I will be moving up from my 300g to 1200g this summer. I'm building mine from plywood. It will be 8'x8'x30". I can't give any info on maintaining a 1000+ tank yet. But I feel it won't be much different then maintaining my 300g.
What kind of fish did you keep, how many and how big were they?Retuks;5012739; said:for me, it tends to be 1000 gallon tanks are less fun. going over 500 really makes it kind of boring if your tank is so wide you can't see the fish if they are on the far side of the tank as well.
i had a 1000 gal at the shop i set up but it backfired when all the fish would hang out in the far end of the tank and it was a good 5 feet to the wall. you'd have to make it long and high to be worth the size as i find it hard to enjoy fish in a 1000 gal any more than in a reef. the point of a tank is to force the fish to be seen any time you want to see it. otherwise, build a pond and imagine how happy your fish are rather than watching them.
A few questions for you...I agree here, I upgraded from a 220 to a 500 and from what the owner of the 500 said to me when I bought it 2000Watts of heat to heat it. He lives in the same city as I do so temps are the same and his house is new and likely had insulation my house is built in the 1950's and has no insulation. So the heating alone would jump from 900 watts to 2000. As far as pumps go if you want to spend the cash up front and save on the back end on electricity you can't do better then Dolphin Pumps, and if someone says you can I challenge them to show me the power curve.
Thanks for the info...hopefully you know I wasn't trying to be a jerk or confrontational...I seriously wanted to know if there was a more efficient pump at that flow and head pressure because my utility company charges $0.40+ a KWh! A few watts here and there really adds up so I'm looking for the most efficient equipment possible. I checked out their website...they look like really nice pumps.65 in the winters,
Note sure how often they come on.
I stand half corrected, at the middle range pumps with high flow low head reeflo wins when you start talking about high head high flow like the manta ray series the dolphin comes out on top.
Dolphin Aqua Sea Diamond 9500 20' 160GPM 1334 watts 9600GPH
MantaRay Gold 19' 130GPM 1144 watts 7800gph
There are also some other middle ground results, I was doing research for a high head when I found these so I just thought the middle range dolphin was the same thanks for pointing that out.
I just got a 10x3x4 and I think I'm going to go with natives because of the cost of heating it if I were to keep tropicals (educated guess would be around $200 to $300 per month) and the possibility of a power outage wiping everything out. I would like to use natural gas to heat it via a heat exchanger, but I would have to run plumbing and a gas line and I don't want to spend anymore money.Downside to 1000 gallon is likely it ends up in the basement or you have to put additional supports in place. 5500 for 1,000 is very cheap. I question the quality and thickness of the acrylic being used. My buddy has a tank just shy of 1,000 10X4X3. The tank was 7500.00 to build. This did not include freight or retail cost. Of course he designed it for his needs and so it had many large overflows, which added to the cost.
He lost all of his fish this past winter when the heater for the room froze and the heaters in the wet-dry could not keep up with the falling temperature.
Water changes took hours on end. He used a 10,000 per hour sump pump to drain (easy part), but filling was very slow and kept him grounded to the house for hours.