Szrazzt's 55 to 125 upgrade.

Well I'd been running a 55 gallon tank for almost a year when i walked into the pet store for water and I saw a used 125 for sale. It was a great price for the tank and stand so after telling my wife (she didnt say no) I got it.

Getting it home was a bit of an adventure because I drive a civic. I ended up bribing a friend of mine with a truck to come help me get the tank. The six pack of Gueness was cheaper than renting a truck.

This is a picture of the old 55 gallon tank prior to transfering stuff to the new one. As you can tell I had a bit of an algae problem due to lack of circulation. That shouldnt be a problem as soon as the two K4 knockoffs. Apparently it takes a while to ship from hong kong

 

After measuring I decided that the new stand was too short to fit the 55 gallon into. It would have only left about 2 inches for my hand and while I'm skinny I'm not that skinny.

What I ended up doing was reinforcing the stand and raising it up 5.5 inches. Here are some pictures of during the stand work.





The stand was designed to just support the tank on the four corners and that made me a bit nervous so I added some planking to fully support the bottom all the way around the tank.



I sanded the surface level and to fill in any imprefections I went ahead and added a border of thin fairly solid foam.

 

I did do a fresh water test on the tank after I had finished modifying the stand. I kept the water in for a couple of days just to make sure I didnt have a leak. The last time I filled up a tank I didnt leak test it and ended up dripping 2 or 3 drops a second from a leaky silicon joint.

 

good start szrazzt

over double in size from a 55 to a 125 - thats going to look excellent IMO
and it opens up the number of fish species you can keep which is great IMHO

Steve

 

Move day was very long and even with my 6 year old daughters help it took all day and I forgot to take pictures. I didnt reuse the sand from the 55 because it was pretty filthy and was causing most of my algae issues.

I had the thought of using the drain from the tank to feed the fuge, carbon/phos reactor and act as a main drain so after I squeezed the 55 under the stand I created this manifold to distribute the water where I wanted.

 

Good luck with that drain mainfold. I tried one a while back and it really diddn't work out how I wanted it too, so I ended up hooking one up to my return pump. For best results you need the pipe with the manifold to slope downward to the outlets.

~Will.

 

looks like your are off to a good start. that will be a nice upgrade.

 

I've got it sloping about an inch over a 20 inch run of pipe. It is actually working fairly well but I had to dial in the valves for the fuge and phos chamber or I got a lot of bubbles. Another trick when making drains like these is to have the pipes leading to the valve slope downward a bit too.

 

A build thread wouldnt be the same without a cloudy tank picture. Its with a 4 foot light fixture in the picture which was shading the ends.

 

I really really need another 60 to 100 pounds of rock but with christmas coming thats going to have to wait for next year. I am making some concrete rocks just to see if they look at all like real liverock.

This is the tank when I still had my lights in 4 foot fixtures. It is pretty but too shaded.