Re: D2mini's New 100g Rimless Cube Build Thread
Ok!
I'm going to talk to my tank builder tonite. So there may actually be some progress on this. :D
Now let me give you a little backstory and share some of my frustration.
So back around early to mid august I talked to Winy and her awesome hubbie and got some great advice on how to set up this tank, plumbing, etc. I decided on doing a closed loop and an open loop. Closed for flow and open for filtering through the sump. So then i started looking for tank builders. Glass Cages was my first thought due to great prices. Tanks looked "ok". Shipping was a little bit of a pain due to central drop-off, not direct to my house. Then a local forum member said he has a glass guy that built his tank. Much better quality than glass cages and close to the same price. Great! So after going back and forth with him for a few weeks, I realized there was a problem. His "guy" knows glass, but doesn't really know tank building. Not that he can't build a nice tank, just that he doesn't know the details like how far apart holes should be drilled, what size they need to be, etc. And neither do I! So this just wasn't going to work since I couldn't really supply the detailed info that he needed, especially when i was going to need to drill something like 8 holes in this tank. So then I contacted my local acrylic sump builder and happened to mention I was looking to have a tank built. This is Sapphire Aquatics, some of you nano guys have probably heard of him. Kyle told me that they now build glass tanks as well. So i got a quote and it was reasonable. Great! Well, around the same time, I'm researching the whole closed loop thing and I came across
www.OceansMotions.com. They have a forum, so i posted my questions and sketch of my tank/plumbing, requesting a recommendation on which of their products would work best. Well i get a response from the owner, Paul, asking me to call him. So i get on the phone and we have a good conversation about different things like proper flow, plumbing, skimming, etc. He says that my sketch wasn't going to work as-is, the overflow was too small to house the plumbing and he had some other suggestions for the plumbing configuration. Now the problem was that the bigger the center column overflow gets in my tank, the less room I'm going to have for putting stuff! It was looking like my overflow was going to need to be close to 10" square. Well the tank is 36", right? Take away glass thickness and that 10" overflow and you are left with less than 26". Cut that number in half and you end up with less than 13" between the glass wall and the overflow wall. Think about that for a second, and imagine stacking live rock in that small of a space. Not much room left for anything else, is there? Well crap. So now Paul tells me that he has some ideas he's been thinking about for a while that would let someone in my situation still have an overflow in the center but not take up as much real estate in the tank. He was thinking of a large drain pipe, maybe 2", with the 3/4" return line in the center. And then some kind of suspended overflow box on top. Blah blah blah. And then he asks who's building my tank and I tell him a local builder. He said he knows the owner of Miracles Aquariums and that I should give him a call for a quote. He thinks they will be around the same price including shipping and they could work together. Paul will design the overflow and Derek at Mircales will take the design and build the tank. So at this point i'm like, fine. You guys just do it. This way I don't have to deal with it, it will get done right, the closed loop will work correctly, etc. So i call Miracles, talked to Derek, he would talk to Paul, yadda yadda yadda. This was August 28th. Since then I've been just trying to get some inkling of an idea on when i might see my tank. Other than knowing that it will take about 5 weeks to build it once in the que, i had no idea when that would be. I got a couple short responses from Paul, that's just the way he is, and I got no response from Derek after a couple pricing emails. Now I know that basically it was going to be custom work done for free. I wouldn't be rushing on that either if it was me. But at least answer my emails and TELL me what's going on or why or whatever. So screw that. Back to Kyle at Sapphire Aquatics!
So that's where I'm at. Totally frustrated and pissed, but i think we're going to work it out tonite and get started building!
Now here's the thing... going back to the space issue with the center column overflow. If you go back earlier in this thread and look at the pics I posted of my house and the location of the tank, you'll see it's going to be a full walk-around setup but it's only a few feet from the two walls/windows. So technically, most of the viewing of the tank is going to be from two sides, not all four. It's not like it's smack dab in the center of a room. So what I'm thinking now is doing a corner overflow in the same corner as the corner of that set of windows. The least viewed corner. It won't take up much glass space, just a matter of 6-8" on each side of that corner probably, and then WHOLE rest of the tank is left wide open for whatever aquascaping I want to do. As cool as it sounds to have a center column overflow, visually I'm thinking the corner overflow is going to be the better way to go overall. What do you guys think?
And yes, dcantucson... i KNOW that a zero edge tank wouldn't even have an overflow. :rolleyes: :mrgreen:
