Building a cement tank!

  • We are currently upgrading MFK. thanks! -neo
J

Jridge716

Feeder Fish
MFK Member
Aug 4, 2009
135
1
0
Buffalo, NY
Hey guys, I recently moved into my first house, and finally have a basement to make into my fish room/ wife retreat. I am thinking about building a open top cement tank. Im thinking between the 500-700 gallon range. It would be leveled and set directly on the basement floor. I would like to frame out the front to accomodate glass.

My questions are

What type of cement should I use, im thinking using cinderblocks reinforced with rebar and filled with cement.

Due to possible foundation shifting, should I build the structure on a floating piece of plywood and not directly cement to the floor?

What type of water sealant or epoxy should I use to coat the interior of the tank

Please give me some suggestions or better ideas. My buddy is a contarctor so he will do the cement and all of that, but he has no idea as far as completely water sealing the tank. Thanks in advance
 
Forget the plywood. Go straight to the floor.

You could use Pond Armour, but there are all types of epoxies and sealants that would work. I would find out what is available in your area so that you could reduce the cost a bit by avoiding shipping.
 
This is like ours, but we don't have glass. We used cinder blocks, filled with cement, and the rebar is attached to the concrete slab. We had a really bad experience with Pond Armor. They got about six hundred dollars out of us, and the thing still leaked, and they kept saying, "Oh, well now you need to do this..." every time we did another coat and it didn't work. We ended up going with a liner. By that point, no other coating would have stuck onto the Pond Armor, and we had no idea how the heck to get it off. I'd go with something else. Other than the fact that we had to use the liner, I really like it. And it's not going anywhere, that's for sure. We had looked at Intex pools, but I didn't trust it to stand up over time. I like the way ours turned out. There are some photos in my gallery if you'd like to see.
 
Hmm, great pics. I was thinking about Drylok as a sealant. I will set it directly on the slab then. The part that really scares me is figuring out how to frame the viewing window. There has to be a pretty simple way, especially because im not doing it on the scale of 5,000 gallons :P
 
I work at sherwin williams. use hi solids polyurethane as a base coat and then use macropoxy 646 as the top coat. stuff is expensive and extremely heavy duty (requires specially thinners for clean up or it will be where it is forever once dry) but works very very well. i have people using it as submerged marine paint on their boats out here on the west coast. also call around ur local stores as we often mistint paint and because it is no longer useful for the store we sell the stuff for 5 bucks a gallon.
 
seriously you must must put a drain in if you do that setup.

im intrigued about how it will turn out
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
MonsterFishKeepers.com
Top Bottom