Time to try a wooden aquarium
Had a CODE RED over the weekend. After seeing how bad a small leak can get with the sump, I waisted no time and spent the whole weekend trouble shooting and repaireding. This project was an experiment with many teaching moments. Long story short. It was a bulkhead leak. Thats all. Living room looked as though I called up the National Guard for a natural disaster. 1. Always wall off around bulkheads. Glad I did that. I was able to seal off the area to work on it. The aquarium is so deep I could not assess the integrity of surface around bulkhead. And it would be hard to remove silicone from last seal.
2. I will never have a 32” stem coming off bulkhead. The intake space also houses 5 300 watt heateres, and a pond UV sterilizer. Moving equipment around most likely caused failure.
3. More space in area.
Cant wait to build version 2.0 with all I gave learned.
Once intake was sealed off I drained the water and wet sanded the base. No easy task. Once dry I inserted the bulkheads and flooded the floor of the intake with 2 stage epoxy. Once semi dry I filled it with quickset morter mixed with 2 stage epoxy paint. I shortened the stems. Once dry coated with epoxy leaving 1” threaded PVC. Now I have a solid, i mean SOLID base. I cut a new overflow, and invested in ONE 800 watt heater. So now I only have 3 heaters and a UV sterilizer. Fewww
Damn man that sucks you had to do all that but glad it's going back together well now. After you have the heater control set up let me know how you like it. I've been seriously thinking of getting some for my tanks as a piece of mind type thing and have been looking at the Bluebird model which looks like it is probably similar to the Finnex one you got.
So far I really like it, thermometer and thermostat! 800 watts only gets my tank to 83 maybe 84. And it is well insulated. Other than that I love it. 86 would be my target, but my acaras, geos, rams may not like it. If I only had Discus and angles 88 to 90.
That's a lot of wattage lol. I was amazed at how well my 240g holds heat being acrylic with the big 3d Bg I think all that foam helps. Because just last weekend I had a heater fail, noticed my normal 80 temp was all the way up to 84. I had two 300w heaters in it. I took the bad one out and amazingly it holds 80f with just the single Jager 300w heater now, and that heater isn't even really having to work hard, it's only on maybe 50% of the time. I can't figure out how it is doing it to be honest because the tank is in my basement here in Michigan and it gets down to 62f room temp at night down there.
