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My New 350 Gallon Paludarium – IT’S HUGE!

By SerpaDesign on

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Tanner Serpa: What's going on Serpa squad, Tanner here. I didn't have time to do a phone tutorial this week. I'm just doing a little update on some stuff I'm working on right now. Working on a lot behind the scenes, just a lot of big projects right now. I want to update you on some of that and show you what I got going on. Let's get started.

First thing I want to show you guys is out here in the garage. It's that thing right there.

We have here is a custom aquarium built by none other than Custom Aquariums. We met up at Aqua Shella couple months back. They said they wanted to work with me, was definitely interested. We talked things over. I came up with this, to get them all the dimensions everything that I wanted and they sent it to me completely free.

I didn't pay for a thing. This tank is sponsored by them as well as that seamless sump that's back there. I don't want to give you guys the impression that I paid for any of this, because I didn't. Nonetheless, I'm going to do a really cool setup in here. It's six feet long, two feet deep, and four feet tall, four feet tall on the back and three feet tall on the front. However, it only holds two feet worth of water. The water area is 180 gallons. The actual footprint of the tank is 350 gallons.

As you can imagine, very specific tank, very custom. I have some cool plans for it. You probably never seen something quite like what I have planned. That'll have to wait until the videos of that come out. What I'll probably do is a three to four part series about it. We'll do one with the background. One was planting and setup and then maybe one stocking. I don't know quite yet, but we'll definitely do several videos about that.

In the meantime, I'm just going to have to leave it out here in the garage. I have no idea how much it weighs. I'm going to guess at least 800 pounds. I have to figure out how the heck I'm going to get this into the animal room. Make enough room for it out there. Something that I find really crazy about this tank is that the glass is three-quarters of an inch thick. That's nuts. All tanks I have in there, I should say the bigger tanks, the glass is only half an inch thick, have [unintelligible 00:02:11] drilled, overflows and everything like that.

We also got the seamless sump from Custom Aquariums. I'll set that up. Getting the tank into the animal room is going to be a real challenge. I'm honestly not looking forward to trying to do it. Getting it here into the garage was a challenge in itself. Freight guy showed up with two huge crates. When I saw the crates, I was getting overwhelmed. I'm like, "Man, these things are huge." I wasn't expecting this to be as big as it was.

Obviously, I knew how big it would be but you don't really understand the scale of it until you see it in person. Once I did, I was just blown away. This thing is huge. It's immaculate and it's just crazy. It's my dream aquarium, to be honest. We slid them into the garage here. Luckily we were able to get them in here, took them apart. We got a ton of OSB and 2x4s leftover from that. I am not going to let anything go to waste. We use these for builds and different things like that.

I don't know about others but it's not a building material that I typically use but I'm sure I could find some use for it or just give it away to people. I don't know but I didn't want to let any of that stuff go to waste. I'm telling you these things, they were packaged to ship, they're packaged to survive crazy shipping. I guess you take the precautions you must whenever you're shipping something this fragile, this expensive and big. Definitely packaging was awesome. We got all this free wood out of the deal. That's pretty cool.

Anyway, I cannot wait to get started on this tank. It's going to be epic. I can't wait to share it with you guys. You got to be patient with me. It's friggin take maybe at least two months to set up. I just want to make sure that I do it right the first time. I don't want to have to do it again. When I set this up, I want it to be set up for like 10 years, something like that. I want to do long-term setup with this.

Take my time with that do right the first time. Just stay tuned for that. Also, for those of you who haven't seen this yet, I posted images of it on my Instagram last week. I'm really going to start doing a lot more exclusive content on there. If you're not following me on there, definitely check it out, might be something that interests you, if not, whatever I understand. More exclusive content on there. Stay tuned for this tank because it's going to be awesome.

Back in the animal room here, we're making a lot of progress in here, really getting it how I want it to look. There's still so much work to do. We got the nano rack taking shape. Then, of course, we have the new rack over here, I should say the new stand for that tank that was in the garage. I don't think I'm going to put the tank here because the bulkhead is right here. The tank would just be way too close to the ceiling. I don't want it to be like that. When all said and done, it will probably be the same height as this rack here.

It would be less than an inch below the bulkhead if I do it there. I think that I actually want to put it over on this wall where my computer desk is right now. Just have a nice dedicated wall but I got to move that, of course, I'm not really too sure where. This area I want to put it, but that's a topic for another time. Again, there is a stand. If you have any suggestions, let me know.

What I really wanted to show you in here was this rack I've been working on. It's a little 16-gallon tank rack. It will hold two tanks, the water box tanks I picked one up from Petco about a week ago. It was $70 for 16 gallon rimless. Pretty nice tank for that price. Honestly, it's unheard of. Most of the time, they're way more expensive than that. What I'm going to do is set that up to be the new Danioscape, or I should say to replace the Danioscape because-- sorry, now it's the 10 gallon. It's a rimmed tank.

Although I like it, I think it looks pretty cool. It's nicely grown in. It's just not quite the scape that I wanted it to be. Really just take a lot of the elements that are in here that I like and redo them in here as well as make this a better scape than this one, using stones, wood, that sort of thing. Some scaping videos coming up. I also think that the Blue Dream shrimp, I want to consolidate that tank and combine it with this one. Put the Blue Dream shrimp with the Danios and then do something completely different on the one underneath.

I don't know what I'll do for that one yet. Definitely open to suggestions. If you guys want to see something specific that I haven't done yet. Definitely open for suggestions. Then up top on this rack is just for storage and stuff. To build this really was quite simple. I cut out common boards and 2x3s to various dimensions. Then I made frames with the common boards and then the 2x3s. Attached everything together with screws that were leftover from the crates I took apart for those tanks that got delivered to me.

Then after all of it was attached together, I added some one-eighth inch plywood to the tops of the shelves and then to the back of the setup. Then after all of that, I added some wood putty to hide all of the screws and then, of course, I still need to sand this down, stain it and then put some poly on the outside. After all of that, we can get started setting up the tanks. Of course, I only have one of the 16 gallons right now. Put another one on the bottom now.

If you're curious, this measures 24x12x14. I believe that's what the dimensions versus 16 gallons decent size, it's not quite a 20 and it's bigger than a 10. In my mind, it's a good scaping setup. Looks like it'll be fun to work with. To be honest, I really liked how this stand turned out. I just think the design of it is pretty cool. It's a little bit different. It's not like what you typically see. It's not just like your standard rack, has a little bit of flavor to it.

You know, with me, you got to build everything out these nice boards. I got a lot of character in the boards I chose. Look at these grains up in here. There's just so many cool grains, and knots, and stuff in these boards. I really just tried to make it a nice piece. Then, of course, all of that will be accentuated when we sand it and stain it. It's just going to look awesome.

Of course, after they're stained and polished and everything they will match the rest of the furniture in here. There's that nice yellow-brown color. Slowly but surely I'm phasing everything out that doesn't match and long term, everything will match, it's going to be a really cohesive look. That's a lot of what I want to do. Down here, obviously, the setups are artistic in and of themselves. I want the room and just the setup to be artistic as well. When you come down here, it's like an experience.

The last thing that I want to talk about while we're down here is the 150-gallon cube tank. I believe I said earlier that when we set up that new bigger tank that's in the garage, it's going to replace this tank or all the fixture in this tank are going to go in that tank and then we'll take this one apart. We can do whatever we want with it.It's a 150-gallon cube. It's 36x36x28. I believe that's how tall it is. Yes, 36x36x28.

It's a pretty good dimension. It's definitely best suited to be a peninsula tank. Everything's on the back and it's coming out this way. You can see it from the three sides. I think it would be better in a different spot. Perhaps, we could put it where this is or back in between these two racks. Not really too sure yet. There's a lot of things we could do with it.

Keep in mind that when I first purchased the tank, it is drilled in everything to be a reef tank. That's definitely a possibility. If I did go saltwater, I have some specific ideas about that. Not sure if that's a way that I want to go but I'm pretty sure you can do an awesome Paludarium in there as well. I don't know I'm curious to hear what you guys got to say.

Let me know what you think I should do with this tank. Part of me thinks I should even just get rid of it because I don’t really know if it fits into the whole theme of this room but to be honest, it’s one of my favorite dimensions on a tank so I don’t know. I’m really not sure. Let me know what you think about that.

Oh, yes, one more thing, this stand on here was custom built and all of the pictures were painted by myself. If that’s something that you’d like to see, definitely let me know. I filmed it way back, probably about two years ago and I just never did the video of it because I got caught up in other projects. Once I finish this up, I could perhaps do the video on it. Let me know the-- I’d be curious to see what you think.

That’s all I have for you in this one, SerpaSquad. As you can see, working on a lot of behind the scene stuff to really get this animal room in shape. We got some new aquascapes coming up, the 216 gallons. If you have recommendations for the one underneath, definitely let me know because like I said, I’m open to suggestions with that one.

We also got the huge 350-gallon setup. I won’t tell you specifically what it’s going to be. I’m sure you can use your imagination but we got that one coming up. If you want to see what I do with that, definitely stay tuned because I can guarantee you it’s going to be an awesome setup and not quite like anything you’ve ever seen. We’ll go more over to the Custom Aquariums tank on that one, they sent me the stand, all that stuff. I’ll do a really cool breakdown of the tank and everything. I just wanted to give you guys a sneak peek of it in this one.

I hope you enjoyed this little update. I’ll catch you guys next time SerpaSquad. Take care and peace.

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About SerpaDesign

"Hi I'm Tanner! I am an artist, designer, photographer, nature lover and DIY fanatic. My passion is to bring nature indoors and share my projects/ideas with others."

"The focus of my channel is to show how I use nature as an artistic medium. If you want to make a beautiful, long-lived terrarium or a bioactive vivarium, then this is the channel for you! I go in depth on every topic, teaching you exactly how and why I do what I do. I also push the boundary, in hopes to create some of the most unique projects you'll see on this side of YouTube."

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