Building A Budget Reef Aquarium: Basic First Steps

In this Part #2 of our 30-episode series on Building A Budget REEF Aquarium, I recommend some more products we don't even sell. Crazy Dave made me promise that in Part #3 I actually recommend a product that we sell (he's such a capitalist).

In the last episode, we went over picking out the tank itself as well as the stand. In this episode, we're going to go over some basics of setting up the new tank before we get into all the rest of the gear.

PUT THE TANK WHERE YOU WILL SEE IT AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE
The first thing we want to talk about is the position of your aquarium. When you're looking for a position for your aquarium there are a couple things to keep in mind. The first thing is you're going to want to look at it. I can tell you that there's a tank in one of our studio rooms in the office, and I hardly ever go in there, and therefore that tank is very neglected. It's actually for the good of the tank that the tank is in a place where you can enjoy it. Here in the office where I spend most of my time is a great place. It's going to make you pay more attention to the tank.

PUT YOUR TANK AWAY FROM SUNLIGHT
You want your aquarium to be out of direct sunlight. In the video, there's a window right here beside me, but the sun passes through this and shines on the other side of the wall. We're not getting direct sunlight on this tank itself.

CONSIDER THE FLOOR
The floor under an aquarium is an important consideration. Here in Arizona, everything is usually built on the slab, so weight often isn't a consideration. But if you want to have a reef tank up upstairs, or if you have a crawl space, and especially if it's a larger tank, you want to make sure it can support that weight. And you want to make sure the floor can support any accidental splashing because if you have a big reef tank you're going to get accidental splashing. It's going to be best if that tank is on something like a tile. Carpet is probably the second best. Wood floors will absorb the water, and it's very risky to put a big tank of water where you know there is going to be splashing on those wood floors.

YOU'LL NEED POWER
You're going to need access to power, and there is a power outlet directly behind this tank. We're going to have easy access to it.

DON'T ELECTROCUTE YOURSELF

Next, we're going to go over how we get that power to all of our gear. When it comes to powering the gear on your reef aquarium, or any aquarium, one thing to consider is that this gear is all going in a big box of water, and there are some safety considerations.
The first one is that we recommend you use a GFCI-protected outlet. I generally recommend you just switch the outlet out with a GFCI outlet. GFCI outlets are in pretty much any kitchen or bathroom. They have a protective breaker so that way if any of the electricity is leaking it'll turn the outlet off. That's so that you don't kill yourself listening to your stereo in the bath. In a reef aquarium, you're going to be putting your hands in a box that has all kinds of electrical components in it. So to keep that safe, you want that emergency shut off.

You can just switch the outlet out as recommended, but if you're in a rented space like we are, or maybe you just don't feel comfortable, you can also get some adapters to do that. This is one that I picked out on the internet. I searched for GFCI adapters. I chose the one pictured because it doesn't just give me a single outlet, it gives me a few outlets and still has the GFCI protection and reset. Plug this into the wall and then all your gear will be plugged into this. That way if a cord were to break underwater, and you were electrocuted, you wouldn't kill yourself. This is very, very important. Make sure you install one of these guys.

PRO TIP NOT INCLUDED IN THE VIDEO: Plug your light directly into the GFCI. When you clean you'll want to turn off all of your equipment, but you will want to have your light on. If everything other than the light is plugged into the power strip you can just turn off the power strip and still have the light on.

SOME POWER STRIPS ARE MORE APPROPRIATE THAN OTHERS

Once your outlet is protected, you're going to want to purchase some kind of power strip. This is because there are going to be a lot of devices you need to plug in (filter, heater, light, wave pumps, and maybe dozens of other things). There are a lot of different power strips out there. My personal favorite style is the shop-style power strip. They have easy mounting holes. Some traditional power strips you can mount to a wall, but they're recessed and they're very hard to access. This one you can just push up against the back and then drill right into the stand to put it in place.

Never, ever leave a power strip just sitting flat on the ground. When all those outlets are facing up the water can get into them. We're going to mount this up against the very top back of the stand. That way all the cords will hang down and the water won't make its way back up into the outlets where it could potentially cause a fire.

I also like the space between the outlets. Some gear is going to have big brick plugs, and when you have a power strip where those outlets are close together, you'll plug one of those in and it'll block up three slots. This one I chose has plenty of space between the outlets, and that's going to allow us to plug something in and not interfere with the other outlets.

BACK IN BLACK
The last part of our basics is going to be painting the back of the tank black (the outside, not the inside of the tank). Now this tank has already been painted black. We used a can of spray paint from Walmart, and we highly, highly recommend you do this if your tank doesn't have a background and it's against a wall like this. Inevitably the back of the tank's going to get dirty, it's going to get dust. It's going to get little bits of salt creep and dribbles, and if you have a clear back that's just going to look really really ugly. There are film backgrounds you can put on the back. Those last for a little bit then start peeling off and bubbling and looking bad. You can also paint the back other colors besides black, but in our experience with colors such as blue, as soon as there's algae on it doesn't look really good anymore. White also does not work well. As soon as the algae gets on it, it doesn't look good anymore. Black is going to look the cleanest over time and the other advantage is most of the gear we're going to put in the tank is black. If you have black pumps against a blue or a white background they're really going to stand out and look bad whereas the black equipment against the black background is going to hide it. It'll make it look really discreet, and that's our goal. So we're going to spray paint it back just with a regular can of spray paint, and then you'll get a result like what we have here.

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Building A Budget Reef Aquarium: Basic First Steps

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