Construction Journal of my new Paludarium

[Biznatch]

Well I haven't updated this in a while, mainly because my dad decided he better hurry and send the digital camera back before the waranty expired to get something fixed. At least I got to borrow my GFs really nice digital camera so i'm not too upset. Anyway, I have finally finished all the plumbing along the bottom of the tank, everything is glued up to the bulkheads. I'm still working on the design for the main tank so nothing is glued there yet. Also I got the overflow pretty quiet, almost to the point where if my room is dead silent, it sounds like someone is faintly filling a bathub in another room with the door closed. The pump humming is more annoying that it. In fact my 72 gallon tank has both an Eheim 2217 AND a Fluval 304 running right next to my head and the little Via pump is louder than both of them from across the room :/

Oh well, we had some extra 1/4" Cork panels from the addition we did last year that I decided would work great for sound deadening the sump. So I stapled those all along the walls/front/back of the stand where the sump is. I also put some pipe insulation around the tube going into the sump.....which doesn't really help at all but I had it around. Anyway here are the pictures.

Here is the plumbing to the sump. Also you can see the cork panels over everything.


Now I'm quite lazy and as you can see in the last picture there is some mysterious pip on the right that goes into the sump and then through the back of the stand. Well that comes out to the shelf below. I started a siphon the shut off the ball valve. Now every week when I do a water change I just put a bucket under there, open the valve and fill it up. I have never seen it done before, but man it's gonna make life easy for me


Here is a full shot for those of you having trouble picturing it. Ignore the bags on the bottom, as you can tell I have made a lot of trips to home depot/the Do it Center.



And that's not everything I got done I went to a local supply yard to pick up some flagstone to make the seperator between the land/water. 44lbs of stone cost me 9$. I then broke it into small pieces with a hammer/chisel then siliconed them together. It looks like stacked stone veneer. I wanted a dark stone so it would pull your eyes away from the main tank and could be hidden by moss/plants so it's not so unatural. I also slanted it inwards at the waterline so frogs will have no trouble getting out if they happen to fall in. In fact it worked out just perfectly so there is a ledge right at the water level; almost perfectly in line with it.

Here is the wall before I put it int he tank. I temporarily put cardboard under it untill I can decide what will really go between the rock/glass.


And here is a front shot of it in the water. I'm going to either attack java moss or xmas moss to the stone and hopefully it will grow across the face of it.


And here is a top view of it. The sketch on the back is of my design for a 3 tiered waterfall that I'm gonna form out of foam. I'll bet you won't believe that for work I do hand drawn conceptual plans for a landscape/pool company :P Trust me it looks a little more proffesional there.


Well that it so far. I ordered driftwood last week from ebay so hopefully that should be in soon and i can finalize the bottom and get the backround done Enough of this boring hard work/planning, I want to get to the fun stuff.

[Grassypeak]

Nice work Biznatch,

What kind of frogs are you thinking of. I notice that your land area is quite small, so I assume you are thinking of some sort of arboreal thumb. Are you planning on keeping fish as well? I’m just wondering why you have such a big water section. I suppose it will be good for rearing tads in the tank, if you don’t add any fish, and the flow is not too strong.

Also, are you planning on running that waterfall 24/7? If you are sensitive to water noise I think that may drown out that air pump you are already complaining about.

Hope I don’t seem overly negative. That really is quite a beautiful job that you have done. Oh, one more comment, if you are concerned with placing the stone wall on the glass bottom, you might try putting down a thick layer of silicone on the bottom. You could let this harden and it will act as cushion for your wall. As for securing the wall simply siliconing it to the sides of the viv should work.

[Biznatch]

For the waterfall I bought a second pump that I'm going to put on a timer to shut off at night, unless it's quiet. The highth of it might be changed a little bit, I haven't finalized the design yet. Also the the land area is actually bigger than it seems. It's almost 12"x12" on the longest parts. I calculated it at liek 110Sq. inches, which is a bit smaller than the 18 talls most people use.

As for frogs I'm most likely going with like 5 or 6 Imitators. I'm not sure yet how many, I need to find out what would be ok since I have no experience with thumbs.....Or any darts for that matter. The tank is a bit over 33 gallons total. As for fish I want some really nice colored guppies, and maybe some endlers. Also gonna have some khuli loaches cuz they are just the funniest fish ever. I don't know if any of them will be big enough to bother the tads, but that's could be because I'm not 100% sure how big the tads are. There will be a few broms though for them to lay also.

[Biznatch]

Lame somehow made a double post ops:

[Grassypeak]

Biznatch,

Sounds pretty well though out. I would suggest not mixing guppies and Endler’s as my understanding is that they produce infertile hybrids. I could be wrong on this, which would mean that they produce fertile hybrids (Definitely frowned upon). The Endler’s may leave tads alone. The female guppies will eat them.

Please keep posting, this is really going to be a nice viv.

[Biznatch]

I will probably only have male guppies since the babies will have no real predators in the tank so the population will get too big too fast with the small amount of water I have. Plus the females don't look half as nice as some of the nice male guppies I have seen. And thanks for the info on the endlers, I had no idea that was possible. Especially since they are like 1/3 of the size of a guppie. I was thinking of some killies, but any tad that got into the water would be toast for sure, plus I have a feeling they would jump out of the water and get stranded on thel and portion. My male Fp. Garderi (sp?) dissapeared from my open top 72. I have a feeling he leaped out and I just haven't found him yet.

[KeroKero]

If you give the imis places to raise their eggs away from the water, some nice water holding broms and film canisters, I think its not real likely they will drop tads in the water, especially with fish. The idea behind PDFs having so much parental care and what not was taught to me as a way for the frogs to move the delicate tadpole stage away from bodies of water with predators, aka fish. I don't know if they'd look at the water and go "oh crap, fish", or are just innately programed to go to broms or similar water holding containers, so I'm not really sure how it'd work in a tank.

[Biznatch]

Well it's been a while since I got some work done on the tank since it isn't my only hobby. I have been busy planning my new computer to build/watercool/overclock. Plus work and school don't help. But I have finally gotten around to getting some real work done on the tank.

I put a layer of silicon on the sides of the tank and under the land area to hide the PVC pipe for the overflow/return from the sump.


While breaking some of the rocks to fill the gap between the glass and the rock wall I smashed the tip of my finger with the point on the rock hammer. Left me a giant blood blister that was like 1/3 the size of a dime :evil: but I finished it all so I could get started with the foam.

Here is a closeup of both the return and the overflow before I glued them to the tank.



Now here's the supplies I needed to start foaming the back. Those gloves were ABSOLUTELY necesary. I can't imagine not having them, I couldn't find anything to remove the foam when it was wet. I tried denatured alcohol, paint thinner (worked better than anything else, but still really bad) and would have tried Acetone if we had any. This stuff sticks to everything.


Here it is half way done. The pvc coming from the back is to just prevent the foam from going in the bulkhead and messing it up. I'll finalize the output for the waterfall when it's dry.


And here it is done. This stuff does dry very quick. I sprayed it and it felt almost completely dry by the time I came back from dinner like 30 minutes later. It took 2 seperate sprays to fill the lower part of the waterfall enough. Now I have lots of carving to do tommorow lol.


I bought the coco bedding today and soaked that. It should be dry tommorow so I'll pick up another tube of silicone and hopefully get the backing on. It's unbelievable how much that stuff expands. I put 1 brick in a 5 gallon bucket with 4qts of hot water and the bucket is almost 1/3 full of the fiber and no water :shock:

[Biznatch]

I have kept busy over the last few days and even with finals here I still managed to find time to work on the tank. With the foam sprayed on very thick I had a lot of carving to do. One thing I noticed was that even though it comes out and instantly expands quite a bit, as it dries it expands a heck of a lot more so the background is a bit thicker than I expected. It goes past my black silicone sides in a few places but it's not very noticable.

After spending around an hour carving, I found the absolute best tool to use in a hack saw blade. Its nice and long and flexible enough to do just about anything i needed. Here is what it looked like after heavy trimming. You can see the waterfall finally taking some shape.


And here are the supplies for the background. This is only like 1/20th of the coco fiber from the brick. If I had known they expand so much I would have only used a chunk of it. This silicone is aproved for food contact so I think it will be ok


Now it's jsut about done, I have some patching up to do but I'm giong to wait untill I test the waterfall in case it needs to be changed.


And the tank is now finally back in my room. Here is some pictures of the back of the stand for the watefall/sump drain plumbing. You can also see my planted 72gallon in the background :P




Now for the sump shot. Lots of stuff going on in there and I don't even have my canister filter/heater yet. But it's in the cabinet so no one will see the mess :P


And finally here is the tank on the stand with the 2x36watt AH kit on it.


I have to get 1 more piece of PVC for the waterfall and do a little modifying to the 2 tiers so it will flow right then I'll get some pics of it running. That's on my list of things to do tommorow, then I'll patch up that background and be done.

Now I need to order my plants, I have most of the ones I want in mind already, but epiphyte jungle isn't shipping till Feb. What are some good places to get them online that are shipping right now. I want to get them in and start growing.

[JoshKaptur]

coming along great... thanks for the detailed pictorial. I was hoping you'd post a pic of the smashed finger, though.