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Unboxing 10 Aquariums

By King of DIY on

Speaker 1:
I absolutely love coming in here first thing in the morning and being greeted by my engineer Juana and the other fish. Today's video is going to be slightly different than what we're used to. We're going back in time to bring you guys along. To unbox all of these palettes, you see today is technically Saturday. All the pallets arrived yesterday. I told you guys are going to be able to unbox all this until sometimes next week. There's a couple of more pallets showing up on Monday or Tuesday and I need to get ahead. I can't have five pallets sitting in the yard. I'll just get way too far behind.

I had to open at least one yesterday and I did set up one rack, just to see what it's going to be like because when I film it, I want to make sure I get it right for you guys. This took me 10 minutes to do. I did it alone. All of it is lightweight. Extremely sturdy too. Look, it goes from the floor, almost to the ceiling, It's still missing it's covers for the top there as well as the sliding doors. I'll add them on when I find them in the boxes. I thought that this was going to be tipsy and worrying about it falling over. I'd have to bolt it to the wall. Maybe it'll be steadier once I get the tanks in. This thing is solid, it doesn't move at all. I love it. Absolutely amazing.

Plus, it's lightweight, I can move it around if I need to. Hopefully, today we set up all of the racking systems. As you can see, we have quite a mess over here. Absolutely in love with these off with the core backgrounds. You guys had seen me do the unboxing there before. This is a different camera, though, so you'll get them. It's daylight right now, you'll get a better idea of what these look like. Then, of course, all of the Eco-tech equipment. I've got to clean up and make sure we have room. Hopefully, we can get them all set up today.

They're so lightweight, I can do this all alone. I love it.

The last little portion here is the actual stand of the racking system. The tank is just inside of it. However, this can just be lifted up all at once, but it has to be lifted up all at once. It's too long for me to do myself. I can lift the weight, but it definitely needs two people to lift it up to get it off properly. Just in time, Gary showed up.

Gary:
Hello.

Speaker 1:
It's Gary's birthday today guys and he decides to come over and help me for a little bit. I hope you guys wish him a birthday in the comment section below. I'm sure he'll check it out. This just has to come out straight, that's all.

Gary:
Should we just put it on the ground?

Speaker 1:
This rack was so light.

Gary:
Yes, I know. I can move the whole thing alone. That's why I said it only takes a few minutes.

Speaker 1:
We might as well show you how one of these go together. Super simple. Each one of these get a thick metal dowel and they go into position. Tap them all in with a mallet. Then the next layer simply goes right on top of that and you keep repeating it. That is how simple it is. It's definitely a little bit faster with two people, but it went a bit together quite easily. Clearly, we still need the doors and whatnot and a lid for the very top to cover that up and then the doors on each area, but it's going good. The walls and the tops. Got three of the racks set up now. That went pretty quickly. Not much left now. There is some soil all over the place, some lids, and doors, a couple of tanks left.

We're doing the tanks last. There were some holes in there. This tank actually had a bucket of custom aquariums biological media they make. This one also had two massive bags of it. It's three eights in size. You guys will see this here eventually, when we start setting things up and these ceramic little balls. This would be fantastic. All kinds of biological media is going to be needed. More lids in there, another base, two tanks. This is going to be the last rack we set up. I don't think there's enough pieces to set up another full rack, but Monday or Tuesday, the rest come.

Build the covers for the racks. They're just going to go right up inside and sit on those ledges in there. Looking good. Here we got three and a half of these racks put together at this point. This last one, we're missing the top piece right here. We need that in order to finish it off and then there's another one that we're missing or two but now we're going to move on to-- We have another base to create the fifth one, but we're just out of space here. I got to clean up. I wasn't anticipating putting them all together today but we'll move on to moving the tanks in now.

Speaker 1:
The tank's moved. Some are just placed out here for a minute. Now we got to clean up.

Speaker 1:
Done. Not done. It's Tuesday morning. More pallets are on the way.

Speaker 1:
The last two kits arrived. Unfortunately, they're going to have to stay in the boxes for a few days until I can make some room for everything that's in them. Everything else that I'm missing will be in here. So far, what's in the little workshop area is four tanks. I've stacked them up here. We've got two tanks here. They also send lids for each aquarium. We've got all of the media. We've got all of the plumbing supplies. Basically, everything to get these up and running including all of the sump systems, which again, are just sitting outside right now. These are the customaquariums.com, seamless sumps.

I could put this out in a tornado and they're going to be fine. If you guys watched the video when I first saw these, my first reaction was like, "Man, these seem indestructible. I should throw one." I threw it. Just went to show that these are indestructible. I think there's still some more sump components in those crates that just arrived though. The original plan was to simply get just the aquariums from customaquariums.com. You see, it was going to cost me about the same to build as it was to buy, yet it would take me over a month to build all these tanks, to build 10 120-gallon tanks. I'm not a manufacturing plant, I'm not set up to build a lot of tanks at once.

I can build one at a time. Because of that, it would take me well over a month. To give you an idea, if we backtrack a month in time, If I would have built them, that's where we would have been at. There's a huge waste of time. However, once I spoke with Custom Aquariums, I had no clue that they also make the sumps, they can do all the plumbing and they were launching this new racking system. I thought, "You know what, let's just go ahead and get you to do everything for this racking system." Man, am I ever glad I made that choice? These stands are absolutely amazing.

I want to give you guys a better idea of how some of the stuff work but I showed you how everything went together. All of the sliding doors simply go in like this. There's little tracks. There's no effort needed whatsoever, they close all the way. These guys also make reptile cages, they don't want crickets or anything to get out. They're very well versed with making sure the system is properly sealed to get ventilated. These go snugly closing. Nothing's going to be able to jump out whatsoever. All of these little dots on the racks by the way. I got to take them off, but they were just color coded, so I knew where to put them.

That was pretty much the extent of the instructions that I needed. Everything else was like there's only one place for it to go. I'm just going to take a little bit of this protective foam off. This is the back of the tank. I want to give you an idea of how this is going to work. Ultimately, we have a return here, we have a one and a half inch drain here, and then we have another little one-inch hole down here. That is at 50% of the water. What that means is I'm going to use this for water changes, so I just have to turn a valve, half the water in the tank drains and then I can fill it back up. I never drain the tank too much. Eventually, I will be moving to a fully automated water change system,--

Speaker 1:
but that's something that I can focus on in the future. My main priority right now is getting everything up and running, and then we can circle back and fine tune things, get things nice and pretty, but ultimately, I want things fish ready. We have all the time in the world after that to do a bunch of little projects. What I think I'm going to do is, I'm going to install the 3D backgrounds into the aquariums most likely out there, and then move them into place, both of them, pull the racking system out with the tanks dry inside of them, plumb them, get them ready and set up, and then we can fill with water. Then I have to do it again and again and again. I can't set them all up at once or I'll never get behind them. That's the downside to having a full racking system that's closed in by two walls as you can't access the back so you want to make sure you do it right the first time.

But with all of those new tanks arriving and me running out of room now, I have nowhere to put all of these new tanks. What I'm going to have to do just temporarily, is take every one of these tanks that're on the floor, and there's only four of them, and stuff them into their racks temporarily so I can bring in the new tanks, or something. We're going to have to figure something out. Let me know what you guys think in the comments below, on how I'm going to organize all of this and get it all done, because I need all of this out of the way as well, in order for me to move the 375 gallon tank in here. In fact, this entire room almost has to be empty. I'm going to have to move tables and everything just to move it in here, and then through this line and of course over onto it's stand.

Anyways guys, I'm sure we'll have a proper look at all of the stands and all of the equipment and everything installed as we set them up one at a time. There's so much to show you and so much to teach you that I think I might break it down into like-- every tank will focus on something different. I'm not sure how we're going to do it, but we have so many videos and so many tanks to set up, and so many components, installing the backgrounds, plumbing, filtration, aquascaping, stocking and so forth, and we get to do it 10 times over, not to mention the 375 and finally planting the 2,000 gallon aquarium as well. If any of this is something you guys want to see and 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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