36x12.5x14 Mbuna Tank with DIY LED Hood

[Lan]

Twenty-five years ago I used to keep fish in a ten gallon. A few guppies, neon tetras, white clouds, some kind of snail, and a few plastic plants. The tank never looked the way I wanted it and after a couple of years I took it down. For years I thought some day I would get a saltwater tank since salties have better looking and more interesting fish. I really had no clue. A recent trip back down to the coast for some training for work and a visit to DougH's house changed my mind about freshwater fish being uninteresting. I saw his 144G half round (see pic) full of cichlids and was shocked how fun they were to watch and how good a tank could look. We must have watched them for an hour. That was it, I was back on the fish bandwagon. Once I got home I checked Kijiji and craigslist for a few weeks. There is not much up here in the interior for selection like down there so pickins are slim. An add for a fifty gallon with stand in Vernon made me bite. I went to get it and he gave me 2 tanks, a power head, and a Rainbow Lifegard Fluidized bed filter for $70. Having only had a ten gallon in the past, I had no idea what a fifty should look like and the guy who sold it probably didn't either. I got it home and measured it out and the larger tank was 36"x12.5"x14 which is about a twenty-seven gallon. Oh well, live and learn. I put the stand where I wanted the tank and didn't like the look of the stand, but the real problem was when I filled the tank. It leaked I was pretty discouraged by this point, but I'm as stubborn as a mule. I read up on resealing tanks and an insane amount about aquarium silicone. I found full size tubes of aquarium safe silicone at a Home Hardware building center for $4. I removed the old silicone fillet with a razor blade. This took hours to get the glass clean. The bottom wasn't secure to the sides anymore so I cut out the bottom glass from the frame and cleaned everything several times first with salt and vinegar and then with rubbing alcohol. The rubber edging tool I bought at the same place did a good job smoothing the silicone into the corners. The plastic top frame was broken. I was going to buy a new one for a few dollars, but the shipping makes it as costly as a new tank. So instead, I'll leave it off and make a tight fitting lid out of hardwood.

[Lan]

rest of pics

[Lan]

So looking at the stand, it was a bit rusty and the open design of it allows my kids at everything too easily so I took it to the thrift store. So I made a stand out of 2x2, glue, and screws for the frame. I was going to use a plan design from here FishandTips.com: do it yourself aquarium stands until I noticed that it thinks 2x2 really is 2”x2”. It's not of course, it's 1.5”x 1.5” so I just built the thing using a bit of common sense. It's still a good program to play around with. I covered the frame in 3/8” plywood and then covered that with 1/8” mahogany plywood. They have all kinds of nicer woods (like oak) in the 1/8” plywood for anyone interested and the mahogany was only $14 for a 4'x8' sheet of it. I'm glad my finishing carpenter friend told me about it. He also gave me enough 1”x6” maple to make my top for the tank and the top of the stand and he routered one edge of it all for me. I covered the corners with hemlock corners and stained it all. The maple is a lot lighter than the rest so I put a second coat with a darker stain on the maple only to bring it a bit closer to the rest. One day I'll get some cupboard doors for the front, but for now to keep the kids out, I just put six wheels on the bottom and roll it out if I need in there, and I can take the fish for a walk if they ask nicely.

[Lan]

more of the stand pics

[Lan]

Deciding what filter and everything else I needed seemed to take forever. Twenty-five years ago I had a small Aquaclear and they haven't changed any which must make them great filters, but I wanted something different. At first I was going to use the Eheim classic on Big Al's because for $79 it seemed like a great deal, and most people seem to use canisters now. But when I tried to order it, I realized I was on the US site and $130 for the same thing when our dollar is at $1.04 put a bad taste in my mouth. Then I found this site Aquarium Supply Store . They had the same filter for $68! The prices were so cheap I was going to buy everything I needed for both tanks. I placed my order but the payment through paypal was refunded a day later with no explanation. They didn't respond to any emails or answer their phone for 2 weeks so I gave up on them. Then I realized how good J&L Aquatic's prices were. The only reason I passed over them before was because they don't sell the Eheim classic. When I compared their prices to the same things on Big Al's US site, I was surprised to see they were usually a bit cheaper. So I decided on the Eheim Ecco 2213. Shipping only took a few days. I was very happy with J&L.

[Lan]

After the kids went to bed I filled the tank and tried to hook everything up, but the Hydor external heater was 5/8” and the Eheim tubing was 1/2”. I new this when I bought them, but J&L didn't sell the 1/2”. Nothing a trip to the plumbing section can't fix. I ended up with some brass transitions meant for PEX piping but they're barbed and work well for this. I tried getting the Rainbow Lifegard hooked up too with a bypass setup for power failures but the bottom plate is leaking a bit so I'll deal with that later. I left the heater and the Eheim going and next morning the kids got up long before I had to and I could here the 5 year old telling the 2 year old that there was water in the tank but they didn't see any fish yet. It was cool to hear they were so excited.

[Lan]

So my friends here in Sicamous were jumping on the cichlid bandwagon too and they found an add on Kijiji for yellow labs in Penticton so they went and picked them up. I took five and put them in the tank with some driftwood from the river here and rocks from the mountain behind my house. I love watching them. They are an entertaining fish! What I would like now is five yellow tailed acei.

[Lan]

I ordered some CaribSea Tahitian Moon substrate and a gravel cleaner and that showed up the same night as the java fern I ordered from ebay. The fern was $3 including shipping and they sent two bunches instead of the one. They have a web site too. AquaticMagic I tied the ferns to the driftwood with fluorocarbon. I can still see it. So much for all the hype that it's more invisible than monofilament. I never caught more trout with it anyway.

[Lan]

For lighting I want to scratch my LED itch. Now I've read so much on this subject and there are many people who are very passionate about their lighting. What I'm going to do will make most of them shake their heads or worse, but for what I want I just don't see it their way. I want something very thin that will fit inside my top, stay cool, not use much power and be brighter than your average cheap plastic hood with a single florescent tube in it. One very well written article I read stated that you wouldn't light your aquarium with one hundred LED flashlights, would you? Well, he's right, but I would with three hundred and fifty of them. Now I know a lot of technology goes into trying to get the expensive growth LED's with the correct pure wavelengths that plants and coral like but from the spectrographic analysis of many white LED's I've seen, there is still a lot of usable light around 6500 Kelvin which plants like. Yes there will be a lot of “wasted” light that plants won't use, but it still lights the tank for display and that's primarily what I want. So the LED's I'm using are $4.80 on Ebay for 100 of them. So for less than $20 (which my friend just paid for a replacement florescent tube for his 50 gallon) I got 400 of them. LED's are very current sensitive so the correct resistor has to be used. I decided on my old laptop power supply which has 19 volts DC output which allows me to run a series parallel circuit of five LED's in series with a 100 ohm resistor behind them. My resistors were about $1.80 for 100 and at this point I'm still waiting for them. Should be here any day now. I simply drilled 350 5mm holes in some acrylic my friend had lying around. This took some time, but there's that stubborn as a mule thing again

[monkE]

Well its good to see you getting back into the aquariums!

That canopy is going to be pretty interesting to see when you have it all wired up. Good thing that you have some electrical knowledge to help you design a circuit that will work for you. Post pics when you get those resistors and have your power supply wired in.

Good work so far!