]V[onster DiY article suggestions

[Dr Joe]

Alright now here we go, Thanks CHOMPERS

Come on people I know alot of you have done stuff to your tanks too, lets hear about it.

 

[pacu mom]

If there is a particularly well done DiY article, that you think should be in the list of great articles, post it here, and the staff will review them, and if fit, will add them to the sticky.

Can you do a nice write-up w/pix on you pacu system for http://www.monsterfishkeepers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=121454

Pretty please

Dr Joe

.

I came home one day to the sound of water running in the living room. This is what I found:

My husband came across this 55 gallon tank at a moving away/yard sale crammed with eight very large fish. We were total newbies and had to get online to figure out which were the oscars and which were the pacu. It didn't take much reading on fish forums to come to the conclusion that we had impossible overcrowding in that tank! Once we learned about the nitrogen cycle, we spent countless hours vacuuming the feces out every day and doing the equivalent of 60 - 100% water changes every day, 5 gallon buckets at a time. It's a wonder my husband's back held out. Even with two pythons (which we eventually discovered), it took 45 minutes to over an hour every day to remove feces from the tank.

When we were setting up our 300 gallon tank, my husband was adamant about making the setup as maintenance-free as possible, i.e, no vacuuming feces. I joined several fish forums to find out what kind of filtration we would need. I didn't get any satisfactory or helpful answers (I had not come across MFK yet). The LFS owner wasn't helpful, either, because he had never had a tank that large. He thought perhaps, that two large cannister filters would work. The tank builder recommended a large wet/dry filter, and I found a man who set up and maintained tanks who recommended spa filters. From my reading I learned that "you can never have too much filtration."

Our 300 gallon tank which houses two large pacu and two oscars has a 400 gallon capacity ProClear wet/dry filter running with a CA-6000 pump (1560 gph) for biological filtration. The wet/dry sits on the floor behind the tank and is plumbed in to one of the overflow boxes. We have the spraybar return from the wet/dry filter hanging in a plugged off overflow box which also has the 400 Watt Hydor heater for the tank. I had bought three heaters, but one heater does the job. For mechanical filtration, we have two Rainbow spa filters fun by a Hammerhead pump (5800 gph). The mechanical filtration system is housed in a converted old furnace room which is directly behind the tank.

Having spent many hours every week vacuuming feces and debris, I did not mind that the new tank would be bare floor and undecorated. To eliminate vacuuming the tank, my husband designed two poop suckers. These are two PVC pipes covered in black hose that come down to 1/4" from the bare floor. They are connected to the mechanical filtration and quickly whisk away feces and debris from the tank. They are strategically placed where debris tends to eddy and concentrate. In the nearly two years we've been using the tank, there has been no debris to vacuum out of the tank.

Poop Sucker

The main mechanical uptake is next to the left overflow box, and the return next the the right overflow box, which keeps the water circulating in the tank.

The tank has been plumbed to make water changes super easy. In the filter room, we have a 55 gallon tank sitting on a high shelf. We have a line running from the utility sink up to the tank to fill it. The tank is plumbed into the mechanical system. We have a heater in that tank, and keep it full of conditioned water.

The vertical line on the right is from the holding tank. Opening the valve sends the heated conditioned water to the main tank. Directly behind this pipe you can see an elbow with a pipe going downwards (against the wall). This pipe goes under the house and and then outside to the patio. Turning the valve on outside, starts the siphoning action in the tank. We can very quickly siphon out 200 gallons. The poop suckers and the main mechanical uptake work very well siphoning out the water. The horizontal lines are the uptake lines for the mechanical filtration. There are valves at the tank and at the filter end on every line. If the valves for the uptake lines are shut, the water siphons through the mechanical return, rinsing out the spa filters before being dumped outside. The return nozzle is only a few inches below the waterline, so it isn't too long before the nozzle is out of the water, and the uptake lines have to used to siphon the rest of the water.

Here's a picture of the back of the tank. We had to drill several more holes in the top of the tank to accomodate our poop suckers and the FX5 we threw into the mix:

The pipe in the front left is the main mechanical return line. On the right and also past the overflow box are the two poop sucker pipes. The hose from the FX5 is also there. The main mechanical uptake is on the far side of the second unused overflow box.



There is a very swift current in the tank which our fish love. When we do water changes, we usually very quickly pump in the last 100 gallons of water. (By turning the faucet on feeding the 55 gallon holding tank, we get 100 gallons from the 55 tank!) Here's a video of our fish enjoying the turbulent action!




To complete the filtration system, we added an FX5 for redundant filtration and later added a Pentair Aquatics 40 Watt UV Sterilizer to the FX5 return line to clear up a green water problem. (The tank is in sunlight all day due to floor to ceiling picture windows and two skylights in the living room.)
These sit on the floor behind the tank

Our tank does not have a canopy. My husband came up with a lighting structure that hides the plumbing.

During the time we were setting up our tank, I was diagnosed with cancer. The tank was fishless cycled, and our fish were moved to their new home March 5, 2006. On March 8, 2006, I started four months of very aggressive chemotherapy. I was too ill to deal with the fish. If we did not have this system, our fish would not have survived. At my worst, I was able lay in a recliner and watch and enjoy our fish. Besides driving me to countless medical appointments, my husband just had to turn valves and faucets off and on to do water changes. Our system born out of desperation, was truly needed and worked out far better than I could have imagined.


We think we've given our rescued fish a good home. Our tank is bare, but for us, the fish make the tank beautiful. Water changes are super easy and involve turning valves on and off and pumps off and on. The water parameters are excellent, and nitrates are usually kept under 20 ppm

 

[midnight]

erm just about anything midnight has done.

thanks

kinda dissapointed that got ignored and no one else said a thing about my thread tho
my diy thread has over 30 projects in one thread.
i been trying to get it stickied for a long time with no luck.
cant even get it edited when i ask mods through pm or ask in the thread.

 

[greengiant]

NOLAPETES 4300G build. I know its not Quite done but to me its epic. this thing is incredible and well explained