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So. My husband is helping with my new 80 gallon (72x14x12 inch) aquarium. He is Engineer (PE, SE, and a fair bit of mechanical in undergrad, too). This means my new tank just got veeeery complicated. The cabinet the tank came with was mounted the man's house, and had to be cut out. It's essentially useless now, and the aforementioned engineer wasn't satisfied it would carry the loads as he wanted, so now he and our cabinet maker friend are redoing the cabinet completely. It is three modules that bolt together underneath in several places, so it can be taken apart and moved much more easily. We had leftover rosewood in his shop, so apparently it will be a rosewood stand . The tank is drilled in three different spots and we will not only be running my two canisters in line from the bulkheads, but my husband decided to help me get more tank volume by using two 8 inch by six foot pressured PVC cylinders, complete with clean out, to give an additional 32 gallons or so of water volume, for a total of 112-115 gallons of capacity overall, once the canisters are in place. This overcomes the disadvantages of a sump system where you gave inherent instability of water volume and the threat of overflow and flooding. It's more like have a *really really* big canister under there, with no leaking issues. T-d off the bottom of that would be a gate valve for clean out of the whole system and to hook up a hose and my (free with this aquarium) pump to drain and refill the whole thing without needing a Python (which woud utility sink can't handle, the threads are too weak). The whole system will also be getting in a built in suspended light fixture off a gooseneck with two four foot daylight fluorescents, two two foot daylight fluorescents, and two two foot plant builds running down the middle of the six foot fixture. I'm hoping to having it about six inches above the top of the tank to get good coverage. I'll be running a sponge over the outflow from the tank to have some backup biological filtration and reduce the suction of the grate down to the two in line canisters. My crazy, genius husband is convinced this isa superior and easy solution overall - gate valves, one inch tubing, PVC, mounted lights, pump, and a false floor covering the PVC tubes so I can still store my qt tank under the stand to keep it out of the way. This whole tank also backs up to a bookshelf island we already made, and I'll be able to access the shelf on it from isnide the cabinet for additional storage. I asked him for some CAD of the plumbing but he said he'd rather just build it and have me take pictures than him spend four hours drawing it up. So step one is poking our friend into finishing the cabinet unit for us. Then it should go very quickly. But he has to finish a refrigerated kiosk for a doctor first, so we are thinking it is a two week wait or so from here. I'm excited to get started!
