aquascaping with fiberglass rods

So i was reading up on aquascaping in prep for my 120g setup. i decided i want to go with some rods in the rock work for stability. the standard rod i see people use is acrylic, but thats hard to locate locally. I have also heard of people using fiberglass rods which are easier to locate as well as more rigid and I think stronger. has anyone here ever used fiberglass rods?

my fall back is PVC but that requires much larger holes than i want to drill.

 

Yes, the FG rods do work well, but make sure the rods are solid. If they are not totally solid FG, and have any polyester resin to hold them together, the polyester resin is definitely not reef safe. granted these rods are a small amount in the tank, but when making woody tanks, folks used to use polyester resin to "glue" the fiberglass matting and wood together. This practice leached all sorts of nasties into the reef since polyester is hydrophyllic and will absorb the water. Not only is that an issue for building a tank assuming the resin will keep the water in the tank, but the polyester resin has a lot of bad things (VOC's - Volitile Organic Compounds) in it it will leach out into the water.

This is from a boat building site regarding polyester resin...
"Polyester resin is the cheapest resin available in the marine industry and offers the poorest adhesion, has the highest water absorption, highest shrinkage, and high VOC's. Polyester resin is only compatible with fiberglass fibers and is best suited to building things that are not weight sensitive. It is also not tough and fractures easily. Polyesters tend to end up with micro-cracks and are tough to re-bond and suffer from osmotic blistering when untreated by an epoxy resin barrier to water. This is really cheap stuff."

That said, I don't think that the driveway markers are made with anything but polyester resin to hold the FG fibers together.

Someone on my local club's forum mentioned using FG rods for driveway marking for snowplows, and i mentioned the issues with FG rods, but nobody that has used them for the purpose you want to use them for has had any issues. I am assuming the ones people around here have used are solid, or are held together with epoxy resin, which IS completely reef safe. I used epoxy to build my 200g composite reef tank.

Now, the last time that this conversation came up, the OP ended up using acrylic rods because she did not want to risk putting poisonous VOC's into her tank.

sorry to make the post really long, but I thought that many people are not aware of the consequences of using FG rods in the tank. If there is polyester resin in the rods, they certainly are not reef safe. Shouldn't here be a materials safety data sheet for these rods? Or does that only apply to certain things? If there is a MSDS, or a list of what they are made of, the you will see what the rod is made of. Many plastics will be reef safe.