Transcript
what's going on reef builders i have a different type of video for you guys today as you may or may not know you know one of the things that informs and instructs our reef aquarium experience is looking at you know very comparable sides of the aquarium hobby and horticulture to see what kind of tips and tricks that we can learn to bring over to reef but i'm also quite an avid freshwater aquarist and so i cross pollinate some of my reef you know upbringing to my freshwater aquarium so in this video i'm going to show you bring you along for kind of a reef style freshwater aquarium build so we're going to use some saltwater aquarium techniques on a freshwater tank and we're basically going to be replacing this aquarium [Music] so i just want to tell you a little bit about the tank that we're going to be upgrading these fish uh to this is a 150 gallon five foot acrylic aquarium and it currently holds my four wild ultima angelfish uh two koi angelfish and a couple random discus that i've picked out just to test the waters with my discus skills and uh definitely one of my pride and joys in this aquarium is a colony of 15 zebra placos this is a really awesome tank the wood you see here is just kind of logs that i literally pulled out of the local creek cut them down exactly to size and kind of wedge them in in certain places and the tank is fine it's fine for these fish i just want something a little showier especially for the altums because i've been growing those guys for i don't know four years maybe five and they deserve you know a really classy aquarium uh to show them off so this tank already has some kind of reef aquarium techniques um it's got a built-in overflow there you can see in the back um we're using a vortec mp10 on the side
to create some water flow in it you know kind of like a river and the water is being returned by an ecotech marine s1 down below you'll see a 20 gallon sump just a very basic sump with a float valve to maintain automatic uh water level and we're also using a clericy gen 2 as an automatic filter roll so this tank already has you know a little touch of saltwater aquarium techniques but let me walk you over to uh the new tank that we're going to build from the ground up with some of these principles in mind my upgraded fancy angelfish discus and zebra placo tank was made possible by custom aquarium and this is the tank and stand that they built it's a rimless aquarium it's got three quarter inch high clarity glass all around it's 48 inches long 24 inches wide and 29 inches tall right so i can really show off those long flowy fins of my angelfish and it's sitting on a really robust um steel tube stand when i got this whole thing and set it up i was like man i love the tank but i'm gonna have that stand forever that's gonna be um just something i i have around for a very long time as a lifelong aquarius you know i want to stress that none of these features on their own are inherently exotic especially not in the salt water space but i think put all together it's going to result in a tank that's just going to be you know just a little bit tricky but also trouble free for a very long time so the first thing we're going to do is we're not going to use the canister filter i do run a canister filter on one of my freshwater tanks i don't clean it ever because the last time i cleaned it i got a nice green water bloom so i'm not really a huge fan of canister filters in general so this is a drilled aquarium this is going to allow us to install a sump underneath and that in itself is not super new but you'll notice there's no overflow boxes here inside the aquarium what we
have is an external overflow box so this is the version that's made by custom aquariums so it's kind of slim profile it's got a few different holes in the bottom you can actually drill it for a variety of different tubing so standard it comes with two inch and a half drains and we're going to reduce those down to one inch and that's going to bring us down to the sump over here so just like in the freshwater aquarium world in a saltwater aquarium hobby we treasure and value the trusty 40 breeder aquarium for a wide range of applications especially as just an oversized sump so we're going to use a 40 breeder for the sump and the first trick you know that we're going to bring to this freshwater aquarium party is an automatic filter rolls now these are just starting to catch on in the saltwater aquarium space but if you're not familiar with them it basically is a spool of a kind of a fleece-like material and as the spool or the filter material clogs up a float switch inside will actuate it and produce a little bit more clean filter material so that water can continue to pass through without overflowing so we're gonna do again something a little bit trickier because between the overflow box to the automatic filter roll we're going to have a continuous siphon overflow it's a little hard to do with an automatic filter roll unless you have a controllable return pump so instead of putting a ball valve on the drain which we might still end up doing what i'm going to try to do first is i'm going to use a controllable dc return pump and fine tune the water flow coming back to the aquarium and going down the drain to be a perfect balance of a siphon so it's incredibly silent operation
so the last hardware trick that we're going to employ on this freshwater aquarium is we're going to use what's called a float valve so this float valve will automatically replenish water to the sump as the water evaporates if you have a power filter or canister filter you know your water level can drop quite a bit and doesn't really affect the operation of your primary filtration but in a sump if the water gets a little too low your return pump is going to start sucking in air and you have to top it off and it's just not a good arrangement so we are actually fortunate that these tanks here on this spine of the reef aquarium studio um there's already a freshwater line that is gravity fed from that vat over there and um we're gonna be able to just tap right into it and we're gonna feed it right to this float valve so it keeps a constant y level in this sump so in a typical sump we would just drill one of the baffles and plumb this through but since we're not going to be working this up very often i actually feel confident enough using just a magnetic holder um this one's a little bit janky because it was the last one that i had but you know we're going to run with it and it's going to be good so um i'm going to go ahead and start showing you some of the parts that we're going to use and start putting this thing together all right so you know the tank did come with a couple accessories and the first of these is going to be our overflow drain this is a h2 overflow which has a real high surface area so if you have a tank with like a lot of leaves or um some bigger fish this will allow you to basically have real large surface strainer to go to pull water from the surface keep that film down and you don't have to glue a fitting like this but it's actually just quite easy to just stuff it in there and you know as we operate this tank we'll figure out which orientation we want this uh overflow skimmer to be at now another part that came with the tank which um i've seen before but this is going to be the first time that i use it this is the siphon stopper so if you use a
sump style return you want some kind of mechanism to break the siphon so if you have your return line you know deep under the water it's not going to suck all that water back down to your sump and cause any kind of overflow situation so this actually has a couple guides right here to help guide the water that's coming out from the return water but should the power to be interrupted these will quickly break the siphon going back into your tank and um i actually have a few tanks that need something like this so i might look at picking up a few more siphon stoppers for some of my salt water tanks and um this one we're i'm gonna just uh put in here just kind of pressure fit for now since it's inside the tank not a big deal but we'll probably glue that in the near future um so now let's start talking about plumbing the actual drain and return line for this tank i got my hat on backwards that's how you know it's time to get to work so first thing we want to do is we want to reduce those one inch holes from inch and a half to one inch just because one inch is easier to work with it's cheaper and i have a lot of extra sticks available we're going to do two drains because there's going to be a primary drain that's where like all the water is going to be going into the automatic filter roll and the second drain will be a stand pipe here a little bit higher so if anything should happen to clog that first drain we got our secondary or emergency drain there to take uh care of that so for the inside we're just going to pressure fit them in into the holes because there's just not really that much pressure if it leaks it's only going to leak into the pipe so we're just going to stick these in here without gluing and that way in the future we have some uh some options ooh that fit in there real nice and tight all right we're just going to put a healthy dab of pvc glue here go around a few times make sure it starts activating and there's always a little bit of leakage that ends up on my hands but we're going to twist these in
right here it makes a nice flush connection okay all right so if you can see inside we got the two bushings where we want them because this one that's closest to me further from the camera is lined up right with this middle pole we're going to call that our primary drain that's going to go straight to uh the automatic filter roll and the other one is a secondary drain and we're just going to do a straight drop of one inch with a couple 90s and get these uh pointed into the sump a lot of people will try to take really precise measurements and dry fit everything before they actually go into gluing it and i have plumbed so many tanks in my life i kind of freestyle a little bit but we're going to measure just up into this bushing down just a little bit further than i know that i need and then i can trim as necessary so we're at let's see 30 let's just call that 30 inches [Music] give that a look-see see how that's feeling and that feels exactly like what i want awesome nice twist i did test fit the the drain version just to make sure i got the good length on it you always want to put this on the male side the receiving side the innie we're gonna go get a nice little twist and get good bond and then put it right where we want just like that oh man that is beautiful isn't that looking nice good just gonna go ahead and get this done this is the secondary drain so this is not super critical ideally this won't be uh passing very much water
and uh there we go aim into the sump so because i'm hard plumbing it and it's going to be you know pretty locked in i think in the future i am going to add a union to this uh plumbing but that's something i can always add later when it comes time to actually servicing the device but you really need to think about considering the order in which you install the part so i'm going to eyeball this part right here and i think and it's just going to drop right in there oh my goodness that is almost like freaking exactly where we need it to be i'm gonna put it almost exactly look oh man that is as good as it gets for some freestyle action okay i thought of a way to kind of cheat a little bit because this sump is empty i should be able to basically glue that on and then slide it into place remembering that these two are exactly the same length does that sound does that sound kosher need to get this part just right definitely need to include a union for future servicing of the clarissey and there we go that's that's right i am liking that on here we've got a little bit of play push the whole assembly on the last major piece of uh hardware to install in this tank is a return pump and this is going to be crucial so we've got a sine wave technology dc pumps gonna be super quiet it's controllable um and that's going to help us kind of get two birds with one stone as far as using the automatic filter roll and creating that continuous siphon drain this is a model that we actually use on a handful of different tanks around at the studio and this is going to be super easy because it comes with the barb comes
with a barber fitting and we're just going to use some flexible black tubing on the return line so that's another small trick i stopped using clear tubing a long time ago because invariably just grows a bunch of algae and looks nasty inside so the last thing to do with this nice piece of flexible black flexible tubing is put it on the barbed elbow here on the return line and we're basically done with you know the nuts and bolts of the system so now it's just time to fill her up [Music] it's been a couple months since we did some of the initial work here on our uh reef inspired freshwater aquarium not much has changed other than my resolve to inject a few more kind of tricky features so one of the things that i've changed since our original plumbing job was to add a gate valve and the union so i did mention the union in the plumbing i thought i could fine-tune the pump with a ball valve but the bulb i've had is super tricky and that's actually the third time i thought i could get away using a ball valve for continuous siphon and it really didn't work so i won't make that mistake again we ran this thing just kind of uh just with water and it's incredibly quiet there are no leaks as expected i want to show up a couple details about this aquarium and particularly what's going on under here so i knew that this was i wasn't really going to
do anything with this space in particular as far as adding equipment or heaters or extra filtration or anything and i thought okay maybe i'll have some plants down here below but i realized this will be just a really nice isolation space for this aquarium system so i've already cut out a big partition right here that we're going to get to here in a few minutes that fits perfectly and because we're going to be a little bit lighter on space inside of the sump i decided to get rid of the the liability and kind of janky magnet mount for the float valve and instead we're going to drill it right in the tank right where it is for sure it is advisable to plan ahead and do all your drilling of any kind of glass hopefully with a drill press and a little bit of a well and plenty of water but we already have everything in place so we're going to do something a little bit trickier i've got a specimen cup full of water and a basically a drip acclimator and i'm going to use that to lubricate and cool the hole right here it's not going to be that much water coming through so i'm just going to have a towel here to catch most of it up it takes a little bit of finesse to get the hole started but you're not really drilling like you would with a bit you're really kind of grinding out the hole that you want so we're gonna get started on that all right so we've just got a little bit of a water stream that's hiding hugging the uh the glass pretty much right where we want it so uh just gonna get her started oh safety safety's super important especially when it comes to glass and eyes [Music]
[Music] all right that wasn't so hard just slow and steady almost no pressure like i said we're not really drilling or cutting it's just grinding away and just barely barely wetted this towel nothing on our stand and now it's going to be really easy to install the float valve just like that we're going to come back to this but now let's go do a little prep work on the partition that we're going to glue into the sump since we had so much room in the rest of the 40 breeder it's basically going to turn into a separate aquarium of variable water height this is the partition that i've already pre-cut and test fit into place i think this is pvc board so it's like really rigid but where most sumps will use like acrylic or glass for panels i don't want to be able to see through it and this is incredibly rigid but that's going to help us just incorporate an extra little mini system into this overall tank um the two things we need to do to this before we seal it up is go ahead and drill it for the return line so this is a half inch uh bulkhead we're gonna put some lock line and that's where the flow control is gonna come in on the bottom we're gonna put in this three quarter inch bulkhead and an elbow and this is going to act like a stand pipe that i can change the height uh when i want to if i wanted to be shallower or deeper and make it a full-size aquarium so let's go ahead and drill those holes [Music]
[Music] i have to tell you i'm very pleased with how this panel turned out it's incredibly rigid and uh i cut it to size so well that really had to round out these corners a little bit just to get it to sit in the silicone seams that are there already and even cut some little tabs right here in the rim just using a little hacksaw blade so that this could fit into place real nice and neat and be further held up by the tank rim itself [Music] all of the prep work has been done we've wiped down where we're going to apply some silicone with some alcohol to make sure it's clean and dry one small trick is i put some large magnets on the other side of the partition so that as i'm pressing the silicone and it's not going to move out of place so now there's nothing left to do but to do it it's nice to wear some gloves like evan reminded me and uh some old school guys may or may not use this trick but of just kind of putting a piece of tubing on your finger so that way when you're making the seams you'll have just a nice concave surface so let's jump into it [Music]
like a lot of major projects you know you think you're going to have everything you need and you're going to put it together exactly how you want and it's not until you know your elbow deep in it that you see a few improvements that could be made midstream and after taking a little bit more consideration after getting some of the primary plumbing completed i think we buttoned up some really nice features that are going to make this tank just all that it can be and i'm super excited to make use and i've created a 25 gallon chamber out of part of the sump that's going to be really fun for keeping different species or if there's a you know spawning pair of discus here i can put them down there and they can spawn still be part of the same water but one of the best parts of this aquarium is that it is already cycled sometime last year i just put a bunch of biomedia in here with uh an air pump and started feeding it some ammonia the ammo alerts blue because there's still some ammonia in here and still keeping it going but we're just going to put this in a basket basically underneath the automatic filter roll so water can flow through it so the tank is essentially cycled you know we'll stay it'll take it a little bit easy on the uh fish editions we're not gonna explode it right away but we still have a few things to button up on this particular aquarium particularly you know some of the hardscape rock wood um the lighting this is a kind of token current usa light that we're using for general illumination but we have a special trip up our sleeve to make this tank really really eye-catching so if you want to make sure not to miss those future installments of our freshwater reef tank or building a freshwater tank with saltwater techniques make sure to subscribe um if you have any questions about anything we did in this particular tank build make sure to put those down in the comments below don't forget to hit that notification bell so you don't miss any future updates on this tank thanks for joining us on this video big thanks to custom aquariums for sponsoring this aquarium build and we'll catch you guys on the next one very soon
