300 gallons of blog!

Been a bit since I updated, but not since I've made progress. Boom.



I cut the wall and glued the trim in place on the 26th, then had a few friends sneak over to help me slide the tank in place. It was a relatively straight forward event. The glass touches the wood trim that I've installed, and once it's all settled I'll caulk it together. I hesitated a few days on filling it though, as I wanted to speak with marineland first. As you can see (somewhat) in this picture, the tank was level.



As was the stand. I had checked it hundreds of times over the construction phase, so I was very confident in that. However, on the short sides of the tank there were gaps between the trim of the tank and the stand. This was about as bad as it was along the left side of the tank.



I measured the gap by seeing how many sheets of paper I could slide in the hole, then measured the stack of paper with my calipers. The gap you see above was just under 1/32". And as you can see, the stand itself is rather flat. This picture is along the same spot as the picture of the gap.



As a result, I deduced that the tank itself was not flat, and so I wanted to talk to the manufacturer before adding water. I could have easily shimmed those spots to fill the gap, but marineland told me to fill the tank and call back of the gap persists. So on the 28th, I began filling (at 50gpd). Here's a shot of the tank at that time (I have some coroplast sign material along the back and sides of the tank).



And today, here's the tank with the LEDs on. I need to figure out the white balance with this new light color. The opening on the wall is about 20"x66", so a significant amount less than the actual tank, but I like it.