worst with updates, but hey, life gets In the way sometimes. We had a few months where we didn't touch the tank but the past couple weeks have brought more free time so it's back to the tank! We had the light working and set where we wanted it but there was one thing driving us both crazy...wires! Water lines! Who wants to see those. As you know the light has a power line and waterline going to it, but we didn't want them to be seen, so we poked some holes in the wall, put in a couple grommets, and snaked a big nylon tube through them. That way if for some reason a waterline leaks in the wall it will run back out. The water is a random raindrop for the 24/7 water change which is set by a needle valve, which is awesome but sometimes it needs to rain. There will be plants in top of the light that will grow like a tiny aquaponics system and we figured they would need a little more than a few drops of filtered clean water a second, so we rigged up a timed "rainstorm". We used an 80gph pump that was absolutely perfect for it. To hide the second waterline, he ran it through a bulkhead in the bottom of the tank, into the wall, up and out behind the light fixture. That gives us our constant drops and occasional rain shower!

We decided to play with the leds and do some scaping....finally! So we ran two rgb extensions through the wall, one for the rim of the light fixture which is paired with the lights under the cabinet, and one for the accent/moonlights which is paired with the lights behind the tank, then we did the scape and started filling
we had to stack some pavers on the left piece of wood to keep it from floating, hopefully it won't take a month to saturate;)
a couple of shots playing with the leds
ill update with some more pics and videos once we get all the wires/waterlines a tucked a bit better and the wood gets saturated


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