I'm starting to wrap my mind around what I would like to build. I am still very far out from doing anything - I have a couple of house projects to do first. I have a couple of issues in my house design working against me - not the least of which being that the best location in my house for a large aquarium is the corner of my living room furthest from any water supply. So there definitely won't be any automated water changes in my future. But that is all discussion for a later date - right now I am trying to decide on what form my tank should take.
I'd like to be as close to 180g (or over 180g) as I can be. And as long a tank as I can build to avoid future house calls from the tang police. My issue is that in this corner my limitations are 50-7/8" long by 39-7/8" wide. So I have settled in on building my stand at something like 50" long by 36" wide. The question i need to settle now is - internal or external overflow/return? If I go external and leave myself a minimum of 5" of space on the outside of the tank - I am looking at a maximum of 181g and that is going 45"long x 31" wide x 30" tall. I'm not loving that 30" tall after reading a lot of information here on R2R. Especially since I want to build a tall stand at maybe 36" tall.
Here is my crappy powerpoint (clearly not accurate to scale) of what that would look like:
Ignore the stuff about 2" trim that is how far it sticks out past the window. The problems here are actually in the stand - I want to take advantage of all that space underneath and really don't like the idea of having vertical braces under the back wall of the aquarium that break up the space under the stand. I am going to build an 80/20 stand so maybe I can go thick enough that it bears that load. But I got to thinking about using the entire 50' long by 36" wide space for the aquarium with internal overflows and returns. (I'm assuming returns can be boxed and run internal to the tank like an overflow?). If I did that I could potentially build a 200+ gallon tank (minus what I lose to overflow/return areas) with a wide open stand underneath and a much more reasonable height for the tank. Here is another crappy powerpoint of what that could look like:
-Ignore the comments about ATO reservoir and dry area that is for future arguments. In this scenario I really like 28" tall build. And I think I could get over the internal space loss as I could do somethings to hide that and I have a pretty wide tank to start with. I intend to rip off @Lasse pretty shamelessly for a lot of what I want to do so I could just let mother nature hide those for me (eventually). One thing that jumps out at me is that at 36" wide that back corner could be a real pain to get to if something happened.
What do you fine folks think? Pros? Cons? Better ideas?
-also, when I get closer to doing things I'll get CAD.
-Dave
I'd like to be as close to 180g (or over 180g) as I can be. And as long a tank as I can build to avoid future house calls from the tang police. My issue is that in this corner my limitations are 50-7/8" long by 39-7/8" wide. So I have settled in on building my stand at something like 50" long by 36" wide. The question i need to settle now is - internal or external overflow/return? If I go external and leave myself a minimum of 5" of space on the outside of the tank - I am looking at a maximum of 181g and that is going 45"long x 31" wide x 30" tall. I'm not loving that 30" tall after reading a lot of information here on R2R. Especially since I want to build a tall stand at maybe 36" tall.
Here is my crappy powerpoint (clearly not accurate to scale) of what that would look like:
Ignore the stuff about 2" trim that is how far it sticks out past the window. The problems here are actually in the stand - I want to take advantage of all that space underneath and really don't like the idea of having vertical braces under the back wall of the aquarium that break up the space under the stand. I am going to build an 80/20 stand so maybe I can go thick enough that it bears that load. But I got to thinking about using the entire 50' long by 36" wide space for the aquarium with internal overflows and returns. (I'm assuming returns can be boxed and run internal to the tank like an overflow?). If I did that I could potentially build a 200+ gallon tank (minus what I lose to overflow/return areas) with a wide open stand underneath and a much more reasonable height for the tank. Here is another crappy powerpoint of what that could look like:
-Ignore the comments about ATO reservoir and dry area that is for future arguments. In this scenario I really like 28" tall build. And I think I could get over the internal space loss as I could do somethings to hide that and I have a pretty wide tank to start with. I intend to rip off @Lasse pretty shamelessly for a lot of what I want to do so I could just let mother nature hide those for me (eventually). One thing that jumps out at me is that at 36" wide that back corner could be a real pain to get to if something happened.
What do you fine folks think? Pros? Cons? Better ideas?
-also, when I get closer to doing things I'll get CAD.
-Dave