Freshwater Aquarium Project

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The Project:

I didn't have room in my house for the size of aquarium I wanted, so I had the great idea of building it outside. These pages will chronicle the progress of the project, and serve as a tutorial on how to build an aquarium. The final size of the aquarium will be about 500 or so gallons. I'm going to use my existing 50 gallon tank as the biological filter. There will also be an underground thermal mass for heating and cooling. So here goes:


Here's a CAD picture of the design:


The front glass panel is 7 feet wide. You can see the filter (the grey box, this is my existing 50 gallon tank), behind the aquarium. In between the aquarium and the filter, is a small tree, that is not shown.

First, I started to build the filter stand. Each post is on a concrete footing, and I drove several long screws into the bottom of each post to anchor it to the footings when they were poured.
Preliminary frame work:

The finished stand. It still needs boards around the middle, and some doors to provide a storage space. The filter (existing 44 gallon aquarium) will sit on the 1" styrofoam sheet you can see at the top.

Here is some detail on the corner. Those corners were tricky! Even with a good miter/cutoff saw it didn't come out perfect :(. No biggie....

Here is the beginning of the aquarium stand. The support posts are redwood, and will each be anchored to separate footings.

This shows the 45 degree corner at the right back. This support post was cut from a scrap 4x6 post I had laying around. I cut a couple of angles off one end to match the 45 degree angle.

This is the front middle post that also came from a 4x6 post. I cut 2 shallow angles in this one to match the 135 degree angle.

This is one of the back posts, with an inside 135 degree angle. I used 2 4x4 posts, cut an angle in each one, and bolted/glued them together.


On the next page, I start on the thermal mass for cooling (I live near Palm Springs, and it gets HOT here...), and heating.

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