foma2000
Aquarium Advice Freak
so heres the story of my mid cycle retrofitting for a fuge. so to start off, i was in mid cycle of my 25 gal salt tank with 20 lbs of live rock (ugly stuff) with a cpr bak pak. i really wasn't happy with it at all. i didn't like how the lights looked. i didn't like how the rocks looked. i didn't like how the sand looked. and i really didn't think the tank had what was nessasary to be succesful ( i want to grow corals in it down the road.) then i heard from a friend that he wanted to give back a tank i had set up for him a while back that was doing really well. it was a 9 gal salt water tank wit 15 lbs live rock, and i thought to my self, this would be the perfect fuge. if i set up a fuge then i could put all the ugly rock from the 25 gal and put it in the fuge, and take the nice rock from the 9 gal and put it in the display tank. the only problem was that the only place to put it was right next to the display tank. this is good in a way because then the out put from the cpr bak pak could just spill right into the fuge. but how was i going to get the water back into the 25 gal? i imediatly thought over flow, and set to work building one out of pcv pipe. now to make the actual box part i decided to use an old flash light cover, one of the cheep plastic ones, so i set upon cutting slits to let water in when all of a sudden the exacto nife slips and cuts my finger from my fingernail to my first nuckle. and deep. (it was bleeding for a full 12 hours (the only way to get it to stop was to rap the bandaid so tight that i couldn't feel it any more)) at that point i just said to heck with the over flow cover and just used pvc pipe ( i still need to put a filter on it so no pods get stuck in it) so every thing was going great. i had the fuge set up with a 5" sand bed, i had water ready to fill it up, and i had my over flow tubes. the only thing left to do was turn the pump on and see how it goes. so i turn it on, and the fuge fills up. and it keeps filling, and filling, but wait, the water level isn't equalizing in the main tank i didn't know what do to. i thought the plan was flawless. i spent the next half an hour trying to figure it out. i put in 3 more over flows but that didn't help at all. then i decided to try raising the fuge higher. and that seemed to work better, but it still was good enough. so i raised the fuge as much as i could and it was working really well, but then i saw water seeping out from the bottom of the tank. and this is where i fliped out. i thought i had cracked the bottom of the tank. then after 10 min of expeting everything i noticed that the cpr bak pak had overflowed wile trying to pump up to the raised fuge. so i lowered the fuge just a bit and presto. every thing works flawlessly now. couldn't be happier. oh. and in the prossess i retro fited the lights so the look much better. i also built a home made C02 reactor(thanks to shawmutt for the idea) while i was at it and a matching bubble lader out of a cd case(this one was all me). i can now say that everything but the cpr bak pak and the glass is DIY. 
so thats my story. thanks for sitting through it.
i wish i could have posted pics but i dont have a digital camara.
so thats my story. thanks for sitting through it.i wish i could have posted pics but i dont have a digital camara.
