7x3x3 ft Tempered vs 7x3x2.5 ft ordinary glass tank
- Thread starter Dre07
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Okay if you want to get into semantics, "hit" is a better word. But this whole thread is based on "what if". Manufacturers put tempered glass on the bottom of tanks because it wont be HIT there. Its really just a case of if the tank does get whacked hard enough to break, do you want time to come up with a plan or do you just want the tank to give out. Ideally, you wont ever hit it but in the end tempered glass does give a darker green hue.
I very much agree with this though, ultimately acrylic is the safest bet. It's 10x stronger than glass and is pretty much shatter proof. Not to mention it gives the best possible clarity. It does get scratched easily but you can buy scratch resistant acrylic for your front panel AND theres something to be said for a material you can buff out and clean up to make look brand new even if it is scratched up. I bought a used beat up 325G tank that was all kinds of foggy, a couple hours of buffing and the front panel now looks like I just set the tank up and filled with water almost looks invisible. AND its so much easier to move, my 325G weighs about 175lbs. a 325G glass tank would weigh 4 or 5 times that much.
Tempered glass is something like 4x stronger. There's a reason Aqueon tempers the bottom of their freshwater tanks.
If the idea is that you want to go with thinner glass to keep the weight down, then yeah tempered glass is a no-brainer IMHO.
PS. Unless you are heating your aquarium to 400 degrees, I wouldn't worry about the oven glass shattering thing.
If the idea is that you want to go with thinner glass to keep the weight down, then yeah tempered glass is a no-brainer IMHO.
PS. Unless you are heating your aquarium to 400 degrees, I wouldn't worry about the oven glass shattering thing.
Yes, there is. I already explained it in a previous post.
Right, except the outer layer of glass on the oven in the second vid, was NOT turned on, or heated, when it exploded. I guess you missed that part?
Again, this isn't the only case of this happening with tempered glass used in oven doors. All industries have an acceptable range of failure on their equipment, including glass manufacturers, and including aquarium manufacturers. Usually no one hears or reads of these incidents until the failure rate is quite high, such as in the Marineland Stealth Pro heater recall in 2011. In that case the manufacturer denied responsibility right up until they were forced to do a complete recall by the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. FYI .... those heaters were marketed as being "shatterproof" , yet there were numerous cases of them doing just that, in some cases with enough force to blow the end out of a 75 gallon.
If you want to keep the weight down, the no-brainer is use acrylic.
Not if the person wants a glass aquarium and not a plastic one.
At the end of the day Acrylic is stronger, lighter, and more translucent. You trade off the fact that it scratches easier but it also buffs out easy. If youre not worried about price, go with acrylic.
Its like that at the beginning of the day too. I think you mean transparent.
After playing around with both in my time, i do prefer glass. The scratchiness of acrylic doesnt sound like a big problem at first, but gets very annoying over time.
Agreed, and unless I have missed a chapter over the years, the tank needs to be drained down to the level of the inside scratches, in order to be buffed out. Am I wrong here? Because that is most definitely a major PITA, when big tanks, and big fish are involved. I have a friend in town that has built some large acrylic tanks (300+ gallons) and the only large tanks currently in his fishroom are glass.
Depending on where the scratch is, its usually a complete breakdown. After all you dont want buffing compound getting into your carefully managed tank water.
An errant piece of sand caught in my mag-float is my most recent headache on my acrylic. Scratches all over the inside of my tank. I realize it sounds like a stupid mistake to make, but trust me--incredibly easy to do!
All my future builds will be glass, i may end up turning all my acrylic into sumps at some point.
Lepisosteus
gave me some great tips when i was trying to plan out an acrylic build but i dont think i could ever hope to replicate the stuff hes got. Glass is just much more forgiving for the amateur diy fishkeeper for sure.
Not stupid at all, this is exactly what happened to my friend, more than once. Ouch. I thought that perhaps there was some new novel way of removing inside scratches, that could be done inside the tank, and was fish safe. Apparently not. So yeah, major PITA to remove scratches, especially in a BIG tank, that contains BIG fish. In my friends case it meant removing an adult Asian aro, an adult black ray, along with numerous large clown loaches. He cleaned that tank up and sold it, made a couple more tanks and sold them, and had two large glass tanks built for his personal display tanks. (non-tempered)
