Australian Aquarist FULL AQUARIUM TOUR Part 1

g'day guys it's Adam here the Australian aquarist welcome to my fish head I realized in making videos I haven't done one yet as a tour of my fish space all around the walls at one stage there I had racking for breeding Australian native rainbow fish and then I made one change and that was with this 600 liter glass tank over here with this tank here I decided to make it marine and I had kept Marine before up in funnel Queensland but had been a while that one changed started it all I've got a permit with Fisheries here in New South Wales to collect my own aquarium fish and I go out and do a lot of snorkeling and Diving I explore the oceans and the rivers and the estuaries and mangroves and I love doing that and in the process I do bring fish back from my aquariums but one thing I love to do is actually see fish in an environment that's to scale or as best as possible it can be to scale I hate seeing a surgeon fish or a moon rash just pacing backwards and forwards in a small four foot tank so that's driven me to build some fairly large aquariums so I can sit down and relax and enjoy seeing the fish behave as naturally as possible so what I actually did in the process was I stripped the back and side panels out of my seven foot six foot and four foot tanks and combined with plywood I then built these two tanks here so we're gonna have a bit of a tour of my setup you can see also just outside here I've got my Australian native rainbow fish and turtle tank which is outside we'll go through that shortly um but I think we should begin with where this process all started and that is with this tank over here rodos a bit of Rapid Fire information about the tank as I said before it's 2.1 by 1.2 by 67 600 millimeters High the reason this tank is 600 millimeters High I love it to be higher is that this panel and that panel back there with a front and back of a four foot tank this panel there and that panel bit there where the front and back of a seven foot tank so the glass itself is 10 mil glass and the height was dictated by those two tanks that I stripped down this was the first tank I built using epoxy and plywood as as the base got a video which I'll uh which I'll link at the end of this it's all about building plywood tanks you can get some good information out of that if you wish to tackle the project yourself basically the base of this tank is a lamination of two sheets of marine plywood two sheets of 18 mil marine plywood with a top sheet set back by the thickness of the glass which is 10 mil and it's obviously epoxied using my favorite epoxy and with this face board or around the edge it actually sandwiches and creates that Valley for the glass to drop down into this tank was a great learning exercise for me but it's also the one that's caused me the most regrets I was doing it as a lot of us probably do projects I was doing it in a bit of a hurry I was doing it just before Christmas and the realization in Australia that come Christmas time in January all suppliers and shops shut down for a good three or four weeks and I had to make some choices based on its construction with that in mind the biggest the biggest regret I've got is in the way I use this aluminum angle as the bracing you can see around these joins you get lots of salt crystals building up and eventually it just starts to actually I feel pit away and potentially particularly along this edge here potentially breach the condition of the uh the aluminum and create some possible toxic effects into the water like I said I've done an ICP test but um at this stage there's no aluminum levels which are elevated but it does worry me I did actually treat treat the aluminum first with a with a appropriate sealer being that time of year I did it using a sealer from my local hardware store and I wouldn't recommend doing that because it's just not good enough I would have used glass glass strips but again being just before Christmas time I was going to have some troubles getting your local Glazier to actually cut those bracing strips for me and being a four foot wide tank I didn't really want to have great big chunky pieces of glass going across the across the middle would take up a fair bit of space so I kind of I kind of thought utilizing this aluminum flat bar in this case it's a stainless steel cable might um be a bit less intrusive so that's regret number one the second regret I've got is the quality of the glass I've since since been getting some brand new glass cut for me from local Glazier and I must admit seeing seeing lovely new glasses absolutely amazing the clarity and the condition and the irising of the edges is beautiful see the scratches there and the algae just gets stuck into those scratches and it does make a little bit hard to actually to actually clean and uh it just does once I've seen the brand new glass or gotten used to brand new glass again it's um it's become a little bit hard to ignore it might be very hard to see but there is that sort of pitting and that there you go look at that down there and that's not I've actually cleaned that glass this morning that's just that sort of corrosion you get from old glass I'm not 100 certain about the longevity of this tank in my display the tank is drilled through the base um just down in here there's actually a standpipe and that's a suction line for a 15 000 liter Laguna pump which is just out the back there and it shoots water back so it's a closed loop for circulation plywood sump which has been epoxied and also polyurethane big aquamatic skimmer sulfur denitrifier one thing that I do run on this tank here is a ultravart light sterilizer this is 120 watt UV sterilizer one thing I also love to use is a good old ink bird temperature controller I don't get into into controlling and gear but I do love that ink bird to switch on the heaters switch them off and also switch on the fan for cooling if need be the rock that's inside the tank I've actually built myself it is there's a few natural pieces in there as well but a lot of the rock is actually built using a combination of shell grit and fine sand and white cement which I then cured in a local Creek to Leach as much of the lime as possible and that was been quite successful the front gravel is actually shell grit a lot of the areas around this side of the tank I've actually left bare bottom and I'm slowly growing a carpet of the Zoe anthers or palifoa and the rhodactus across the across the base the other thing I'd say about being outside in this shed is that um I can make mess that's one thing I really love because I did have some tanks inside the house at one stage and my wife would always get quite upset despite having to go concrete floors about water being spilled and I'm I'm a little bit messy so um I love being out here I've got a drain just down the corner of the shed there which I can hose hose out and the other thing I've you might have noticed about the stands is that these stands are all basically stacked concrete blocks so um there's no chance of rust there's no chance of rot and I can just get the hose in here and splash around and there's no problems whatsoever after a previous video I did on how to use the best fish food for your aquariums I mentioned that one of the two foods that I exclusively use is from an Australian company it's called frenzy fish feeds and I've started to develop a very very new tentative relationship with these guys but it's really exciting it's really exciting so in case you're wondering that's frenzy fish feeds this is the large six millimeter size pellet I use for my Estuary tank and for my turtles but I'm I'm pretty excited this is Australian company the ingredients in these fish feeds is amazing so I hope you've watched that video and you've learned to read the ingredients list and check out those first four ingredients on the ingredients list do that check this one out so they're based down Tasmania and they make feeds for aquaculture they make feeds for aquarium fish but they're also behind the scenes playing with live Foods they're playing with insects they're playing with macro allergies kelp spirulina duckweed and they're aiming to put out a whole range of different feeds that includes not only the pellets but also potentially flake and also potentially gel beige foods that includes all those amazing ingredients so and this is Australian company let me decide again this is an Australian company um they do have a new style of packing that's going to be coming out looks something like this and um it's the same good product just different style of packaging they're very young young company and they're just they're just growing and building so I really think we should get behind them and support them they've been very kind to send me a whole range of samples here from a half a millimeter pellet up to a nine millimeter pellet and what I would do is I'll go through or break open these packets in the next video and we'll go through different sizes and what we think we could use this sort of pellet for so um check them out you won't find them in the pet store you ain't going to find them online by directly from them it's free shipping and the prices of this fish food is amazing like seriously it's amazing so um you'd be mad and Australian as an Australian aquarist not to check them out so where to now well after I built that tank I decided that I wanted to try something bigger as you do so I decide to build this and this is my Estuary tank it contains some of my favorite animals so I'm actually really happy with this tank I spend actually a lot of time sitting in front of this tank I think because it's so long been 3.6 meters it actually provides me with that sense of scale that I love to watch the reason it's 3.6 meters is that this glass panel and this glass panel is the front and back of a six foot tank 3.6 meters and that panel there is the front panel from a four foot tank so it's 1.2 meters so it's 12 foot by four foot and again two foot or 60 centimeters high because of the height of those tanks so that means that these two panels here are separate it's not one continual pane of glass I bridge that internally with a glass bridge and externally with a Timber bridge and it's got that bracing piece of again aluminum that goes all the way down the tank I actually really like watching this tank I spent a lot of time sitting in front of it having a cup of coffee or a morning tea I think it's because of the sheer size of it being 3.6 meters long the fish can actually truly extend their uh fins so to speak and get some Pace up especially the trevally and um it's you know watching the little surgeon fish pecking away and a monster there my favorite eel just lounging around in the Driftwood um it's it's all very relaxing despite the fact that it's not a coral tank so it's quite interesting it's um it'll its biology comes and goes a fair bit I mentioned about the the deep sand bed I'll get occasionally a bacterial Bloom that might come from having some of the um the Driftwood in the in the tank and then that'll subside and the biofilms will grow on some of the Driftwood so it's actually a fairly successful replication of what I see when I do go snorkeling around um the break walls and the marinas of Coffs Harbor so in that sense it's been very successful and I actually wouldn't change I wouldn't change any part of this tank I really like it if you have interest in um setting up a different style of marine aquarium such as an estuary star like this one here check out these videos that I've got about using Driftwood and aquarium in a saltwater aquarium and also about uh just some of the the inhabitants I've got in this tank

Channel: Australian Aquarist

Views: 13,631

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Id: 6RnjR6Tq_xA

Length: 13min 8sec (788 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 24 2023