Today was an adventure in DIY fishkeeping. My tank rack in the basement has needed replumbed from day one. I didn't take into account the flow from the pump when I plumbed everything together and quickly realized that it was possible to overflow the tanks because the drain lines were too small. Originally the drain lines were 1/2" and after doing some math I figured out that if I made them all 1" and had them feed into a 3" pipe it couldn't overflow unless a pipe got clogged. So the plan was to redrill all the tanks, add new bulkheads, replace the PVC drain lines with flexible tubing, put strainers on the drain lines, and make a 3" return line....
So I drained all the tanks....
Moved all the livestock to buckets....
Then the part where everything went off the rails..... I successfully drilled one of the tanks... and the rest ended up cracking either when i tried to pull the bulkhead off or while drilling. No big deal right... Petco is doing their $1 per gallon sale right now, I'll just go pick some up....WRONG! The Petco in Beavercreek has disappeared, but their facebook page is still active
. So I went to Petsmart and they matched the Petco price, but only had three 10 gal tanks. I then went to Pet Valu, they had four 10 gal tanks, but they gave me some grief when attempting to match the price, they wanted a printed ad which I didn't have. I showed them the online ad for the Dayton stores and then the manager finally decided that they would have an employee call Petco and find out if they were actually running that kind of deal. When they went to ring up 4 tanks they realized that they were missing out on $20, and that I was getting the tanks at cost. They weren't very happy, but they let me buy them anyway.
Moving on... I successfully drilled 5 of the 7 tanks I bought. Ended up cracking one of them, and decided to hold off on the last one till I actually need it.
I got everything assembled and glued...
Here is the setup for each tank...
The drain lines....
And the finished product.
This project only took about 7 hours... 2 trips to Lowes, and a trip to 2 different pet stores.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk