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Aquarium Racks Are All Setup

By King of DIY on

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The remainder of the racks and the aquariums have arrived and they're just scattered throughout my yard as well as in the gallery right now. For example, there's four of them out here underneath my pergola, a couple are in here inside my workshop. Actually, one is just unwrapped and testing at one of the aquadecor backgrounds as you guys can see. More on this in a future video, but this isn't siliconed in place yet. I was just trying it out, seeing what it's going to look like. Again, we'll circle back to all of the aquascaping supplies that are now here in a future video so we can go over them in detail and what the plans are.

Rest of the racking system though is now in place. All the aquariums are scattered throughout here just for some simple reasons. One, I have to get them all plumbed and scaped before I install them into the racks. I don't want to have to move them around twice to somewhere out there, somewhere outside. Being outside is totally fine. They're glass, if they get wet, well, they're an aquarium they're supposed to get wet. Then there's four inside the racking systems, because I simply ran out of space, and I can maneuver and position these racks where I want them to go with one aquarium inside of it, no problem.

As you can see though, the racks are spaced out slightly in between them. This is for a very simple reason. One, it fills up the entire wall, giving it a more aesthetic look. Two, the outsides of my power heads which are going to be the MP40, the vortex by Ecotech. This is the motor that goes on the outside. This has to go over here, so I need room to get my arm in there and fit them in. Now this has to go up against the glass though, so I will have to drill into the sides of the tanks here, which is not going to be hard. It's a simple hole saw.

Those panels are actually relatively simple to replace as well. If I ever changed my mind or I move these racks around and I want this covered again, I'll just get ahold of customaquariums.com, who sent and built all of this, and let them know I need another panel. In between the spaces is about four inches of space. There's a couple of things I want to talk about. The first thing I want to address though is all of the crating supplies that came with the tanks. Now, many of you guys know that I had a shipping container here, or a garbage container here.

Actually, this is the second one, I filled up the first one within two hours of it being here. That's because over the past four months a ton of construction has been going on. It's not just the crates that were garbage that was here. There was so much other stuff that I needed to throw out. However, out of those crates and the supplies that they came in, or all the plywood and two by fours and whatnot, I had a friend come over and he wanted to have them, so gave them to him. He's going to repurpose them. No problem. They didn't end up in the garbage.

Definitely running out of space in the gallery though, we've got some lids. We've got some plumbing supplies. We got here more plumbing supplies and some pre-filters. We've got the seamless sumps. I can't wait to set these up. I'm really excited about how we'll set those up, but we'll see what happens. More of the customaquariums hose over here. You guys know I can never have enough hose. Then lots of their biological media here. I mentioned there was only two bags, but there's actually three bags and a container, and these must weigh about 40, 50 pounds a piece. Some more lids there.

Definitely running out of places to put this stuff. I technically could fit everything in the gallery, but I still have to prepare to move in the 375 gallon tank. Then once we get that in there, I guess you could say all hell is going to break loose. Now, back to the racking systems for a second. Look at the little reflection in the tank. I got to love that. The tank actually has proper lights on it right now. They're not really fine tuned, but you guys will see this, the lighting and everything here in an update shortly. We will be planting this aquarium here within the next few days, so make sure you stay tuned for that because that should be interesting to say the least.

Now that I've decided where the racks are going to be finally placed, I want to address something, a few questions that you guys were sending in to me about the racks themselves. One is, "How far to the wall can you have them? How are you going to plumb them? How do the tanks go in? What's supporting them?"`And so forth. Let's quickly cover that. This is a one and a half inch bulkhead, this is a one and a half inch drain. This is the biggest part that's going to come out the back.

So we need the tanks to be at least three, four inches from the back of the wall so this can go in behind it. If you look down at the aquariums here, you'll see that they're all drilled. These are for the bulkheads. Now, if we look right above it, you can see in the racks, there's holes in the racking system to match up with the bulkhead whole. All of that plumbing simply goes right through this rack. Now, to get the aquariums into the racks, honestly, you just slide them right in. They are a perfect fit.

You might have a millimeter or two on each side and maybe above it, but when you're standing in front of them, that is not apparent at all. It looks like it's perfectly formed to this, which is awesome. Once we get the lids on here and we close these, everything of these seams, every one of these seams is actually silicone. We're not going to get a ton of evaporation out of there either, yet there will be ventilation within the aquariums. Now, if we take a closer look into the rack here, you can see that the support systems are right here.

This is about a three inch, maybe a three and a half inch vertical metal beam that's going across and actually runs around the whole thing, so that stops it from sagging. However, it also has a lip above it that the tank sits on. Above this lip sits some three quarter inch plywood. The tank simply sits on top of that, and the perimeter of the tank rests on the lip of the metal. That's identical for the top and bottom. Now, what I've decided to do is I'm going to install all of the backgrounds into the aquariums with silicone, let them cure, followed by some scaping.

I'll dump in sand and gravel and whatever substrates I want afterwards. Those don't have to go in. I could easily fit them in through the top here. I'm also going to then plumb them and slide them into place. However, I'll have to do it one at a time because one of these racks has to pull out so I can address the plumbing and behind it and run it all behind the aquarium down to the sump. Then simply put it back into place, fill them up, and we're good to go.

I can't wait until the day we walk in here and every one of these aquariums is set up and has some really amazing scapes and fish within them. There's still so much to do out here in the aquarium gallery. This coming Sunday, I'm going to update you guys on it all and show you guys what I've been up to. You'll be surprised with how much we've been able to get done this week, but I've got to give a big shout out to my friend Gary who came over once again, helped me uncrate all of the rest of the aquariums and throw out the garbage.

There's another big empty dumpster here, so clearly I'm not done with a lot of construction stuff. To give you guys an idea of some upcoming videos though, what I'd like to do is go over a lot of my scaping supplies. I've got a lot of different types of wood here. I've got a lot of other materials that we'll be using for the scapes, and I want to start setting up some backgrounds in this tank. Give you guys an idea of what they're going to look like and perhaps do some mock aquascapes and get some ideas and feedback from you guys because once we set them up, we got to continuously move onto the next aquarium and I need your feedback.

I want to make sure that this is pleasing to both me and as well as you. I also have to plant the 2000 gallon aquarium. I hope to show you guys that this coming week as well as set up the 375 gallon plant that tank and I'll show you where that's at. Plus we still have to set up the saltwater tank system out here, which is coming along nicely. I'm going to show you guys the tank, the sand, the sump I built and all the plans for that as well as the plumbing, and that's coming soon as well.

All right, so clearly I've got lots to do and lots to work on, so I got to get back to work. If any of this is something you guys are interested in, you're not subscribed to this channel yet, I highly suggest you do, so you don't miss any of it.

About King of DIY

Joey is THE King of DIY, and when he built his gallery of aquariums he chose the Custom Aquariums rack system with 120-gallon tanks...a lot of them!

Joey Mullen is also known as the king of DIY, uarujoey or the DIY fishkeeper on social media. Providing education and inspiration for aquarium enthusiasts on YouTube, he is also the author of The Ultimate DIY Handbook; for the DIY Aquarist. His channel is about educating all levels of fish tank hobbyists who are passionate about caring for fish and keeping an aquarium of their own. Joey's aquarium rack systems were custom made by our professional fish tank engineers, here at Custom Aquariums.

Please watch the King of DIY's videos for some helpful information and great tips on diy aquarium keeping.

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