[motydesign]

We’ll this has come along fairly quickly and I’m excited to share these photos. The inspiration to come back into the hobby after 10 years was a combination of a few things. I’ve never stopped dreaming about the feeling I hadn’t fed my frogs and finding very rare species in very odd places like at work or something. It came to me that I wasn’t having nightmares because I ever neglected my frogs rather late last year I realized I was missing out on the frogs feeding a part of who I am. So I moved into possibly my dream home year ago (feb10) and realized that the house had some weird areas and one was a plant pot that shared the base with the dry wall???? There was no barrier or anything, I knew that was something that would have to go! So post demo, dry out and clean. I knew I had a spot for a viv and started building. I’ve built all the furniture in the house in the past year minus the couch(copied some designs I found on the web but have enjoyed wood working and welding more than I thought I would have)

 

[motydesign]

The biggest issue I think I had was finding the righ wood that framed the tank in possible way and would increase usable surface area of the inhabitants…. I tried many options and thoughts… errr many.

 

[motydesign]

This was a silicone smear to the glass layered with fiberglass screen then the greatstuff over the screen technique.

silicone and rope…. Lots of silicone and rope, my nose still burns from the acetic acid

getting the FB installed as a single piece was quite important for me and I ended up having to rip out the already adhered stick on the glass to do it. 2 steps forward one step back. Really it was worth it though. Knowing that my substrate will stay exactly where it is and not have voids for frogs to get lost in was worth the extra thought and work!!!

I ended up with 2 jungle hippies to light this tank. And so far I’m liking them. Not using the lightning nonsense but the dawn dusk is kinda nice. Also the spectrum looks nice other than the yellow is a little higher than I want(need to look into programming it down a bit ). Also wow, turface mvp is tough to come by these days!!!

 

[motydesign]

Started with a 1# of Joshs calcium clay to see how far it would go before doing the full batch order. Being it’s so expensive I opted to run just a layer over turface rather than the whole substrate. I figure long term drainage this would help too.
Vining out the tank was fun and I kinda wish I would have done more. The large ropes were a fail and too much of the rope was showing through so I decided not to pursue adding more to them and just set them aside

I’m a sucker for Andy’s so let’s see what I can do with this tank

I swapped the tags on accident with the brasdi and dendro so please forgive my mislabeling… was excited and wasn’t looking at the placement as throughly as I should have…ooops

 

[motydesign]

I purposely ordered 4 of the glass panes and did a leave out until all live hinge was installed and I could correctly order the 5th perfectly (I’m still waiting on it hahhaha… the sent me a non flat polished piece )

I spent more time on the stand than I did the viv. I’m still getting a few more hard wax coats on the walnut burl veneer I did for the doors and I’ll see if I can get a pic that captures it. I still have the hood to finish. Yesterday 1.22 I completed the mantle that I’ll have tie into the hood.

Co2 bug bomb for 4 days….. I am unwilling to deal with scale!!!! Bleached and microwaved and baked everything I could and co2 is for good measure after coming out of the quarantine bo

 

[motydesign]

The past few months I’ve been working on my bugs for seeding. I knew getting a jump start on this from my past frog room would be smart. Currently working with orange, rosy, costa purple, and dwarf white isos. the spring I have my favorite pinks , prospectors, and 24ks. The care I’ve invested in theses guys has paid dividends!!! The oranges have had a solid boom already and today seeded about 20 adults into the tank keeping a dozen or so adults and all the adolescent and babies in the cultures. The costa purples are so small thankfully they seem to be booming but being the culture is capable of holding so many more than the oranges I’m in no hurry to split any of them up yet. Was stoked to be Seeded pinks at the same time as the oranges and the culture seems to still be producing more than I can justify dumping in there at the moment. May just split the culture and have two going

will post pics here in a bit


considering the size, location and all aspects of me being as cautious as I can, I’ve built this tank as a “smart viv” I’m currently running Kasa smart strip, smartlife temp relay, Westek relay(better scheduling for my fans than Kasa)
Kasa strip is nice just to have remote on off capabilities for all aspects of what’s powered to the system with watt measurements as a part of tracking.

The Westek allows my scheduling to be a little more fluid and more precise and I like the history feature

Finally the smart life is a feature I like but I haven’t finished the build. It is intended to be the relay for a small upright ac unit I’ll duct from the closet (not pictured) through the wall and a grill placed behind the tv to dump cold air if the top of tank hits 82*. I’m still working in the winter so I have time to finish my hood before I get my insurance policy in place. Playing with the unit though I have found a design flaw in the unit. It is designed to ramp the temp all the way down to the low side before modulating off. Now if this only had 1 control plug that would make sense but they market this with a cooling plug and a heating plug. In testing I found you would bounce back and forth from heating up the viv to 82* until ac kicks on the relay for cooling then run it down to 64* and cycle back and forth. Sooo that’s not good, so right now I’m just tracking the temps and enjoying the history. I may swap to the acinfinity 67 controller picking up humidity tracking with temp and see if it does what I want with a 2-5* hysteresis loop. But I’m still researching this a bit to see if it’ll do what I want.

 

[Robru]

Wow!! Very nice done

 

[Imatreewaterme]

Looks great! Good work.

Ricky

 

[Ravage]

Outstanding work. Nicely over engineered, but since I am looking at building an enclosure for a very expensive tropical snake I liked seeing how your automation came together. Keep updating please.

 

[Pmcarbrey]

looks great! i'm doing something similar now, i chose to go with a reef ready tank in order to have a drain and am using Apex for my controller, in a few months when i get everything set up and settled i'll have to compare notes with you!

 

[motydesign]

Would love to! I did learn the hard way this week that you reallllly need to turn down the led intensity with these lights even with high light loving orchids. Hopefully I caught it soon enough and just lightly burnt a few and didn’t kill any of these gorgeous plants.

 

[Dr. Manhattan]

Awesome. Subscribed !

 

[Paluscape]

Creating a naturalistic vivarium is hard... integrating any vivarium to look like a deliberate piece of art/furniture is also hard... and it seems like you've done both.

Awesome work, I love it

 

[hydrophyte]

Looking great! Subscribed.

 

[motydesign]

I put this in its own thread, but might as well add it here too since it’s for this build. The light were too noisy for the living room so a few bucks and a few minutes made all the difference in the world

 

[motydesign]

Ooo I also got some fun plants a week or so ago. Still have shipments coming before I consider it “planted”

 

[motydesign]

Still one more orchid planting to do prior to frogs, but she’s looking pretty good

 

[fredk]

It will be interesting to see how the look changes as your plants begin to fill in.

 

[TeddytheFinger]

Looking good indeed!

 

[motydesign]

Here is a little circulation fan I just whipped up real quick. I’m running my temp and humidity probe in it so that I’m actually circulating the air I’m measuring and giving the tank some nice air movement. The diffuser tubes can be rotated to point the air where I want. Right now I’m just pushing it from one side to the other. I have the materials to build a second box that I might run on the other side. If I commit to the second I will change the flow to be a bit more “wild” of a current. I’m using the humidity to control the fresh air fans that I have….. we’ll I will. I didn’t like how I was measuring (probe exposed to the misting) so no I can start dialing in the controls.