re-siliconing busted tank, and new fishroom pump

[Erik Olson <erik@thekrib.com>]

On Fri, 31 Mar 2000, David Colin Gorton wrote:

> couldn't believe it when he told me that it was 575 litres (125 
> gallons)!!!!!Including stand, FREE!!!
> I've now got the MAJOR headache of finding somewhere for it - but what a 
> headache;-)
> The only other problem is that one of the panels is cracked, I was thinking 
> of siliconing another sheet of glass onto the outside, not pretty but very 
> effective, I'd think. Does anybody have any suggestion?

If it's glass, strongly consider taking off the bad pane of glass, buying
a new one, and siliconing it back together.  If it's a tank that has a
molded plastic "ring" around the top and bottom, then you'll have to first
remove it (it's siliconed on, but it's possible to slowly pry it up,
working around all sides, until it lifts out entirely. GO SLOW!).  Then
you cut through the silicone sealant around the single pain.  Once the
glass is removed, you'll have to remove the excess silicon around the
neighboring panes (use exacto knife and razor blade to do this.  It's very
important to get the excess silicone off, or else the new pane will not
stick.  Finally, buy the new piece from a glass shop, and silicone it in
(make sure the silicone is aquarium safe, i.e. no anti-mildew agents!).
You can pop the plastic ring things back on at the same time.

Why this, instead of sticking a piece on the outside?  I tried that once.
What happens is that as soon as you put water in, and the tank feels the
stress, the original crack bows out, and it cracks the new piece.  I don't
know if siliconing the inside will help a lot more, but I wouldn't trust
it, especially with a tank this large.

So as long as we're slightly off-topic here, Kathy & I finally bought a
bigger airpump for our fishroom.  We've had this trouble for the last 3
years in that our fishroom's too small by fishroom standards (only about
20 tanks in the racks + 5 standalone display tanks) to get a hulking loud
blower, but too large for standard hobbyist pumps (we were running four or
five dual-membrane pumps, running 2-3 tanks off each "port", and replacing
one every 6 months, and having to re-adjust everything just right at every
water change, to be sure one tank didn't get all the air and turn off
another). Anyway, we found this nice little "linear piston" pump in a
booth at the NEC convention last weekend -- runs off 24 watts (in an
outage, it'll probably run of our DC inverter and a car battery), is
quieter than any one of the old Whisper pumps we had before, and drives
all our existing setups easily, and should be able to run double the
amount should we do any expansion (NOT!).  I mention it here because maybe
others on the list are in similar predicaments with mini-fishrooms, and
I've really never seen a pump like this before.  It was about $190 from
www.jehmco.com (their website doesn't list it yet; it shows the next
larger model only). No affiliation with JehmCo, just a satisfied customer.

  - Erik

-- 
Erik Olson
erik at thekrib dot com



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