00:02 Speaker 1: Yo, what is going on, Serpa squad? We got that moved in here, but the animal room is in complete disarray, so give me a day or two, I'm gonna get this cleaned up and then we'll talk about that.
00:15 S1: Here we are, a few days later, everything is all cleaned up and in its respective location, at least for now. Things are gonna change more as we move into the future, like this 40-gallon rack, for example. I just put it there 'cause it fit and it was an easy move. The bullfrogs are still in these tanks and I didn't wanna have to move it because if I do, I gotta take all the tanks off and the bullfrogs are going into the 75-gallon rack here soon. So once they go into there, I'll move this and then those 40 gallons will be empty. So again, let me know what you guys want to see with those. I got some ideas, but I'm definitely open to suggestions. And the 75-gallon tanks, they're gonna be done relatively soon, maybe a couple of weeks. I had a slight issue with the one underneath. I'll tell you what, I checked it about five times to make sure that it wasn't tempered and I drilled through it, and sure enough it was tempered. Obviously, you saw a few weeks ago that I drilled in the backs of the tanks. That was fine, but I thought it would be easier to drain the tanks if I had bulk heads on the bottom to drain them out, just would be a little bit easier. So I started with that one, it cracked, and I gotta get a replacement tank.
01:20 S1: The one on top though, that's gonna be done here pretty soon. That might be next week's video. Anyway, I know you wanna hear about this tank. If you recall, last October at Aquashella, I linked up with Custom Aquariums. We got to talking, they liked what I was doing and said they wanted to work with me. So I was like, "For sure, I definitely would do that." So I designed this tank myself. Of course, I had to take into consideration all of the ceiling heights and everything like that. And initially I was gonna build the stand myself too, but they said, "Hey, we could send you that too." So they built the tank and the stand and sent it to me free of charge, so I didn't pay for any of this, although I don't receive any compensation for talking about it, simply the product. So I just wanna let you guys know about that. But anyway, this thing almost didn't fit into the room. Now, as I just said, I designed it to fit in the room, but the thing that I didn't take into consideration was the stand, because, again, initially I was gonna do that myself. But if you see, it's raised up off the ground a little bit, so it has wheels on it, casters, which is nice because if I wanna move this tank, I could literally just slide it across the room, no problem, all by myself even.
02:24 S1: That would be different once it's filled with water, but we wouldn't be moving it like that, and most likely we're not gonna move it again. I think this is a great spot for it. It's really front and center when you walk into the room, it's the first thing that you see. And it actually fits into the space better than the 40-gallon rack did. It's not quite as deep and it really doesn't obstruct with the window at all either, so it's a good spot I think. Initially, this tank was delivered to me by freight, it was set into the garage on a pallet and I was just gonna pay somebody to move it. I got several quotes, I had one company come out, they looked at it and they said that it wasn't something they were gonna be able to do, so I reached out to a different company and they wanted to charge me $1300, which at the time seemed like a lot, but if you take all things into consideration, it's actually kind of a good price. Because moving something like this, it's dangerous, you could break it. If they break it, they have to pay for it, all that kind of stuff.
03:17 S1: So if you get a quote like that for moving something of this nature, it's actually not that bad. But at the time, I thought that was a lot of money, so I didn't take it. And one thing led to another, and it was like, "Okay, we're gonna move this ourselves," and that ended up being a much harder task than I initially anticipated. Unfortunately, around the same time everything started happening in the world, everything was shutting down, and I wasn't able to get anybody over here to help me move this, so it just sat idle in the garage for about six months. During that time, I was still able to order stuff online though, so I ordered the suction cups to be able to move this thing. Each suction cup can hold 240 pounds, so we would have been able to lift this with four of them, but it's not really a four-person job so I got six of them. And I figured, "Hey, they're a good thing to have around because if I ever wanna move these other tanks, they'd be a lot easier to move with suction cups than lifting it up from the bottom and potentially crushing your fingers." Anybody who's moved big tanks knows that I'm talking about.
04:12 S1: As I was planning things out, I thought, "This can't be too bad. All that we have to do is just lift up the tank real quick, that's the hardest part, and set it on the stand." The stand could be wheeled into the room and it's easy-peasy, right? Well, it didn't end up being that easy, unfortunately. Two weeks ago I planned for everybody to come over to help me move this, and I even built this little ramp so that we could just wheel the tank up the ramp and through the doorway. But when one of my friends came over, he said, "I don't think this is gonna work." The issues that we had that I didn't anticipate is that once the tank is on the stand, we can't just wheel it through the doorway because it's too tall. So unfortunately, I didn't have anything else that we could wheel this in on, and I said, "It's gonna be too hard for us to try to carry this thing through the doorway. It's just gonna be too heavy and we'll end up dropping it or someone's gonna get hurt, something like that." So we planned again for the next week. In between, I went out and got some skates, each of which is rated at 1000 pounds, so once we get this onto the skates, we can move it, no problem.
05:08 S1: Getting the tank on the skates was pretty easy since they're pretty much the same height as the pallet, so we literally just had to lift it up an inch, go over a little bit and set them on there. And it was actually quite easy to slide up the ramp and into the room, but it was a little bit harder to get up onto the stand. With a little bit of muscle and finagling, all five of us were able to get it on the stand, and then I rearranged the room and got it where it is now. I really wish I could have filmed some of that, but I didn't feel like dealing with the camera during that. I just had to focus on the tank and make sure that we moved it safely without anybody getting hurt. And luckily, we were able to do so. That also leads into why I couldn't get it in the right corner. As you see, I have the bulkhead here and it's just maybe about a half inch too low, so unfortunately I couldn't slide this under there. We already had it up on the stand and I'm like, "Okay, we'll just leave it there. It's fine."
06:03 S1: Now that we finally got this thing in the animal room, you could probably get a much better sense of how large it actually is. It's huge. And whenever you see it on camera, I'd imagine it probably looks a little bit smaller than it actually is. Whenever you see this thing in person, it's huge. It's like something you would see at a zoo and I cannot wait to get it set up. I'm telling you, you haven't seen anything like this yet. I haven't really done anything like it yet, and it's gonna be awesome. For the past six months, I've been gathering up all of the materials for this. I have a great selection of hardscape, a lot of really neat plants, the background's ready to go, and I have all the equipment as well. And with most of my other projects, I'll do a single video that encompasses the entire project, but due to the scale of this and all of the things I'm doing with it, I think I'd rather do four separate videos. So I'll do one on the hardscape and background, one on the plants, one on the equipment, and then one on stocking it. And I think with that, you guys could learn more from it and we can get more content with it, and I can actually elaborate on some of the things I'm doing and why. I do that with every project, but with the plants, for example, I could tell you what I'm using, why I chose the plants, how I selected them, everything like that.
07:08 S1: So I can really just elaborate on each thing individually, so that way you guys can learn more and, again, so we can get more content out of this. I know this is gonna be one of those instances where because we waited for a really long time, the project is gonna be much better than if it would have happened a month after I got the setup. I just think that during that time I was able to think things out a little bit more and really just figure out everything. So I'm doing a lot of things differently than I would have had I set this up initially, so I cannot wait to show you guys what's going on with that, so stay tuned.
07:37 S1: Another thing I wanted to show you real quick was in the 16-gallon danio scape. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to capture it on film, and I filmed this bit previously and I was talking about it, but I just couldn't find them. So I got a new fish in here, it's a Panda Garra algae-eater. Whenever I'm able to get him on film or a picture or something like that, I'll post it on my Instagram. But otherwise, he's in here and I figured I might as well just still film this part so you could get a quick update on this tank.
08:04 S1: Before we end this one, I wanted to show you how the backyard pond is doing real quick. We've got a lot of good growth and it really looks even better than it did last year. A lot of the flowers have really bloomed in quite nicely, all of the irises and lilies and all that sort of thing. There have been several flowers on the water lilies as well, and the cattails even got their little fruit popping out, which is pretty cool. I wasn't sure when we'd see that, but it finally happened, which was pretty cool. All the goldfish and everything else in the pond are doing exceptionally well too, and we even got our resident frog, he's been hanging out back here. And initially they were both upfront, one stayed up front, the other one stayed back here, so it was pretty cool. They each have a pond to themselves. All in all, I really like this. I spend a lot of time back here just hanging out and it's just a lot of fun.
08:58 S1: Since we're talking about the ponds, I might as well bring you to the one out front too. This right here, that's my favorite angle. You can really see all the plants and the waterfall and the basin and everything, it just looks awesome. And as you could see everything has grown in exceptionally well. A lot of things are in bloom right now. I tried to plan it so that throughout the season, there's always something new in bloom. The pitcher plant popped up pretty nicely. We have some azolla behind it that overwintered quite well, and overall, everything with this is doing really well. Our own little front yard oasis. I love it, it's a great place to hang out.
09:32 S1: And that is gonna do for this one. I really hope you enjoyed seeing a quick update on the ponds as well as an update on the danio scape and my future plans for the 350-gallon and 75-gallon paludariums. I got some really big plans for those that I know you guys are gonna enjoy. So if you're not yet subscribed, be sure to do so and turn on notifications so that you're notified as soon as I upload those things. And until next time, Serpa squad, take care and peace.
