I found a new tank to give my newt a nice upgrade. It's a good size and a good price, but I have a few questions.
First off, what's up with the big pipe? I'm assuming it was a salt water aquarium and that's something to do with the sump? Is there anything I can do with it in a cold, freshwater tank? If not I can just cap it and stick some moss on.
Second, what do I do with the little wall? Honestly I probably wouldn't usually have my substrate that deep, would you just add a lot of cheap gravel and get the substrate higher? Or maybe hide it with a big stick?
Posted by Thick_Reality_5889
4 Comments
No idea about the wall, but if the pipe is for a sump nothing is stopping you running one on freshwater. Gives you extra water volume, effective filtration and keeps filters out of the main tank
That’s an overflow system for a sump, not just a pipe. You can actually run way better filtration with it if you set up a sump below. You can cap it, but you’d be wasting one of the biggest advantages of that tank.
I thought the wall was a little tennis net 🤣. But seriously if it’s glass and siliconed on then it might be a bodged attempt at replacing a broken cross member. I notice you haven’t got on at the top, is there one underneath the tank?
The tennis net looks to be a divider for substrate and wouldn’t offer any real structural advantage. It would allow them to have sand on one side and soil on the other while limiting mixing/contaminating. Given there aren’t more holes in the tank for returns I doubt this was a saltwater setup.
I have a tank that looks to be this size, I run a high tech planted community tank. I also use a sump. I would highly recommend going that route since the tank is setup for it.
Sumps don’t mean high flow at all. Pretty much all DC powered pumps have a controller used to control flow. Mines setup so the lowest setting just stops the plumbing from emptying while providing nothing into the display. Sumps can also be setup to run silently, look into “Bean Animal overflow”. If I didn’t have shimmer on the surface I wouldn’t know it’s running.
The sump lets me increase water volume, in my case a 50g tank, that is dedicated solely to filtration. You can now essentially stock your 125g tank like it’s a 250g tank. The filter media I use would fill up the average household aquarium.