DIY Aquarium Rack Setup in Garage Adding Tank

Recently I set up a rack in my garage and that rack is intended for quarantine and also for breeding. So I've got African cichlids and my Tanganyikan cichlids, which are in that tank with the white stand actually bred. So the Lelupai in there had some fry and I've got three little babies that I'm growing out. The focus of this video is actually going to be in the garage and on finishing setting up that rack because I've got some very exciting ideas for what I'm going to do with it. I'll give you a little bit of a look at where it's at right now. They're kind of nocturnal in here, so the lights only go on at night, but this garage has some type of curse where I clean it and then it gets messy again, like two days later. As you can see, I've got a four foot tank there. That's where the three African cichlid fry are. And then I have my little Florida Swamp Tang, that's Speckles, the little molly that you can see, little Dalmatian molly in there. Speckles is doing well, plants are doing well and everything in that tank, but I'm not super happy with how it looks. So let me lay out the plan. I'm going to actually move this tank down to the bottom rack and then right here on the table, I have a matching tank, exactly the same that I got from Mad Aquariums when they did the aquascape night just recently. They were doing 20% off tanks, so I grabbed that. Jack, the owner of Mad Aquariums, did me a solid, thought they were going to have these four foot tanks. They didn't have them. He felt bad, but then they actually had a secondhand one that they're not using. So he said I can have that secondhand one for $50. These tanks are not cheap because they're low iron glass. So $50 for one of these is fantastic and I will take secondhand any day. You're going to probably end up scratching it and I trust them there. It's not like a 20 year old tank where I have to worry about the integrity of the silicone or anything. And this rack, I've got a video on setting this up originally and almost breaking the rack and then a second video of setting it up actually properly after I took everyone's feedback. If you're interested in setting something up, that is a really great video. What I've got, which you will see in this video, so I won't go into too much depth. It's just the two Aqua One low iron glass tanks. I've got Jahiro's Vivid Minis that I had left over from when I originally did a riverscape on my six foot peninsula tank. Used to have rainbow fish, even though it's got African cichlids now. And I've got the Aqua Illumination lights on that tank now because I like those ones better. They match my Malawi tank and I like the shimmer. So the Jahiro's lights are in here, though, because these are still really great lights, really nice and bright lights and very good at growing algae, as you can see clearly. The first thing is we need to go to the Gold Coast, go meet up with dad and go to Bunnings, get the timber for cutting along here and then also getting the acoustic board too. We are actually all very tired because my fish and I were up all night because I had a house inspection. The house is really nice and clean now everywhere, but I spend all night cleaning basically just to make sure that it was going to be perfect for that. So I still got energy, though. We've got to go out. I've got to get this done. So we will go do that. Luckily, I've got the day off. What I've definitely noticed is that wave maker where the flow is increased, I noticed that it makes it a lot harder for the algae to grow. So I would say just from this that, hey, my wave maker is not on, I need to turn that back on. This is why it's not good to do things late at night. Basically, what happened was I turned my UVC on, which is not in the tank instead of my wave maker. So the pump on that is probably gone. And that's really unfortunate. And I just got these two, these new bulbs to put in there. So these are ultraviolet clarifiers. They take out green algae from the water, which just makes it look really crystal clear. And I did order two pumps just to have spare pumps because I wasn't sure how my pumps were going to grow since they're a couple of years old. But they cancelled the order because it was coming from America and I guess there was an issue with it. But I definitely don't think that pump is going to be working now. So let's get going. We'll head to the Gold Coast and we will meet dad there. All right. We are getting the yellow tongue particle board, so $39. Dad is just currently asking if we can get a discount because this one has a broken part. Good discount. Dad got it for $20 instead of $49. All right. Easy done. So here's the acoustic board, one of those, and look how nice the colours of these are. So what I'm going to do is I just spray it with a waterproofing stuff just to help, well not waterproof it, just make it a little bit more water resistant and it's good to go. No one walks faster than a dad in Bunnings on a mission to get stuff. We've been thinking about getting a rug for the garage. This is so nice and soft. I'm thinking maybe a Turkish one. Because that won't show dirt too much. May as well get it while I've got dad here. Dad said we didn't have time to look at rugs, so now he's looking at them. Yeah, I think that rug is going to look really nice with that red too. We'll just have to do some final cuts at home for it as well. But I'm quickly going to go and grab a door stopper that I saw too. So we will be back in one second. I saw this and I thought it was cute. So cute. That's my puppy dog. This is Zeta. I got her in 2017. She used to live with me. But now she is mom and dad's dog because they love her too much. All of these balls here, she found at the park. All right, you're already sitting. That's cheating. Okay, high five. Good girl. Spin. Roll. No. Lay. Roll. Still well trained. Not quite as good since she spent too much time with mom and dad. I give you a 7 out of 10. Using this stuff called bondcrete and mixing it with a little bit of water. This yellow tongue board, it is somewhat weatherproof because it's made for like building outside and being able to be out if it rains and stuff for around about half a year. But I'm just thinking that if you come in close here and have a look at this, where it's open there, where it's being cut, I just worry about water potentially running into there because it's going to have fish tanks. So we're just putting this bondcrete, which is like a gluey substance to just help to drip it already to help to water, make it water resistant a little bit extra. So we are back home. I'm going to go and bring all the stuff inside. We've got our foam, our yellow tongue, which I just realized we can actually put the bottom shelf on. I feel like I made that a lot more complicated than it needed to be and it would be good just to have a little bit of weight on the bottom of the shelf. Now, I do want to just get a little water resistant spray from Bunnings for these before I do put a tank on there, but I've got plenty of time to do that. I might do that on Friday when I go and actually pick up the four foot fish tank. But we'll just see they fit. Yeah, beautiful. I'm really excited to see how this looks. I'm going to save that for Friday or tomorrow when hopefully I'll have a little bit of time to clean this up and I will have had some sleep. So put that down for now. And one last thing that we cannot forget, we cannot forget the most vital item that we got today, which is a little door dog draft thing. Plan is, is that it's Wednesday. So what I'm going to do is I've got some non aquarium stuff to do tomorrow. Then Friday, I've got the day off. So on Friday, we're going to head to Mad Aquariums. I've let Jack know I'm coming in to pick up the four foot tank then and we'll have to get some other accessories like some more filters and heaters and stuff so we can make sure that we can have our two quarantine tanks fully set up on the bottom. We'll have our four foot tank on the second rack matching our top one. And we'll go through the process. So this is water spray, water shield. Sorry, the Sally's one. I used this last time for the yellow acoustic board that I put on the shelf just to make it a little bit hydrophobic and a little bit more water resistant since we are putting fish tanks on there and they're not really meant for fish tanks. So I'm going to go quickly spray that because it's meant to have a few hours to dry. All right, now I did get need to get another bottle of this because last time I used it, I used the whole thing. OK, so I'm just at Mad Aquariums now. We're making pretty good time. They are doing stock take right now, so they're very busy. But I just got Maddy to help me. We got some sand and I got two bags of sand. I've got my filters and everything. So we just thought we better just run around and get everything and chuck it here. So it's all ready to go and buy. This used to be set up here. So it's second hand. So Jack was saying he'll give that to me for $50, which is very kind of him. That's a really, really big discount because these are a few hundred dollars normally. So I'm very happy about that. But we're making good time. So I reckon let's go buy our stuff. We'll get the tank in the car and we'll be good to go. That's handy that no one's parked here. All right, put it in there. Be good to go. All right, cool. All righty. So we're now at Saturday and last night I gave the garage just a little bit of a clean just to make some space for us to get done what we've got to do. But we're going to get to work. What we're going to do is we're going to grab that other tank, put it down here. Move speckles down there. Get our four foot tank. Hopefully I will be able to muster up the strength to be able to get that four foot tank here. I needed Finn to help me move this one, but that was because it had a little bit of sand in it. By the time I put it up there, it's a little bit higher up. So hopefully we'll be able to get it in. But we'll see how we go. We will see. If you saw it in the thumbnail, I probably got it done. Well, there's nothing to it, but get it done and do it. I made that not rhyme. Let me go get the tank that is the same as speckles to pop down here. At least this one is easy to carry. Oh, there should be a soft bottom for it. Let me just see if I can find it. They do come with this little very thin leveling mat that you can put underneath. And when I start draining, it's kind of taking all the sand out, which in a way is is helpful because I can move this tank easier. All right, guys, I'm literally just going to have to pick speckles up. Speckles. OK, speckles, in you go. He's very easy to pick up and he's not very smart. She, I mean. All right. We've been here before. The first time when I set it up. What we're going to do is I'm going to get my flue ball light. I'm going to take this off and I'm going to attach our flue ball light along the top here, and then we'll put the shelving back on. Then for here, I'm going to get another Tahiris mini to match. I called around to a bunch of places and I couldn't get anywhere that had it in stock right now. So we just have to get that ordered in. But that will be coming. All right. So we're making solid progress. I've just gone ahead and I have moved that flue ball light, the flue ball sky onto here. And because this one isn't going to be hanging like what these Tahiris ones are and I've attached those with just fishing line. So it's see through. But this one's just going to be flush on the top. So I've just used zippy ties, the good old faithful zippy tie to attach that on there. So now that's good to go. I'm going to add our shelf back on and we can get our full tank on. I used to have this light on my discus tank. There we go. Sweet. All right. We'll put the foamy thing for it to sit on on the bottom as a start. OK, let's try and move this. Oh, and it's actually moving so easy. Oh, my gosh, this is way easier than last time. OK, I had dinner. I'm good to go. I can think clearly again. But I did just realize something. So I was going to put speckles back in the four foot tank because the heater doesn't reach. But what I might do is I'm just going to run an extension cable from the other side of the wall just for that heater so I can keep him in there because I realized that what I really want to do is since I'm going to be adding some substrate into the four foot tank for putting the plants in there, I want to put some aqua soil in there and that can raise the ammonia levels a little bit too excessively for a first few days. I think it is. I just know that initially you're not meant to have fish in there straight away. So I want to do actually keep speckles in the bottom tank and I'm going to set up just a little bit of the escape for the swamp tank. So I have a bit of an idea of what I want to do. I want to get some rocks and put them along the back and frame the back and then put some aqua soil behind those rocks. So it's kind of like a little bit of a cliff for the plants to be on. And then that way, the center is going to be the main part where all of the mollies will be swimming around. I just had started shoveling sand in from in that bucket. So I'm going to move that across now. I don't know if it's a good brand. It's aquarium soil and it's tropical. So I don't know, but it's what I have. So I'm just going to use it and put a load in the back. Now I'm just going to squish this substrate down the front here, make it a bit thinner. This is going to be the final scape. That's why I'm doing this quite quickly and rough. I'm going to do this a little bit more in depth later on. This is just kind of my initial type of scape of it. Look at this. It's like a little fry meeting. Can you see it's three of them that have been eating? It's getting so big, it's crazy. So what I did was I just finished with the tank. I filled up this four foot tank and I just let them sit for a couple of hours and come back downstairs. Now, unfortunately, it would have been good if the filter was going while we were waiting. But this filter at some point has stopped working. I've unplugged it now because I'm not sure why it stopped working. I might have overloaded the socket thing, maybe. I'm not sure, but I just don't have time and I just don't have it in me to figure it out right now. So I just thought I'll just unplug it. And once I'm a little bit more fresh in the morning, I will check it out. The baby fish is so cute. So this is what we've got right now, and I know it doesn't look amazing. It is missing a light and the cables. Don't worry, I'm going to fix all of this. I'm going to make this look a lot better, a lot nicer, especially the quarantine racks down here. So of course, speckles are still in there. Speckles will go in here. This is going to be our bio escape tank. I'm going to do a Florida biotope in there and see how that turns out. And then once I've grown up, who knows? Maybe what I might do is I might even do something where I can escape this tank. Kind of keen to try getting into some plants and some aquascaping and see how I go. I feel like these two tanks are going to be really good for doing that. And then down here, I'm going to have these as always quarantine tanks, probably bare bottom set up 24 seven so that I can always buy fish if I want to buy some and put them in there. And then I'm going to continue growing out for I am doing some breeding, which I can use this for. But we've got a few different tanks, at least now that we can utilize for all of those things. I really hope that you enjoyed seeing the process. Let me know what you're thinking of this rack system and how it's going along. I did want to show you the carpet and put that down here. It's just not worth it. We need to wait when everything is looking nice to do that. I know I didn't get as much done as what I wanted to, but I hope you still enjoyed seeing this get set up, at least with the tanks now. So our breeding, aquascaping, quarantine rack system has its tanks now. We just need to make it look nice and get the extra Tahira's light as well. If you enjoyed the video, make sure you give it a like. And if you're enjoying my content, I would love you to subscribe to my channel. That's a really easy, free way you can show your support that helps to promote my content and get it out there. If you like this shirt, this is one of my merch shirts, too. So it says, I love African Cichlids. I've got a website, katiecichlids.com, which I'll link in the bio, too. If you want to grab some merch, check it out. If you're in Australia, I've got some nice warm jumpers and free shipping over $100 as well, which is great. But anyway, that's it for this video. I will see you in the next one. Bye.