Construction Journal of my new Paludarium

[Biznatch]

I have been reading the forums for the past couple of months and finally felt that I have learned enough to start my own tank. I'm new to the dart frog hobby, but I have been keeping fish tanks for a while now. I have a 10 gallon and a 72gallon bowfront planted tank that has been running for a while now.

I have finally started building my paludarium to eventually hold a group of darts. It's going to be a paludarium and Im using the x-large exo-terra (18x18x24) for my project. I have just started not too long ago and have started taking pictures of the progress.

Since the tank is an akward shape, I couldn't find a decent stand to fit it so I had to make my own. I have never been too good working with wood but it came out alright. I used plans from this website to make the stand. http://www.fishandtips.com/index.php The stand is extremely stable, probably more than the one holding my 72gallon fishtank. Here are some pictures of the stand.

This is a picture of the front of the stand. I have already finished it and done 2 coats of primer along with most of the sanding. The only thing that is left is the final coat.




Here ist he back of the stand. You can see the 2x2" frame and the 3/4" plywood sides.


There is one big problem with the plans from that website. When you put the dimension of the stand you want in, the sizes it gives you are for the frame. It doesn't calculate the 3/4" plywood you have on each side. So as you can see in the pictures, the stand in a bit bigger than the base of the tank. I feel pretty stupid for not catching that before I started building it.

[Biznatch]

Hmm it doesn't seem to want to work with linking my image and showing a thumbnail of it here, any suggestions?

[jmcc000]

[Biznatch]

Care to share how you did that? :P I have a lot more pictures of my progress to add. I can't get html to work either so if you could let me know what code you are using to do that it would be appreciated.

*edit* nm i figured it out. The links I copied had a space in them, not sure why. Thanks for the help.

[jmcc000]

Very nice looking stand. I dont know why it worked for me,

[Biznatch]

As you can see in first pictures, I have a 5 gallon sump underneath. I'm going to plumb a PVC overflow in the tank. This way the water lever in the exo-terra will always be the same and won't get to low. It also prevents the tank from draining if there is a power outage or the pump fails.

As you can see the shelf is too high and there is almost no room to do the plumbing to the tank. I didn't plan on a 5 gallon being so tall when I built the stand. So it was a lot of work lowering the shelf since the 2x2" supports were nailed/screwed in with 3" screws.

Here is the sump now lowered ~5" so I can fit my arms in to work on the plumbing.


I am going to have a canister filter (not sure which one yet, looking for a good deal) below the tank, so I couldn't lower it much more.

[jmcc000]

I really like that stand. Are you gonna put a door on the front of it. Thanks for the link to that site, i will try and make one here soon for the same Exo Terra. Keep the pics coming

[Biznatch]

In order for my idea for the overflow to work, I had to drill the tank. I ordered 1/2" bulkheads from http://www.marinedepot.com since they ship from anaheim and I recieved them the next day. The problem was they sent me 3/4" and didn't have any 1/2" in stock.......

The only diamond bit we had was 1 3/8" and 3/4" require a 1 1/2" hole. We checked with some calipers and found that the bit is just big enough for the bulkheads so I went ahead with the drilling.

Now neither me or my dad have ever drilled glass, and I wasn't about to test my skills on a 100$ tank. So I went to a local glass shop to ask if they could drill it. Aparently the drill press thye have was too big to fit in my tank, so they couldn't help me. He did however give me a nice size piece of scrap glass to practice on for free

In the picture you can see the guide I have set up for the bit. This is a must have since it will walk all over the glass if you don't have something to prevent it from moving. I used a 1 3/8" wood hole saw and drilled the hole 1 1/2" from each corner (This would help me place the hole in the tank and prevent from getting too close to the edges). It also held water decently well.


Once you get a nice groove started, you can remove the template and keep drilling. I never had a problem with water moving away from the bit so I didn't bother setting up a barrier for it. The bit was always nice and cool to. I did constantly spray with water though and would periodically stop to wipe away all the bits of glass.


First try we did it wil no cracking or problems. It does take a while (Like 10-15 minutes for 1/4" glass) but It's better to go slow. You can also see the bulkhead fits perfect in a 1 3/8" hole







*edit* Yes the door is done already.....Well it's assembled. It's actually waiting in the sun right now getting ready for primer along with the canopy :P

[Moe]

Nice journal. What return pump are you using?

Moe

[Darks!de]

Very nice so far. When figuring out which return pump to buy, first measure how high it will travel from the pump to the top of the waterfall or other water feature. Then you'll need to figure out approximately what gph rate you will want flowing out of the feature. Then you have to find a pump that matches it. Yes, that is all pretty common sense, but what I didn't realize, is that the gph listed on the pumps is the gph at pump level. For each foot of height increase that gph drops dramatically...fortunately there are charts on the back of some pump boxes showing the decrease in gph with added height. Make certain you are picking the right pump, because lots of people get too high or too low of a gph and have problems. I recommend getting one of the pondmaster pumps. They have a large range in power, have adjustable flow intakes, have built in prefilters, are very reliable, and aren't too expensive. Of course if you want a lot of filtration as per paludarium you would probably want to go with a canister filter like you said.

Luke