ToasterWaffles

We finally got the new aquarium set up! Hooray! It took a lot of work on Saturday, then a lot more on Sunday to get everything pulled off. I know it’s horribly cliché, but I could really use another weekend. Jess, Charles and I didn’t get any rest over Labor Day weekend. We had to finish assembling the stand, get all the plumbing taken care of, put together the sump, water test it, tear down both old tanks, get about 170 gallons of water from Scripps, move the new tank in to place, put the new plumbing in, put all the rock and stuff back in, put the water back in, and pray it all worked. Luckily, it did.

We started out Saturday idyllic and ready to go… around 11:00 AM. I’ve learned over a few tank moves (Brahm, Charles, our own once or twice) that they always take longer than they should. You accidentally glue two things together, you don’t measure something out right, you have to stop and go get water, etc. I was determined for very little of this to happen with ours.

We went out to get all the rest of the supplies we’d need, primarily plumbing and such. After we’d obtained everything we came back home to put the sump together, around 3:00 PM. After it was together we put some padding in the corners to keep the pond liner from tearing when it was full.
Once the pond liner was totally stapled together (excessive stapling) we put some water in it to test it. One thing we noticed was that the edges bowed out a bit. That’s to be expected, but it wasn’t very bad. That took about half an hour taking us to around 3:30 PM. To let it test for longer than 10 minutes we went out to get lunch. That was the first sign that we wouldn’t get everything done. You NEVER have time for food when actually moving a tank. I was starting to feel like it just wasn’t going to happen today.

We got back to see that the sump was still holding water! Hooray! We moved the four pieces of the stand over to the same vicinity and screwed it together. This was quite easy and so far everything had been going well. Around 5:45 PM we had the stand together and were jumping on it to see how sturdy it was. It held Jess, Charles, and my tubby self without any problems. Great. The total weight it will bear is in excess of one ton.

We picked up the finished stand and put it around the sump… almost. Though we couldn’t tell at the time we’d put it in the wrong way. Though it doesn’t look like it, the sump is actually a rectangle. We decided to drain the sump so we could move it around within the stand and figure something out. The sump is a lot lighter than that stand. Once we rotated it and saw how it would fit there was much joy in the air. We put the refugium in as well to get a good feeling for how it would all work out. We finished all that around 6:00 PM.

At this point it was very clear to Charles and myself that we could not finish today. We still had to glue all the plumbing together, baggie up the animals, take out all the rock and water, break down the tanks and get them out of the way, get Jess’ parents over to help us move the new tank in to position, and restock it. That would take at least another 6 hours, probably longer.