193 gallon plywood build thread

thats smart, take the rum out to the garage and the next thing you know your fish are swimming up hill because your cuts wherent even. lol but the stand looks great, good work

 

this looks amazing and i am now interested in looking into plywood tanks lol

 

HAHA i know right!!! i think i wanna do this on a LARGE scalem the cost is SO much cheaper, i might send you a pm for me infor im thinking like a 1000g tank.....

 

1000 gallon would be super ridiculous

 

At 1000G, the cost of the tank itself would be the smallest cost. The skimmer and lighting needs alone would break most people. Electric bills on those monsters are an upward of $300+ per month too, not counting anything else in your house.

 

That's a valid point. You get rock solid stability with a huge tank. The financial benefits might not exist. Heck, the cost of a good phosphate reducing media alone would be very expensive. Put the tabs for electricity, the water bill, salt, carbon into the mix and you had better be gainfully employed!

 

Not at all worried about the cost of equipment or RGE, thats the least of my worries, just wanna get it built water tight.

 

I know of a couple guys with 1000g plywood builds.

It can easily be done, and if you want a 1000g tank, making one as a plywood/ epoxy beast is the only way to do it affordably.

One guy that i know of that has his 1000g plywood tank bought 10 gallons of epoxy from the same place I did. My epoxy alone was like 120 dollars for over 2.5 gallons, so he spent 4x that much. Plywood alone I spent 140 dollars for the tank and stand, so he must be bare minimum 4x that amount, not including the equipment needed to run a tank that big.

If you have the time, you could easily make a nice skimmer for a tank that big, but DIY takes time. This guy is planning that his tank will be running by December. Granted his tank is already filled with water, I know I will get mine running before he does, based solely on the equipment reasons. For me, I have everything, I just need to transfer it from the old tank to the new one, and add a few extra goodies like my 75g sump.

I think he will have like 6 or 8 400 watt halides. I will only have 2 x 250. Just that difference in lighting will be killer on the electric bill. Now if you had a solar panel array bug enough, the electric co would have to probably still pay YOU $$ every month for the energy you sell to them.

One recent TV program, might have been a newscast, showed a couple in Iowa IIRC that had a small unobtrusive solar panel array that even in the heat of summer with the AC set at like 67 degrees, the electric company owed them on average 400 dollars per month.
Now that would make it pay to have a big enough tank, even with the cost of the soalr panels.


The epoxy paint is here, but I had 1 more coat of epoxy to use, so now that is covered, I have enough epoxy for touch up if I need, but I will also have the epoxy paint as well.

I should be able to epoxy paint some tonight, provided the epoxy I just put on sets up well enough before too late tonight.

 

If you make the tank well, with epoxy and wood, and then epoxy paint over the epoxy, that will not be an issue.

 

Thought I'd chime in. I have several friends with plywood tanks. They are amazing and very versatile. 1 was a Reef Central TOTM. Anyway. Plywood tanks when built right will out last glass tanks by decades