Anyone have 10 feet long tank built by Midwest Custom ?

[flamenco-t]

I am working on design and I am curious about a few things about Midwest tank that is 10 feet in length.

1. How thick are your acrylic ? front, back, top and bottom. Are your top and bottom made by joining two sheets together or a single sheet (for 10 feet)

2. Where are your overflows, how much flow are you pushing ? are you getting enough flows to eliminate dead spots in the tank ?

3. In relation to above, what kind of filtration are you running ?

My current tank is a tenecor 10x3x2.5 tall. I am disliking on how tenecor did the two overflows. I got my tank to where it runs silent, but I am not pushing as much as flow that I want. I have the opportunity to do another tank and I want to make sure I learned from my lessons and yours

Thanks

Stan

 

[Jc1119]

I have an 8'. I haven't measured it myself but it's thick. Really thick. No noticeable bowing on the front panel really at all. The overflows can actually be put anywhere you want. Chris was great with letting me setup the tank the way I needed it, and i needed different overflows. First I had him move them in from each side about a foot. For the species I was intending to keep, I had a plan to basically build a tree root system around each overflow and I needed the extra space on both sides for it to work. Moving the overflows helped me create two extra zones in the tank and when keeping larger cichlids and loricariids, the more zones the better.

I need the tank to be silent too, but I wanted to have the ability to upgrade my pumps without having to redo the system. Each over flow has 3 bulkheads. The 1" is my return running back up an the other 2 are 1 1/2" drains, one primary and one backup( in each overflow). Herbie style controlled with a gate valve.

The tank not only has completely silent overflows, but the sump is as well. Right now I am running a pair of q16000's and id guess my total gph is probably around 2400, or about 8 times an hour. Judging by the fact that my gate vale is about 90%closed, Id bet I could push 5000 gph through this system without any issues whatsoever.
The only extra things I added were a pair of Koralia's on the inside walls of my overflows. I run them very low and point them back up towards the overflows. The returns are angled diagonally downward from the back corners, basically opposite from what the Koralia's are doing. I have 2 spots in the back corners of the tank where a bit of dirt collects, but other than that, the tank stays really clean. And has the legs to be able to take a major horsepower upgrade simply by changing pumps.

My midwest is bar far the best built tank I own. It's the build in my signature, a lot more detailed......

 

[flamenco-t]

Thanks John,

How many linear inches (or feet) is your overflow weir (teeth) ? My current problem with my tenecor is that there's only 24" of overflow weir (where the water drains) and 3/4" tall teeth. It's not enough to drain on a 10 feet tank.

I too run herbie style overflow, but the main problem is that there's not enough overflow teeth to let the water drains.

 

[swk]

You could remove the teeth and use gutter guard to keep small fish out. They are pretty easy to remove with a dremel or similar multi-tool

 

[Jc1119]

Thanks John,

How many linear inches (or feet) is your overflow weir (teeth) ? My current problem with my tenecor is that there's only 24" of overflow weir (where the water drains) and 3/4" tall teeth. It's not enough to drain on a 10 feet tank.

I too run herbie style overflow, but the main problem is that there's not enough overflow teeth to let the water drains.

Im not sure the actual measurement, but Im only about a third of the way up the teeth. My boxes are slightly bigger than normal probably 24 linear inches per box. The teeth themselves are pretty deep and pretty wide. If I decided to throw a pair of Hammerheads on this tank the overflow teeth would be able to keep up.

if you look t the water line in the last pic, you can see there's quite a bit of room left between the water and the top......the other pics give you an idea of how they are layed out

 

[doviiman]

If you look at my build thread (822 gallon tank in this section) though not built by mid west, it is 10ft, and has 2 overflow on the external sides. I can get box measurment if you like, but it moves a lot of water. I am also using three air stone to aid if there is any dead spots. So much that I had to slow it down some. I have no way of telling if there are dead spots, but from adding a few minnow to see what the current was like i can see where they seem to be swiming against the current at the bottom center of the tank. The tank is built out of four single ten foot sheets (top bottom and of course back and front). The sheets however are 1.25 thick. This had me a little concern, but after seening the build and the way its constructed, i sleep well at night. Plus warranty helps.lol
I am using two pro clear 400 sumps with bio and pond matrix, three Nu clear canister, soon to be four (two 25 mircon two 100 micron) and one UV sterilizers.