is arguably no better feeling than setting up a brand new aquarium system
the octopus aquarium the shark tank are now up and running and in today's video i'm going to show you
how i did it all and give you a basic breakdown of how the filtration system works plus some of the
problems and challenges we came across uh in doing so and when i say we i mean me it's just me here
i think we'll have to start with the overflows and how i went about that what i was originally going
to do versus what we ended up with obviously when i have the bare aquarium the next thing i got to
do of course is figure out filtration we knew we were doing a sump and we need a way to get
them down there when it comes to acrylic you can just use wood tools on acrylic like a wooden hole
saw will drill through acrylic no problem uh wood saws and routers everything that you use on wood
works on acrylic for the most part now originally what i was going to do was use one of these and
this is our extras from the 2 000 gallon aquarium this is a 2 inch bulkhead it's a way for you to
drill your aquarium and get water through the wall or through the bottom of it drill a hole
stick this in this goes on there's a rubber gasket to stop any leaks
i'm sure you guys know what a bulkhead is by now if you've been watching me for a while
and then these little strainers this was just going to be it i had uh i just
had extra this is like a frankenstein system that turned out pretty cool i basically used
a lot of extra equipment that i already had on hand i was gonna go another route but once i
was kind of looking for odds and ends i realized i have everything and there's no reason why i should
you know build or buy anything when i don't really need to besides when it came to these overflows
i thought this was going to be pretty ugly pretty sleek for the most part but it's likely going to
be loud and i'm not going to have as much control over it so i went to my local fish store one fish
two fish in dartmouth nova scotia and i saw these little overflows now they're only rated for about
600 gallons each uh 600 gallons an hour each which is more than enough for these two aquariums i do
need relatively low flow in the octopus as well as the shark tank but at 600 gallons an hour to be
fair i'm turning the water over almost 10 times an hour eight nine times an hour i don't want to do
the math you do it and like i said we just drilled the hole with a wooden hole saw installed the
overflows and what i liked about them the reason why i went with it is because the internal box
is so small and the slits in it aren't going to allow for like a shark to get in but an
octopus might so there is one last thing i got to do you need to install
this fine mesh it's a plastic fine mesh it's not going to be able to rip it apart or anything
over top of the slits i just wanted to do some testing first i got about a week or so
before the octopus arrives so i do have time to get this over it the slits are probably
a quarter inch wide maybe smaller but i'm not taking that risk again the sharks aren't going
to be able to get through it but i don't i don't feel that comfortable about the octopus so we'll
definitely install this and that's basically what i did for the overflow systems now before there's
even water in the tank one of the things that i just had to do was clean the tank i wanted it to
look brand new because these tanks are brand new i just built them i want them to look brand new
so i took some of my fritz glass and acrylic cleaner which works really good on acrylic and
clean the insides and out of these tanks because they definitely needed it and then the annoying
part nothing out here is level this concrete cement floor was laid in like march it was still
it's just not level out here at all so everything has to be manually leveled now i made a video in
the past how to level your aquariums and simply just using wooden shims uh just bang them under
the stand under the support systems where the majority of the weight is going to be
but a little hack i like to use is to when i take my level i like to put it on top of the tank and
then put the shim under it till it gets level to see how much of that shim i need to tap in
so i'm not like constantly going up and down and checking and coming back and up and down
works for me then of course added some sand and pre-mixed some fritz salt
and filled the tanks up the salinity right now
should be at about one two one point zero two six
yeah so 1.026 temperature 25 degrees celsius so this is perfect oh and then the lids
i had some spare uh double wall polycarbonate panels that we've used for lids in the past
i just had extras cut them up and put them here but i made them extra big
because on the octopus aquarium i'm going to weigh these down with like five pound weights
there's no way i'll get out of that or at least we'll find out yeah oh and then and then i escaped
the tanks in the shark ag aquarium we're using more of a sand it's a crushed coral type sand uh
something that's going to be soft on their bellies be able to find their food yet make them feel at
home i'm not a huge fan of adding substrate to like a grow tank or anything like that but uh the
the sharks that we are getting uh will probably do a little bit better with sand the octopus
aquarium got more of a fine-grained crushed coral this will give him a little bit more grip
to go on uh there's only a couple rocks in there right now and you'll notice the tower's gone i
wouldn't say i had a huge problem with the octopus tower if you guys don't remember i built this like
almost like two and a half foot tall tower that comes out of the tank i had a few little issues
with it and i had to fix a couple it didn't break or anything but i had to add some stuff to it to
i i need a couple days for this that video will come out shortly okay so as for the filtration
like i mentioned it's like a frankenstein type setup as the water overflows we have a main
one-inch drain where the water is coming through the tank it drains here
uh and that this is the emergency in case this ever gets clogged they both go into a filter sock
that's what these two pipes are as well i just painted them black i kind of started
painting everything black and then i realized well now there's green and
there's gray and there's black and there's red i just gave up there's too many colors to cover
but i did have in uh good intentions with these two pipes they go into a filter sock that i simply
clamped onto the side with a little clamp i was going to build and rig something up but
i i mean this works and i've done it before many times it just hangs there and when it's time to uh
change it a lot of times it gets too heavy and it sags so that's when i know it's like
okay time to change that and very easy to change take the clip off remove the filter sock replace
it or just clean it and that'll be it once the water's pre-filtered and into the sump we have
a large protein skimmer mind you it's not skimming that great right now because i took out the tower
extra water got into the sump of course that tower water had to go somewhere and i had to turn the
skimmer down letting less uh water into it um but basically as you can tell see how it's like
a cloud of bubbles literally a cloud of bubbles you can't even see through it you can barely
make out that there's it's it almost looks like smoke as in comparison to when i was testing this
with fresh water you can notice that the bubbles are much larger and that's why a protein skimmer
works in salt waters because they're able to make these fine tiny little bubbles and as they rise
protein is being attached to them the protein molecules are attached to those tiny little
bubbles um and as they rise they get to the surface they burst in the cup and then we can
remove that protein i wish we could do this in a salt in a fresh water tank and technically you can
but the skimmers are floor-to-ceiling type deal they're not practical at all this is an open type
an open concept sump so there's no baffles or anything it's a bare 40 gallon tank and things
are just kind of propped in there oh i did build a couple of acrylic platforms a lot of
this i didn't film because i was just kind of doing my own thing and enjoying the build but
the reason i built these acrylic platforms was simple the output of this reactor that
we're gonna get to in a minute it was too low uh the output was like butting up against the brace
and i couldn't go under it so i have to try to come over it but i had to lift it by an inch and
a half so that's why it is and look at this is all the plumbing that i had here i got to pick
up some one in one and a half inch pipe and just go boom boom right down and that's that's the
only thing making noise right now this makes a little bit of rattling noises like from all the
media in there that i'll explain here in a second but i raise these two up which allows more water
in the sump fix that little problem and then of course uh once we're through with the skimmer
we have the biological uh reactor basically water's being pumped in through this little
pump at about 300 gallons per hour it rains over this fluidized media and then there's
an air pump pumping in air at the bottom so the water pre-filtered uh unfiltered water
is coming through the top going through the bottom and then it kind of overflows over here
and i can control the height of the water with this gate valve right here now if you're not
familiar with what a fluidized reactor is or fluidized bed media or fluidized
bed filter or fluidized filter i used to make them all the time we have these uh little media
they are little plastic neutrally buoyant uh media
and basically what this does is if we put this in water it's going to float but you can like
tap the water surface i'll show you so that's going to float but if i tap it where are you
but if i tap it
it doesn't come up
right away see that so it's like can you see that it almost suspends in the water for a second right
now what that means in a filtration system as ammonia is present in the system and creates a
demand for uh nitrifying bacteria which lives on surfaces it doesn't live in water it needs
a surface to live on it's going to attach to this stuff and because it's neutrally kind of buoyant
that means that it's once even a little bit of bacteria is on this and it becomes cycled
it no longer really floats it kind of suspends in the water and just a little bit of
circulation like air bubbles for example can cause it to fluidize and kind of go nuts like this now
see and the benefit of this is very simple as the bacteria is cultivating on the outside of this
only the strongest the youngest and most efficient bacteria remains because look at
it all smacking into each other all that older and dying and dead bacteria you know that moan
that you find in your tank sometimes is all getting knocked off and while we do want only
the youngest and most efficient bacteria to be present like a supercharged bacteria type of thing
there's also something to be said about allowing bacteria to live out its life cycle so if we look
in the center you can see it has a protective area so when these are clashing together the insides
are not touching at all allowing for all those microbes and bacteria to live out its entire
life cycle the benefit of course to a fluidized filter is that they are incredibly efficient
and next to no maintenance if you are curious on how to build them i've done tons of projects on
them i built them into sumps bottles you name it every type built them into the back of a tank into
the side of the tank into barrels every type of fluidized filter because i used to only do them
then it just became a little too cumbersome they were huge they're a little bit noisy they got
expensive because you need to buy the media the the container the pump et cetera et cetera et
cetera and i you know i just wanted to show you guys how to that you can run it doesn't matter
the method of filtration so long as it works for your setup and i showed you guys every diff every
type of uh method of filtration there is and if you want to truly oh well i guess i guess
do a shameless plug what's up oscars oh check the plant to take out this is actually looking
really good needs some fish though doesn't it plants are doing well got control of all that
algae just did uh just siphon it out manually and then of course uh did a water change that was it
anyways back to my shameless plug i wrote a book titled the ultimate do yourself handbook for the
do-it-yourself aquarius it's massive and there's an entire chapter on filtration not only talking
about and showing you in detail how to build these types of filters but the why and discussing the
bacteria and how to actually calculate how much media you need based off the fish you're actually
keeping and what bacteria actually require it's actually my favorite chapter in the book yeah
so after going through the fluidized bed filter it overflows over here and then you guys might
want to see i've got a pump back here believe me i know it's hard to see it i don't know how
we'll get an angle on it but because everything's dark oh there you can kind of see it there it's a
2 000 gallon per hour pump um we might be able to see it yeah there we go right there 2 000 gallon
out per hour pump and we split it here in either direction for either a tank and we control the
flow to each tank with these little ball valves so if i want more flow to go to this tank i turn the
ball valve down for that tank type of deal but right now they're just equal i don't need a ton
of flow to each aquarium uh and i have about 400 gallons an hour going to each one 70 gallon tanks
about five times an hour that's gonna be good we're having we're gonna have shark eggs in
this for a couple months there don't need a ton of flow in there tank just needs to be
clean and cycled and the octopus aquarium if we need to increase the flow of course we can but
uh we'll keep things a little docile for now let them let them get used to it and they are
coming within like i think it's like a week or two they are returned via these little half inch and
this is me not uh just being lazy i gotta put on some hose clamps but uh returned it via these like
uh half inch ball valves and some lock line uh and if power ever shuts off you'll notice that the the
overflow or the i'm sorry the output is above the water surface so it's a siphon break if these were
below the water surface when the power shuts off water is going to siphon all the way down to the
sump as much water like if this was two inches below the water surface two inches of water is
gonna overflow into the sump all these little things you guys gotta know about so obviously i
can't just take the octopus and the shark eggs and add them to the tank it's not cycled i'm going to
have to cycle it and i want to do it relatively quickly so how am i going to do that well
after the skimmer and after the the bioreactor there's a bit of a channel back here and there's
tons of space but i'm going to use that space and take these bio blocks from kevin's tank
i've got a bunch of them in here these are cycled ceramic media and toss them in there immediately
cycling the aquarium sort of because the octopus is so small and the shark eggs really aren't
creating any sort of ammonia that bacteria could potentially die off so i'm going to also add in
some fritz bacteria to kind of supplement it and keep a very close eye on how everything is going
to be fair i won't need to add a ton of bacteria to this tank because there's not going to be
a ton of bio load at least at first oh yeah you know what i did recently
i trained the archer fish to spit if you guys want to see that video and how i did it let
me know in the comments section below that tank needs a water change so that's basically
everything about these tanks the filtration how they were set up etc um a little boring per se
but i do want this video to be out there to kind of reflect back onto in case anybody's wondering
how everything works i likely won't talk about it again besides like little updates on it
the focus is definitely going to be on the animals figuring out the octopus observing the sharks it's
just going to be absolutely phenomenal and if you can't wait to see those things and if
you're not subscribed to this channel yet make sure you do or you're going to miss it i got to
get back to work on the tower it's a it's a bit of a problem i'll see you guys in the next video