The Display Tank

In his book Bob Fenner points out that a lot of people start this hobby on a whim without knowing what the want from it, or how to achieve it. That to me is a recipe for disaster. My desire to is have a plan before I take the plunge in order to give myself the best chance of success. Will I be able to stick to the plan entirely? Probably not, I've already changed my plan many times in the few weeks since I started researching the hobby, but with a plan I give my livestock the best chance to live and myself the best idea of what I am getting involved in.

So where do I start? I guess it's with the look. As this is an artistic centerpiece above all else I need to be able to manage the rest of the requirements and the needs of livestock within that framework. My wife came up with the idea of having the aquarium look like it's sitting on a shelf on an arched opening within the wall, the lighting fixtures would be hidden within a plant shelf above the aquarium and there would be no unsightly plumbing.

Here's a rough sketch of what she is thinking it would look like:



As you can imagine it's presenting some problems in terms of how to handle overflows, plumbing and lighting but I'll look at those in a later blog.

Having this look does give me some tank dimensions. The tank size is 72" long by 24" deep and 30" high, giving a total of 230 gallons. The model shown above was designed for a 30" high tank sitting 36" off the floor. We may drop the stand height to 30" from 36" if the plant shelf is too high.

Having got the dimensions the next decision is glass or acrylic? I know everyone has their own opinions on this but I'm leaning toward glass, with low-iron glass in the two long sides to improve the viewing clarity. Why? Well, having done a lot of reading I've decided the ease of cleaning glass, coupled with it's scratch resistance, is of more importance to me than the lighter weight of acrylic and it's better resistance to fatal damage.

So there we have it, the basis of the system, a 230 gallon, 72" x 24" x 30" glass display tank. Next up I'll be looking at livestock.