My MONSTER tank is in!

[CanadaPleco]

YA YA YA YA. so today I went to Barrie and picked up my new tank. It is TEN feet long! yep 10'. Its 24" deep and 21" high. Has an external overflow at the end with 2 x 2" drain pipes.

I cant wait to get water in it and have it all running...

Will take some pics tomorrow after I go back to barrie to return this damn 12' trailer.

Big tank not fun to move that is for sure.

[cichlidguy]

Nice! Post some pics, I need pictures of this monster.

- John

[klc]

That sure is a monster tank. I hope your floor can support it. You'll have a metric ton of water in it.

[Chouin]

That will be a nice tank !
What fish will go in it ? Vampires ?
We need some pictures
Chouin

[jackson]

Sound freaken sweet :)

Now go get a few pairs of some blue eyes so we can all be jealous LOL

Oh I also want to see some pix :)

[CanadaPleco]

OKAY Here are a few pics.

http://canadapleco.com/picture.php?albumid=2&pictureid=7

More here: http://canadapleco.com/album.php?albumid=2

Forgot to say that the front is Starfire glass :)

I will be stocking it with my 4 big L330's, possibly a pair of stingrays, some big silver dollars and I think my L200's ( I have 12 on the way from Columbia ). Which would give me a group of nearly 20 of them.

[jackson]

Very nice :)

Where are you finding all these L-330's? I need to get my hands on a few more. I have been looking for a long time now.

As for the ray's I would not keep them with the plec's. You risk having them rasp their discs and they might eat the slime coat off as well. It could work but it is a risk :)

[CanadaPleco]

I brought 4 good sized L330's home from the catfish convention. 2 pairs :)

They are easy to get right now from columbia, they are available in any size. Decent store should be able to order for you. Or Oliver at below water. They are pricey to ship at that size, but I know Oliver usually sells 6-8" or so once for like $65-80.

[jackson]

I brought 4 good sized L330's home from the catfish convention. 2 pairs :)

They are easy to get right now from columbia, they are available in any size. Decent store should be able to order for you. Or Oliver at below water. They are pricey to ship at that size, but I know Oliver usually sells 6-8" or so once for like $65-80.

Thats awesome :)

I will have to ask around more. What stores do you think are decent?

What kind of decor do you plan on putting in there? Are you going to have lights on it or no lights?

[Pleconomous]

Wow that looks like quite the tank, keep us updated! A group of 20 L200's in there would be awesome!

[CanadaPleco]

Thats awesome :)

I will have to ask around more. What stores do you think are decent?

What kind of decor do you plan on putting in there? Are you going to have lights on it or no lights?

Oliver at Below Water is prob. your safest bet to get them easily. I don't know the stores well as I am 2-3 hrs away from all the ones in Toronto. I could tell you a great store in Detroit area, but that's 6hrs away for me also.

Well I was planning on getting some more driftwood from around my property, but there's well over a foot of snow now, so that isn't going to be happening until the spring. But will be using a bunch of wood I have in the other tanks at the moment. Also going to put in a bunch of river rock, still have to go to the river and get that too, not going to be fun this time of yr either.

As for lights, I have none yet, prob. just going to wire up a bunch of small LED lights, easy on the power and not super bright.


Wow that looks like quite the tank, keep us updated! A group of 20 L200's in there would be awesome!

Ya my L200's are about my favs., so they may be in here with the L330's and thats it for plecos I believe.

[BooUrns!]

You are insane but I am envious! Nice tank.

[CanadaPleco]

You are insane but I am envious! Nice tank.


haha. thanks :)



Now go get a few pairs of some blue eyes so we can all be jealous LOL


I am really not digging the Blue Eyes. Personally I like the looks of the L330 ten times more, and lucky for me they cost 10-20 times less :)

[cichlidguy]

Great tank Rich, it's gonna look great when it's all set up.

- John

[jackson]

haha. thanks :)



I am really not digging the Blue Eyes. Personally I like the looks of the L330 ten times more, and lucky for me they cost 10-20 times less :)

LOL :)

I agree I love the L-330's one of my fav plec's for sure.

River stone is the best. I would check out the home depot near you to see if they have any left from the spring/summer. The huge bags go for about 18-30 bucks I think and They are huge bags. They are high glosee and clean rocks to boot. I bought mine from them :)

[CanadaPleco]

I like the free option, the river is 5 minutes from my house and all the rocks in all of my tanks are from there. The plecos LOVE the stuff growing on them.

[jackson]

I like the free option, the river is 5 minutes from my house and all the rocks in all of my tanks are from there. The plecos LOVE the stuff growing on them.

You dont biol the rocks befor eyou put them in?

Free is always nice :)

[CanadaPleco]

heck no... that kills all the good stuff that the fish love so much. People worry too much about things like that... I have NEVER ever boiled wood, it makes it so hard that the fish cannot even chew it. and rocks, are you kidding me. I go and grab like 200+lb of them at a time.

I also live far north of any city and the water is very clean. I wouldn't ever use rocks from say lake ontario or one of its feeder rivers or creeks.

[klc]

Free stone, how nice. Most "free" stone around my place is limestone and that doesn't work well with plecos. Is the tank glass or acrylic? Are you going to plant it? A strand of white Christmas LED lights would be cheap and festive. Easy to box in too.

[CanadaPleco]

Yep, as much free stuff as I can find for the pickings LOL all canadian shield rock, which is awesome.

The tank is all glass, the front panel is 1/2" starfire glass.

The side and back is panted black. Eventually the stand will be really nice as well as the top... It will be fully built into the wall.

[CanadaPleco]

Okay few things have happened over the past week. For starters I have been in Jamaica for my brothers wedding, it was awesome. Only to come home to about 2 feet of snow in my driveway and -20 odd degrees. YUCK.

Next, I was supposed to have an order of 12-13 L200's come in for the tank. They never left the exporters due to they were not in the best condition, so I will have to try again at a later date.

I filled up the tank today. This took forever! I did not fill it right to the top as I do not have any of the sump setup at all yet. I am using a spare Eheim Pro 2 2028 for the time being. It is well seeded, so there wont be any issues with cycling.

I emptied most of the fish from 2 of my 90 gallon tanks in the fish room. These consisted of: 4 large L330's (I thought I lost one, but 2 of them are stuck in a cave together). 12 x Silver dollars, 6 of which are Black Bared ones and getting pretty big too. 6 x Red shoulder severums. And 3 LDA31's I dunno what happened to all the rest of them, but they have disappeared as well as all my little L204's. I think maybe they were fighting too much in the 90. Hopefully I can find some more of them in the next few days in those tanks.

I still have yet to add in my 10 or so Gymnogeophagous Notre which are also starting to get to a good size.

Once I can track down some more white sand around here (which is a pain in the butt this time of yr) I will be adding lots more rocks, wood and the 6 L200's I have in another tank.

Will post some pics tmrw when the light is better.

[CanadaPleco]

Okay time for an update.

I finally got in all the plumbing for the sump. So today I was busy building a box under the tank. Its approx a 90 gallon aquarium flipped on its side. I used pond liner to line it.

Ran most of the plumbing to get into the sump, then the battery in the sawsall died so I will finish that tomorrow.

Sump is more or less done, its just a bunch of foam :)

Going to have to take another trip back to the hardware store tomorrow to get some flexible 3/4" tubing for the return lines from the sump.

Hope to have the proper filter all setup and running sometime tomorrow, YA YA.

I am really contemplating draining the whole tank and getting one of those Pangea 3d backgrounds. However they are HUGE dollars, but would look sweet. (see attachment)

[tobalman]

Check out this site from Edmonton, They have 3D background for sale in Canada,

http://www.gillsnfins.ca/deluxe3d.php#malawi_rock

Good luck

[CanadaPleco]

Thanks, I have been in contact with Patrick at Gills N Fins, he suggested not using any of the backgrounds for the tank as he is pretty sure the big Panaques will chew away at it :( So I've got to try to figure out something else now. A DIY background is not going to happen on this tank, too big. The thought of filling and draining it 10+ times is frightening.

I did get the sump 95% working yesterday however! WHOOOOO, damn do mag18's ever move a lot of water, and I want to put 2 of them in here eventually. The sumps already cleared up a lot of the crap floating around in the aquarium.

[cichlidguy]

Nice set up Rich. Whats the turn over rate with the Mag 18?

John

[CanadaPleco]

1800 gph at 0 feet. I think its running around 1000-1200gph right now.

Also have an Eheim Pro 3e and a Pro 2 2028 and a couple power heads in there, LOTS of flow.

Everything still looks very "GHETTO" but one day it will be all nice and neat. In wall design. Just need to make some more $$ first.

On a side note, I really can't believe how fast all the fish are growing in here compared to their previous homes, which were not really that small. All of the fish were previously in 90 or 125 gallon tanks. I have noticed growth on all of the fish in the past month, especially the 2 LDA31's that are in the tank. They have put on nearly a quarter their size. One of the L200's has also put on a good bit. I am just scared to see how big these black bar silver dollars will get :(

[cichlidguy]

That's awesome that your getting a better growth rate, you'll have some monsters in no time...lol. I wouldn't worry about it looking Ghetto, it looks fine. Money doesn't grow on trees, at least not here in Winnipeg :)

John

[jackson]

If I remeber correctly those SD's will get to be around 10'' and over 5'' tall.

Are you using them as dithers? if yes for what fish?

[CanadaPleco]

They are already 5-6" long I've had them for I guess around a year and they have doubled in size easily. I'm not using them as dithers at all, I just like silver dollars. Although I would trade them for a smaller species like the spotted ones.

[jackson]

I think they all get pretty large and tall. Plus your tank is big enough for them to reach almost the same size as they would in the wild.

I think these balck bars are not too cheap at least not cheap like other out there. you could sell them and buy some more plec's with the cash ;)

[CanadaPleco]

They are expensive little buggers, I think they were around $30 each when just 1.5"

Did a little more re-scape on the tank today. Added some caves, and a what I thought was a big piece of drift wood as well as some plants (plastic) to hide the maxijets a bunch.

As far as flow goes I am now running the following.

3 x Maxijet 1200's = 900gph
1 x Mag18 = 1200gph
1 x Hydor Koralia 3 or 4, cant remember which = 850gph
1 x Eheim Pro 2 2028 = 277gph
1 x Eheim Pro 3e 2078 = 480gph

So total gph in the tank is approx 3700 gph!

So I have around a 12 x turnover rate.

[Bwhiskered]

Nice tank Rich. Jerry in Brantford at The Tropical Fish Room has a big one that he picked up and will no doubt sell. It is if I remember right 8'-6" long 24 wide and 30" deep.

[CanadaPleco]

Wow, that's a nice size tank! Wish I had the money right now to get it as well :)

Today I worked on the tank a little bit more. I was not happy with where the Eheims are/where located under the stand. So I cleaned and moved the Pro 3e 2078.

I am also having an issue with a lot of floating particles in the tank, many big Panaques = LOTS of crap.

So I while cleaning out the filter, i changed one of the layers/baskets to foam. It is 2" thick filter foam. I also have finer stuff above this. I am already noticing a difference in the tank, hopefully in a few days it will be MUCH better. But anyway, I moved the big Eheim over to the left under where the overflow is, just makes sense to me to have all the filter stuff in one location. (excluding the sump of course). This is its new permanent home. I hard plumbed the intake line with 3/4" PVC as I simply did not have enough eheim tubing to run the 8 feet I needed :) Also I drilled a couple of holes through the stand to run the tubing, nice and neat this way.

Now in a week I do the other filter :)

[CanadaPleco]

Did a little more work on the tank today. I took down the 125 gallon in my fish room, which had an Eheim Pro 2 2229, (the bigger Wet dry one). I did a cleaning on it and put it right beside the Pro3e, so now I just have to move the Pro2 2028 in a week or 2 then I'll be all set on the Eheim end of things. There are getting to be a lot of tubes at the one end of the tank now!

[CanadaPleco]

Well the tank has been drained and filled again. Only have a little we sponge filter in there right now and a dozen large koi angels to get it cycling. Of course they are hiding when I took the picture.

For reference, the large rock on the left is 2.5' long a foot tall and almost a 10" deep. Was NOT fun trying to get it in, well over 100lb.

Still need to get some large rocks for the right hand side of the tank. There are approx. 6-7 caves in there so far.

454

[cichlidguy]

Looks Great Rich, I'm so jealous.

-John

[Jkhuu]

oh man..envious of the setup. Great job on it. I also like the lighting. Will that big nice piece of driftwood going in there ?

JK

[CanadaPleco]

oh man..envious of the setup. Great job on it. I also like the lighting. Will that big nice piece of driftwood going in there ?

JK

Thanks :) No on the drift wood, it was too big in every way.

[Zebrapl3co]

Wow, those rocks are heavy. Are you sure the tank won't buckle against the weight. 100+ lbs is pretty heavy.

[CanadaPleco]

Wow, those rocks are heavy. Are you sure the tank won't buckle against the weight. 100+ lbs is pretty heavy.

They are fine, they are on 2-3" of gravel. and the tank is sitting on stryo. Will be fine :) Really not much weight when compared to the amount of water in there. The weight is dispersed over a pretty large area as well. Going to get some more rocks hopefully tonight. When you think about it also I have upwards of 300lb of gravel in here alone!

Oh also the rocks are not leaning at all against any vertical glass! Only on the bottom.

[CanadaPleco]

UPDATE:

Okay getting some stuff ready for the new fish coming in wednesday. I have hard plumbed in my Eheim Pro3e 2078, just moved it from another tank, so its nice and cycled. I am a big fan of hard plumbing my canisters. So much easier and cleaner then the tubing.

Also hooked up a 2229 w/d. I am having a hell of a time getting it to work right, have spent hours and well still do not have the w/d function working right. They have to be 31" or something like that from bottom of the filter to top water line. Did it all, and still nothing. Will have to take it all apart again and check everything (prob missed some dirt somewhere).

Picked up my soon to be main filter on the tank until I can build my sump as well. It is an Eheim Pro 3 2180, its got a 500w heater in it. Could not resist it on ebay, now to find enough media for the thing. Holds 10 litres, I know I do not have that much kicking around.

Will try to get some pics of how I have hard plumbed the 2078 when I get back from Detroit with the new fish.

[CanadaPleco]

I have come into a problem and have not yet been able to come up with a good way to solve it with this tank. That is the LIDS!

The cross bracing in the center of the tank (2 of them) are higher then the euro bracing which causes me problems for anything that I can think of for a lid. Anyone have any ideas?

505

506

507

508

[cichlidguy]

I'm not sure what you want to do... Maybe you could silicone a glass strip under the center brace in between the euro bracing and have the lid supported by that

John

[Jkhuu]

I'm not sure what you want to do... Maybe you could silicone a glass strip under the center brace in between the euro bracing and have the lid supported by that

John

Rich,

I was thinking along the same line. Possibly silicone glass braces at the 2 ends.
The either have flip or sliding glass lids going length-wise of the tank.

[Bwhiskered]

Big Al's in Oakville has some L-027's At least that's what they are calling them. They look a lot like the L-330.