- Hi guys and girls.
I'm ReefMan and today I wanted to talk about glass,
specifically low-iron glass,
glass that you might have the option of using
on your fish tank when you order one.
For example, my fish tank is made by a company called
A.G.E. and it's a custom tank.
And when you're doing a large tank you have the option
of normal class or low-iron glass.
Low-iron glass is clearer.
It's actually exactly the way it sounds.
It has less iron oxide in it
which makes it more optically clear
especially if you look at it edgewise.
It won't be a bluish-greenish haze like normal glass.
So low-iron glass is often called Starphire glass
but that's actually a brand name by PPG Glass.
It's also called Ultra White, Optiwhite, Crystal Clear,
whole bunch of names.
If you ask for it at your local tank manufacturer
just ask for low-iron glass and any
of those manufacturers have an option for it.
As I mentioned before the difference between low-iron glass
which is clear and like this,
I can't see any difference
when I look through it and normal glass
which is like this where I can see it get blue
when I look through it, especially on the side.
The difference is that the low-iron glass
has a lot less iron in it than the normal glass.
It actually has about 10% of the iron than normal glass has.
Now there's not a lot of iron in this to begin with.
All of this kind of glass is made from silica sands
and those sands, on average, are only maybe .1% iron
which is enough to make it green like this.
Low iron glass comes from sand that's found
in the state of the US in the Wisconsin area,
Minnesota, Wisconsin and then sort of
down towards Arkansas is only .01% iron oxide.
And the way they make glass is they melt all
that silica, they add some proprietary ingredients
to it to maybe make it harder,
more scratch-resistant, stuff like that.
They melt it down and then they pour it
onto a big container of molten tin.
That's why it's called float glass.
It's made by floating it on molten tin.
And, of course, tin is a metal, it oxidizes
so they can't do it under normal air
so they do it under a nitrogen and hydrogen
pressurized atmosphere so that the tin doesn't oxidize
and then damage the glass.
But basically they float the glass on this molten tin
and then slowly reduce the temperature and eventually
the glass is hard enough that they can sort of like
pick it up off of the molten tin onto rollers
and then you're on your way to cutting
it to whatever size you need.
Now Starphire glass is not any softer
than normal glass or low-iron glass intrinsically
is no softer than normal glass.
So you might see people complaining
that it scratches easy or things like that.
So far as I can tell, and by looking at the data sheets
from manufacturers like PPG, it's not the case.
They claim that it's just as hard, just as structurally
rigid, in terms of shattering and what not,
versus normal glass but I think the thing
is it's much clearer and any kind of imperfection,
any kind of scratches are going to show up more
on low-iron glass than they would on normal glass
just by it being so clear to begin with.
Low-iron glass is used predominately, I think,
in display cases, certainly fish tanks,
things like that, small things.
It is about 10% more expensive than normal glass
so you're going to find that it is more expensive
to get a fish tank with Starphire or low-iron glass
than it would be to do normal glass.
I do think that it's worthwhile
especially if you have a larger tank.
For example, I also have poison dart frogs.
Excuse the fact that this glass is covered
in frog poop but, well, they poop often.
This tank is only a 60 gallon cube and it doesn't have
to hold water so the glass is very thin.
Because of that this is just normal float glass.
It's not low-iron glass and if we look at it edgewise
you can see that the glass is actually green,
if you look at it that way.
But if you just look at it normally through the glass
you don't notice it because it's pretty thin.
Thicker glass, like the samples that I was showing,
they have a green tint even when you
just look through it normally.
So, for example, on my fish tank that I always shoot
in front of it's a seven foot wide piece
of glass that's two feet tall.
On the front it has to be a certain thickness
to be able to actually hold up to the force
of the water behind it.
As you get into bigger tanks I think the benefit
of low-iron glass definitely goes up
because the glass is getting thicker.
I hope this video was interesting.
Let me know if you have any questions
about low-iron glass, Starphire glass.
I'm happy to answer anything that I can find.
Hope you enjoyed.
Don't forget to like and subscribe.
Give me some feedback, I love hearing from you all
and I will see you next week.
Bye.