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First attempt at building a Barracks


mumofthehoarde

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After many many months of lurking and drooling, I have stockpiled enough pieces to being my first attempt ever at building a barracks.

I have no idea what I am doing. But now the fish room is no longer on carpet I am going to try it out.

I have a "No Hammer" shelf unit (bought on sale for $49). I have replaced the MDF with cypress floor board as my attempt to paint MDF with marine varnish didnt work the best as the MDF soaked up the whole tin of paint.

Conned hubby into cutting the boards for me when the fish room migration was happening last thursday.

Last night I tested the Aquapro water feature pump I purchased but it was not strong enough for how high I want to move the water. The stats on the side of the box said rec height 60cm Max height 120cm so I thought I was ok. But I was wrong. So conned hubby into a shopping trip to Tamworth and got a bigger Aquapro pump. Its stats say Rec height 200cm Max height 300cm so hopefully tomorrow's test will be ok. This pump cost $79 from Bunnings.

on the bottom I have a Dalbarb sump I found a trip to Armidale (cost $179..I know.I wimped out and paid through the nose for it)

Next row I have 4 x 12" tanks which I drilled a 9mm hole through the back.

Next row up I am tossing up between beanie boxes like Kermadum's or those $2 containers from Kmart, I havent decided yet.

the top row will be another 4 x 12" tanks. Each tank cost $24.95, I was going to make the tanks but after getting a quote for the glass out here in the sticks, it was cheaper to buy the tanks.

I will hopefully be able to upload photos tomorrow when the next phase of the fish room happens.

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I think it's really better to pick the pump AFTER you've figured out the design of the barracks. The strength of the pump doesn't just depend on the height the water has to travel but also how far it has to travel horizontally and how many outlets are coming out of it. I wish I had a foolproof way of figuring it out but I don't. You need to figure out the flow rate of the nozzles you're planning on using. They should state the flow rate on the packaging in litres per hour. You need to muliply this by the number of outlets. That's the final flow rate your pump has to be able too produce. But that's not all. You need to look on the pump packaging to find out what effective flow rate the pump will give for the height that it has to pump. Some pumps will show a graph showing the reduction in flow rate. Of course not all pumps will have this graph. Unfortunately this is where a lot of us end up buying multiple pumps as we try to find one that is strong enough. One way around this is to simply get a pump which is far more powerful than you need. You then need to place a valve after all your nozzles which will handle the excess water flow.

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I started with the plastic containers but found the viewing was hard and the lid had to be lifted I only use them for guppy fry now and have gone for glass jars from plasdine 3.75Ltr jar about$3.00 so then get a glass cutting spade bit from bunnings (its cheeper than the dimond ones and dose the same job and drill your holes Ill take a pic when Alex finds the camara and they wont scratch like plastic will and you can boil them I just like the cleaness of glass IMO

Hope it helps

Cheers

Les

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