Fiddler crabs are neat

Not much substance to this post, but I just think fiddler crabs are fun. We currently have two of them living in our living room tank, along with a pair of constantly breeding angelfish. They are always very busy (the crabs).

Hello

Google stylized this. Instagram-crab.

Pardon me. Ahhhh!

180 Gallon Red-Eared Slider Aquarium Build - Part 1

Quickly basking (SPOILER, new tank)

This is Quickly, my wife's very chill red-eared slider. She's had him about 10 years now... Longer than she and I have known each other. He's likely to live another 30. There's a story behind his name, but I'll leave that for her to tell.

When I met Quickly, he was living in a 20 gallon aquarium, and had outgrown it. When we moved in together, we upsized him to a 50 gallon tank. That seemed like plenty. But he kept growing, and we began to realize that he really didn't have enough space, the tank was difficult to keep clean (turtles are messy!) and he didn't have any stimulation. This became really apparent when we moved his tank out of the den during some renovations. He was right there with us as we'd eat dinner, and we started to plan a new tank.

Here he is in his 50 gallon tank.
Not enough space for a turtle.

 We researched all sorts of tanks, and went so far as to purchase a 100 gallon black rubbermaid tank to build a habitat. But having him in with us during renovation really made us aware that he had a personality, and we wanted to see him. So we began looking at options for the largest glass tank we could fit into our den, and we'd knock a hole in the wall so we could see him. The largest tank we could fit was going to be 6 feet by 3 feet, and hold about 270 gallons. After pricing all that out for a while, realizing it would have to be a custom tank, we turned it down a notch. Gemma found a used 180 gallon tank (2 feet front to back instead of 3) in Astoria, I managed to wrangle that ~400 pound tank into the trusty minivan, and home I went. And then back again, to pick up the stand.

Steel stand in process of being
sanded and repainted

The stand was steel, and looked fine... At night. In light of day, as I was sanding and repainting, I realized that this was something some welder had tacked together. I needed this to handle more than 2000 pounds of glass and water, as well as not crack the slate flooring in the den, so I decided I'd have to build my own stand. I'll probably turn the steel one into a garage workbench or something.

I planned to drill the tank for overflows (I'm a reef guy at heart) and have a sump, so I needed to get that done first. I've drilled holes in tanks a few times before, but never something this big (or expensive). But the standard stuff about drilling glass applied, going slow, don't push, etc, etc. I have a right-angle Milwaukee drill that is about 200x overmatched for this job, so that was obviously the one I used!

Like a donut hole, but glass

Big drill w/ diamond bit

Three holes, zero cracked tanks

Alright! Three holes, no cracks, things looking good! Previous owner had painted the back glass black, I removed that. You'll notice the leaves on the driveway, this is October of 2015. This project took a very long time, and I am very happy that it took its sweet time to snow that year! Since I wasn't liking the stand that I'd received along with this tank, I had to build my own. I was comfortable building a strong stand. The 240 gallon reef tank I built in 2011 is doing fine, the stand is rock solid, the engineermanship is sound. But that stand is hidden, built into a wall, and not finished in any sort of furniture-grade style. This one would need to be. Furthermore, we wanted the maximum amount of swimming area for Quickly, so his basking area would be above the main tank.

Sketchup makes neat drawings!

So the plan I came up with was a standard 2x4 construction stand, just like the one I'd built before, but this time wrapped with a craftsman-style veneer. The back would be open. The glass above the main tank is 11 inches high, and there to keep Quickly from climbing out and cracking himself into pieces on the stone floor. His basking platform would be on the right hand third of the tank.

The previous owner of the tank had included the terrible metal stand, which takes up space in my driveway even as I type this, but he'd also given me a 4 foot LED lighting fixture. Not enough to grow plants, but enough to light the tank not under the basking platform. Basically, perfect for a turtle tank.

Again, thanks Mother Nature for not snowing me in and preventing this build!

2x4 and 2x8 construction, sheathed
in plywood. The plywood on the back
extends down about 12".

If you follow along closely later on, you'll notice that the original design had the doors coming together with a very narrow separator. The entire front was going to be openable, no supports. I second-guessed this later in the process and added a middle support. Very likely not needed, but I'm not disappointed with the final result, and it is definitely not going to sag. So the doors have a 3" margin between them.

The doors are glued and pocket-screwed together, with the center panel dadoed to accept some pine paneling pieces. I really like how these came out.

The tricky part was cutting the plywood that I planned to use on the front of the cabinet to accept these panels. I initially tried using a thin-kerf circular saw, but found that the blade wandered enough to absolutely wreck the cut out, and I had to start over. Similar variances happened when I tested using a jigsaw and a regular kerf saw. Starting fresh, I ended up creating a jig and then using a router with a bearing to follow the jig and cut the opening PERFECTLY. Should have done it that way to start.

Hallelujah, perfect fit!

The top of the stand was a challenge, more for sourcing the correct materials than for any complicated cutting. I wanted it to be at least 1.5" thick and solid wood. I ended up getting several .75" boards and gluing them up.

That almost immediately failed, as the boards began to dry out unevenly and cupped up like crazy. Then I weighted the top down with buckets of water overnight to straighten the top out, one bucket leaked, dissolved the glue, and the piece came apart. That was... Frustrating.

So back to the hardware store I went, and purchased a flat, solid wood door. The door was about 18" too long, so I sliced it down. Turns out 'solid wood' is one of those marketing terms. Yes, what was inside that door is technically wood, in the same sense that a hotdog is technically beef. It was a very chippy, sawdusty mess! So I then had to cut it down more and attach a 'real wood' end and back piece. Wouldn't matter for looks, as it was being painted, but it sure did put me in a bad mood, as I was probably about $400 into wood just for the stand top, and it was taking weeks to get it ready. But then, just like that, it was done!

Waddya mean we need to
get this into the house?

OK, not exactly done, but it sure looks like a stand now, don't you think? Since this was getting painted, I just screwed straight through the plywood into the 2x4 frame. The 2x4s carry the load, and the plywood prevents them from racking sideways under load. The screws would be covered over. The strap hinges are great, I love them.

Looking in from outside...
Tank stand!

Finally, on December 21, 2015, I got the tank stand into the house with its first coat of paint. This about two and a half months after Gemma first found the tank, so this project is not proceeding quickly (pardon the pun), but it's moving. Next step, shore up the floor. The last thing we want is this tank to land up next to the saltwater tank in the basement.

All told, the tank plus stand plus water plus rocks plus sump plus whatever was going to approach 3000 pounds. I knew the direction of the
joists, their span, etc. The tank is only a few feet from a foundation wall. It's unlikely that there would be a problem even if I did nothing. BUT, it's perched on a stone floor, and even a little flex is likely to crack the slate. So I added a 4x4 reinforcement to the basement below the tank. It's belt and suspenders.

Or I hope it is!

It took until January 10 before it was finally time to wrassle the tank into the house. No white Christmas this year, no snow to speak of. Last year the tank would have been under a foot of ice and snow, but not this time. I'd managed to find my suction-based lifting handles, so the wrangling wasn't nearly as bad as getting the thing into and out of the minivan. But finally, the tank was in the house, no more worries about the weather, and phase two could commence!

Leak check! Buying on Craiglist and not testing
anything for three months could have gone - badly. All OK!

Part 2 to follow!

Lots of valves and bits

Here are the parts, assembled for your viewing pleasure, about to go into building out the backend waterworks for my reef tank. The size reference is difficult to see, but the valves on the back left are about 12" tall. They're massive.

3-way PVC ball valve

This is one of those things that probably only gets me excited, but the 3-way valve for part of my 240 gallon reef tank has finally arrived, and if a valve can be sexy, I think this one is!

Now I'm just waiting for the 60 other plumbing parts to arrive. 

240 Gallon reef tank build - part 1

My old site had a link to my 80 gallon saltwater reef tank. It had graphs of temperature, pH and ORP, status of lighting, and a small webcam that updated every 15 seconds or so. This was circa 2002. I've long since shut down that tank, moved several times, and finally I own my own house. I'm in the process of finishing the basement and adding a new 240 gallon dream tank, custom built into the wall. I'll document a bit of the process here!

My old tank was 48" long, 18" deep and 24" tall. Each dimension was CLOSE, but not quite what I wanted. So this time around I went with the largest dimensions I could realistically want and also importantly, FIT into my little basement. The new tank is 72" long, 24" deep, and 31" tall. And just barely fit into the basement.

As I was redoing the basement, I realized "Wow, this is where the tank should go!" Up until then, I'd planned to tank over a substantial part of the dining room above, reinforce the floor, run additional power, etc. But the basement was a blank slate, already reinforced (it's concrete!) and was all found space, so no stealing living area from the other inhabitants of the house.

So I immediately tore out the studs I'd begun adding for the wall between the playroom and the storage room, and began to design and construct a built-in stand:

As you can see, it's built from 2x4 dimensional lumber except for the top, which is 2x8... And it is massively overbuilt. A single 24" 2x4 can handle about 19,000 pounds (assuming you can prevent it from moving sideways). I have eight 2x4s in compression, and the entire stand is wrapped in 1/2" plywood to give lateral stability. In reality, the plywood is the real structure of the stand, going without it would be very dangerous. I still have some concerns about the 72" unsupported span on the back, for sump access. Time will tell if I've made a miscalculation. The top of the stand is 3/4" plywood, with a 6" ledge around the sides and back so I can kneel or stand to access the tank from above.

Here's the hole in the wall, drywalled (but not yet spackled or painted) and ready to receive the tank:

Moving the tank into place turned out to be... Challenging. I had three guys helping me, but the total weight of the tank was well over 400 pounds, and the thing is delicate and unwieldy. We could not lift the tank outright, but we could lift an end of it at a time, so we could lower the back out of the car, then lower the front. I'd tacked carpet onto sheets of OSB to make sleds, and those proved to be our salvation. We were able to get the tank from the one in the car onto one on the driveway, then walk that sheet over to the side door of the house, then put the one from the car as a ramp into the door, etc. It was quite a process.

In that second (top right) image, you can see the carpet ramp and the painted/unpainted shadows of the two steps I had to remove from the basement stairs to allow the tank to enter the building. Prior to ordering the tank I'd made a mockup with the same dimensions, and moved it from outside to inside, and dimensionally, it worked. However, I did not take the weight into account, and it wasn't possible to move the tank through the same motions when the real day came. Live and learn there. The third image (bottom left) is the tank sitting half on the ledge of the foundation wall, half on a 2x4 brace I'd made for just this purpose, as a staging step prior to the last push, getting the tank onto the stand (last picture).

I've since replaced the steps, here they are a day or two later:

Once the tank was physically in place, I began building the wall above the tank. I didn't want the wall to impede the lighting entering the tank, so I built the bottom of the wall at an angle, shown below in various stages of being built and drywalled:

Finishing the drywall was a massive pain in the butt, because there was a giant fish tank in the way! But it came along bit by bit, and finally came out ok!

Tunze Osmolator Universal 3155 Review

I wrote this review circa 2003, when I couldn't find any information online regarding the osmolator prior to purchase, and I felt I could help out. Since then, info has proliferated, competing top-off controllers have come to market (including some sexy peristaltic-pump-based ones), and I shut down the system that used this controller. But the information is still mostly valid (the osmolator has been only minorly updated, and it still uses that silly plastic pump), so enjoy. But take with at least nine years worth of salt.

Since I got my tank in the summer of 2002, I'd been maintaining my water level using a 2 gallon jug set on top a PVC shelf I built in my sump. Every time the water level got below a certain point, GLUG, a bit of water would flow from the jug, and everything stayed pretty well stabilized. But while my solution was simple and reliable (as long as I remembered to fill the jug every two days or so), its flaw was that the jug took up a lot of space in my sump, and 2 gallons really doesn't last that long... A weekend trip would empty the jug. So a better solution was in order.

 I started looking at various improved solutions, from hooking my RO/DI directly to the tank with a float switch, to expensive peristaltic dosing pumps, to simply getting a bigger jug. Then I stumbled across the Tunze Osmolator Universal at MarineDepot. It took me a little bit of guesswork to figure out exactly what "this sensor is insensitive to soiling, light or magnetic fields" and "even small waves or level variations cannot irritate the unit." really meant (Although the translator's English is better than my German), and there didn't seem to be any reviews out there on the web talking about this unit. Hopefully my description will be helpful to anyone considering upgrading their water top-off solution.

 The Tunze Osmolator Universal 3155 comes with 4 main parts:

• Tunze 5017 Water Level Controller: The basic brains of the controller system. It is hard-wired to the optical and float-switch sensors, with a shortish wire with a strange electrical connector at the end (more on that further down) for the pump. The power supply plugs into the bottom of the controller. Four lights tell you what's going on: A green LED is usually shown, when the system is balanced. If you fiddle with the optical sensor, you'll see this light blink on and off as it detects happy/sad water status. If the optical sensor stays off for long enough (about 2 seconds), the pump will switch on for a minimum of 10 seconds, along with a yellow LED indicating active pumping. 
• Optical (IR) Waterlevel Sensor: This is a pretty fancy little gadget. As you can see from the picture, it has a slightly pointed tip that points down into the water. What you can't see from the image is that the tip is clear, with an LED package on either side. Actually, I'm guessing that one is an IR LED, the other is an IR detector. My uneducated guess is that when water contacts the bottom of this, it essentially causes the light being emitted by the LED to be channelled to the sensor, much the same way as fiber optics channel light by bouncing it off the interface between materials of different refractive indices. Anyways, that doesn't matter. Whenever water touches the tip, the Osmolator is happy. When it doesn't, the Osmolator is sad. Since there are no moving parts, this sensor should be very reliable. I'll have to see if over time any sort of salt crust develops. If it does, I'm sure just rubbing the sensor would fix any mischief. 
• Magnetic Float Switch: This switch is your panic/cutoff. If for some reason the optical sensor doesn't register that the water has been replenished, the float switch will both cut the pump and sound an alarm. A constant beep tone. It's annoying, but it wouldn't wake me up, it's not very loud. But if I were awake, I'd likely hear it and try to do something about it. This is really the last safety, because if the system fills to the point that this alarm triggers, you've probably got a MASSIVE failure and your tank is siphoning into your sump or something equally evil, and if that is the case, it's probably power-failure-related, and if that's the case, this alarm won't be working because the Osmolator doesn't have a battery backup, and it won't have been the pump's fault anyways, because there's no power! But it's a nice thought. 
• Water pump: The final piece of the puzzle. Just a normal pump. Has a power lead coming off it that hooks to the strange connector from the controller. When I say 'strange,' I mean 'poorly designed.' Instead of having a standard 'plug,' the end of the pump wire just has two stripped wires. You have to then screw these wires into terminals on the wire coming from the controller. It makes me uneasy to have bare wire near salt water. I may replace this in the future with some sort of real plug, or just solder the wires and seal them with heat-shrink. Low voltage or not, shorting the wire would NOT be a good thing. Also, I'd like it if the pump was either A) weighted at the bottom or B) had suction-cup feet. As you can see from the picture, the pump is tall and skinny. And top-heavy. 
• Power Supply: Really, a minor part of the system, but strange enough that I thought I should comment. The power supply is HUGE. For some reason, they include a unit that can be configured to supply anywhere from 1.5V to 12V (The Osmolator requires 9V). Why they would ship a supply that is four times larger than a simple 9V power supply is beyond me. Just make sure you have room on your power strip for this baby, for it will take at least 2 spots. 

Once turned on, the controller will run the pump for at least 10 seconds, and max out at 10 minutes. The actual amount of water that the pump can add in that amount of time will depend on how far it has to pump the water... At 3 ft, 10 seconds should be about 1/2 cup. 10 minutes would be about 2 gallons. Pumping 6 feet, you can cut those figures in half. So, even if both the optical sensor and the float switch malfunctioned, assuming your tank can hold an extra 2 gallons without overflowing, you'd be fine. In my experience with pumps and all things mechanical, you're far more likely for them to stick 'off' than 'on', so the most likely failure state is for the controller to run for 10 minutes and realize that it hasn't filled the tank... This could also happen if the refill container ran dry. In that case, the Osmolator will very graciously beep at you until you take care of it.

 Now, the big question I had that I couldn't find answered on the web was: Does the pump have siphon protection? My sump tank is floor-level, and I wanted to place the refill tank around waist-level so I could refill it easier. I want to make sure that when the pump shut off, the water wouldn't siphon down into the sump and overflow the system. Well the answer (which seems obvious to me now, but didn't then), is NO, the pump is a regular old pump and has no protection built in at all. The refill container water level MUST be below the waterlevel of the tank it is filling. So I can't run the line from the osmo-pump into the sump. But the solution is simple. You just run the line up to the main aquarium, and place it above the waterline (so the main tank won't siphon back into the storage container). I have mine pumping into one of the overflow boxes, so the fresh/salt mixing still doesn't take place in the main tank, but there is 0% chance of siphon. 

 I don't plan on testing this, but there is also an option for the Osmolator that allows Kalkwasser dosing (replacing your evaporated water with limewater) that apparently keeps the solution stirred in the storage tank. It sounds like a pretty neat feature, but I'm instead planning on adding a calcium reactor to my tank in the near future so I'll never know for sure. If anyone wants to comment, please shoot me an email. 

The Good: 

• Set and forget... Even beeps if you forget to fill it Multiple safeties to prevent overflow 
• Takes up very little space in sump 
• Complete (but strangely worded) manual 
• Accessories available to allow Kalkwasser dosing 
• Less expensive that hiring a butler to do it 

The Bad: 

• More expensive than buying a 5-gallon water cooler jug and some tubing 
• Sensors are hard-wired, making it difficult to run wires through holes 
• Pump wiring has strange plug that seems to invite corrosion or electrical shorts 
• Pump is somewhat top-heavy 
• HUGE generic power supply