This is an old tank that I have kept for several years. I has had several crashes and changed a lot during that time. But it is a nice aquarium that might be fun to document. So I'll start this thread. This tank will probably be taken down in a few months. But I will probably store it somewhere since insulated tanks are not really a thing and it might be good to have for future projects...
The tank was started to house animals from our west coast, I saw another aquarist over there that posted a lot of tempting pictures. I was also intrigued about our own fauna because by now I had kept tropical reef fish for a few years and realized that I knew more about the animals on the other side of the planet than the animals two hours to the west. So this would be a learning experience beyond that the fish looked neat.
I got this tank, a 120 liter tank. I didn't have a lot of funds and only one power circuit in the room i keep the tank in so I was on a budget on both cost and power consumption. And you never hit right on the first try so I was modest
To keep the temps stable and the chiller from working as little as possible the tank was insulated. I used Styrofoam for all sides except the front glass pane.
The viewing pane had to be insulated too though. The room has many tanks in it and condensation was a huge problem, you could not watch the tank without it and the stand took a lot of damage from the dripping. I used aluminium profiles and silicone to attach a second viewing pane to the tank and sealing it. Since then I have worked a lot with getting the moisture in the room down and today condensation is less of a problem, but a naked glass pane would still be a huge temperature leak.
It would have been perfect to use 1 inch acrylic for the tank instead. But that was such a high cost over here that just the tank would have been more expensive than the entire budget I have used to running the tank for the last eight years... So an acrylic tank is still a dream...
I bought a Resun Mini-200 chiller for the tank, it is fairly quiet and powerful enough for this tank, especially after it was insulated. I ordered this one new, but these days I make sure to snatch up chillers when I see them available when adds come up. Chillers are not that common around here because few people need them with the temps outside being fairly low during the year.
I wanted to keep algea and kelp in the tank so I built an LED fixture for the tank with 630 nm, 660 nm and 20,000K white LEDs. Total power was about 60W. I still have this fixture and it grew most species well, would be interesting to check PAR.
I would probably change to PSU though. I wired the fixture as three parallel series. So if one string died then the other two would be driven harder. This was fine since I was applying lower amps then the maximum the LEDs could handle, even with just to stings. But if two strings died the last one would be fried. Today there are solutions for this problem, or rather simpler solutions. On the plus side it has been easy to repair the fixture and replace LEDs when they burned out.
This is probably the earliest pic I have of the tank running. In the start I used Tunze streamers for circulation, I put the magnets on the outside in the styrofoam. This worked ok, there was a lot of flow since the tank is small. But when I kept the strong lights on the kelp and algae grew like crazy. A backside of this was that the streamers became clogged in algae in one week, tops. I was a lof of maintenance use them. They also did add heat to the tank still, not a lot but once the fan in the chiller died and it did not chill the water anymore. The tank is so well insulated that the temps rose to 26 degrees celcius from just the streamers. Now that I use Air the tank will last for almost two days before the temps become dangerous, and it rises very slowly so the animals are not shocked.
You can also see a backside to the double glass. It is almost impossible to tank tank shots from a distance. You get a lot of reflections.
The tank was started to house animals from our west coast, I saw another aquarist over there that posted a lot of tempting pictures. I was also intrigued about our own fauna because by now I had kept tropical reef fish for a few years and realized that I knew more about the animals on the other side of the planet than the animals two hours to the west. So this would be a learning experience beyond that the fish looked neat.
I got this tank, a 120 liter tank. I didn't have a lot of funds and only one power circuit in the room i keep the tank in so I was on a budget on both cost and power consumption. And you never hit right on the first try so I was modest
To keep the temps stable and the chiller from working as little as possible the tank was insulated. I used Styrofoam for all sides except the front glass pane.
The viewing pane had to be insulated too though. The room has many tanks in it and condensation was a huge problem, you could not watch the tank without it and the stand took a lot of damage from the dripping. I used aluminium profiles and silicone to attach a second viewing pane to the tank and sealing it. Since then I have worked a lot with getting the moisture in the room down and today condensation is less of a problem, but a naked glass pane would still be a huge temperature leak.
It would have been perfect to use 1 inch acrylic for the tank instead. But that was such a high cost over here that just the tank would have been more expensive than the entire budget I have used to running the tank for the last eight years... So an acrylic tank is still a dream...
I bought a Resun Mini-200 chiller for the tank, it is fairly quiet and powerful enough for this tank, especially after it was insulated. I ordered this one new, but these days I make sure to snatch up chillers when I see them available when adds come up. Chillers are not that common around here because few people need them with the temps outside being fairly low during the year.
I wanted to keep algea and kelp in the tank so I built an LED fixture for the tank with 630 nm, 660 nm and 20,000K white LEDs. Total power was about 60W. I still have this fixture and it grew most species well, would be interesting to check PAR.
I would probably change to PSU though. I wired the fixture as three parallel series. So if one string died then the other two would be driven harder. This was fine since I was applying lower amps then the maximum the LEDs could handle, even with just to stings. But if two strings died the last one would be fried. Today there are solutions for this problem, or rather simpler solutions. On the plus side it has been easy to repair the fixture and replace LEDs when they burned out.
This is probably the earliest pic I have of the tank running. In the start I used Tunze streamers for circulation, I put the magnets on the outside in the styrofoam. This worked ok, there was a lot of flow since the tank is small. But when I kept the strong lights on the kelp and algae grew like crazy. A backside of this was that the streamers became clogged in algae in one week, tops. I was a lof of maintenance use them. They also did add heat to the tank still, not a lot but once the fan in the chiller died and it did not chill the water anymore. The tank is so well insulated that the temps rose to 26 degrees celcius from just the streamers. Now that I use Air the tank will last for almost two days before the temps become dangerous, and it rises very slowly so the animals are not shocked.
You can also see a backside to the double glass. It is almost impossible to tank tank shots from a distance. You get a lot of reflections.