Alex: Hi, everyone. My name is Alex and this is Tank Tested. Today, we're going on an adventure. I have a 150-gallon aquarium in my house. It looks like this but I want it to look more like a real aquascape. We're about to go pick up some aquascaping supplies from my friend Victor. Hope you'll come along. This is a first for me. I've never really taken us on a vlog style adventure but I think this is for a good cause. We're going to my friend Victor's house. Now, he is the president of GWAPA, the Greater Washington Aquatic Plant Association. He has a huge supply of aquascaping materials.
I'm going to go pick up some of them and go from there. I think that rather than trying to come up with a scape first, I want to see what supplies exist. Then we'll come up with some designs that support the materials like actually have access to. Now, we're switching over to voiceover. For most of the rest of this video, we'll be living in this world. On my way to Victor's house, I passed by one of my favorite views in Washington DC, the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. There's no point in pointing that out. I just wanted to share a couple of my favorite landmarks. Here is the Smithsonian Castle and behind me in this video is the National Botanical Garden.
Now, before we go to the next clip, I want to warn you the audio quality's not the best, bear with me. All right, I've arrived at my friend Victor's house and I'm going back to his back shed where we have all of the aquascaping materials for GWAPA. We have bulk prices which are still going to add up pretty high on this trip. Here are all of our rocks that we've got. Then up here, right up there, we've got some wood. Now it's just a matter of going through everything and picking every single individual rock for my aquascape.
Now in an ideal world, you had a perfect idea of what you want to use from the very start. What kind of stone? What kind of texture? What color? All of that selected before you start selecting hardscape but we don't live in the ideal world. Instead, I needed to figure out what type of stone had the best variety of materials so that I could build an aquascape in a 150-gallon aquarium.
Now, here I wanted to just get a reference of how much stones actually weigh. How much would I be paying? I measured this stone and came up with 2 pounds. Now, for anyone that knows the weight of rocks, that probably seems a little bit low and it definitely is. I started collecting stones and putting them outside not really realizing that I had made a critical error. We'll see it play out throughout this video. I had my scale on a grass lawn which is going to give wildly inaccurate results.
There's another problem, there's only so much of this big chunky stone available. I wasn't going to be able to fill my scape with a couple of 5-gallon buckets of rock. That's when I turned to a type of rock I've never used before. This is elephant skin stone. Not only have I never used it before, I've never really seen anyone else use it before in person. It was a risky choice but it's the stone that we have by far the most of. Knowing that I want to take my time and pick out the best possible pieces of stone that I can work with because each piece of stone needs to not only stand on its own as a beautiful piece of rock but also work together with all the other stone I select.
For instance, this piece just doesn't have the detail or texture that I'm looking for. It's important to think through the size, color, and texture of the stone that you're working with. That's why having a large supply of stone is so important. It allows you to be picky. For instance, the piece of stone that I'm pulling out now has the texture and the scale of that texture that I'm looking for so it goes in my selection pile. Now in the interest of this not getting wildly tedious, let's speed this up into a time-lapse. Just know that it took me around two hours to pick out all of this stone.
Now, if you're thinking of setting up your own aquascape, I have a little bit of advice. First, know that you can always break your stones down smaller. Now, the interior of the stone won't have the same weathered features that the exterior does but you can still carefully break your stone down into smaller pieces. It's much harder to make your stone bigger. That doesn't mean it's impossible. You can actually glue stones together to create a larger stone but it is challenging. With stones like elephant skin stone, the corners of the stone are rounded. It makes it very challenging to glue those stones together. The biggest stones I've got are the biggest stones I'm going to get to work with.
My second bit of advice is simple but a hard pill to swallow. That's that you should always buy more hardscape than you think you need. The unfortunate reality is that we as humans are not great at estimating sizes. What feels like a perfectly adequate amount of stone at the shop suddenly looks quite sparse when it's added to an aquarium. If you can afford it, always try to get around twice the amount of stone that you think you'll need. That means some stone won't end up on the scape. The best stone for the job will end up in the aquarium rather than you relying on every piece of stone that you have.
Finally, remember that this stone can be used over and over again. That means you're not just buying for one aquarium, you're buying for every aquarium you set up in the future. That doesn't make the price tag any less painful but it's a good thing to keep in mind. Speaking of price tags, it's time to figure out how much all these materials are going to end up costing. In this pile, there are also a couple of pieces of wood. I pulled them from the upper deck of the garage but that footage is worse than anything else I shot. There are just four pieces of wood that I added to my total cost.
Here, you can see me starting the process of weighing each individual stone. At this point, I was still weighing the stones on the grass and I was feeling pretty good about how much they were going to end up costing me. Then I realized the big rock couldn't possibly weigh only 3 pounds and that I'd done something horribly wrong so I moved the whole set up over to the garage and started again. I weighed each individual stone tabulating the total as I went. Because I'm buying this from my local club and we don't upcharge our members, the total price is probably less than you might think.
All in the stone weighed about 250 pounds which means that for all of my hardscaping materials it ended up costing me around $500. Here are all of the rocks and wood that will be going into my 150-gallon aquarium laid out in all their glory on my living room floor as am I. Which as it turns out is not the most flattering angle to film someone with but I spent an hour and a half figuring out how to get this shot, so I'm going with it. I'm going to commit, it's even going to be my thumbnail. That aside, these rocks, there are a lot of them but they may not actually be enough to fill my 150-gallon aquarium. See, the tank that Custom Aquarium sent me, actually holds about 20 cubic feet of water.
Now, these rocks, these are not 20 cubic feet of rocks. Now, you don't want your whole tank to be filled with rocks but you want it to look full. This probably isn't enough rock but I do have a secret weapon right here. This is a mesh bag filled with lava rock. It's crushed lava rock and it's way cheaper than all of these rocks. That's what I'll be using to build the base of any mounds or mountains that I set up in the aquarium. These rocks will go on the outside where I can show off all of the pretty edges that I paid for.
Based on the materials I selected, I started planning out potential aquascapes in a recent live stream. Here you can see a few of the designs I started playing with and suggestions I took from people watching live. If you want to see more content like that, consider checking out my live streams. Based on these designs, I think it's pretty clear I want to come up with the design that looks visually arresting.
A real aquascape for a giant aquarium. Now, the tank is 6 feet off the ground so I've got to keep maintenance in mind but I still want something that's visually eye-popping. If you want to see what scape I end up creating in my 150, you'll have to hit that subscribe button and ring the bell so you're notified every time I upload a video. Over the next few months, this tank is really going to come alive.
Oh, one last thing, I really want to thank all of my Patreon supporters for supporting this channel. Without them, projects like this wouldn't be possible. Thanks to all of you. If you want to support this channel, consider joining my Patreon. Thanks. Bye.
