Betta Tank Renovation - Pictoral Journal

Hi ya'll. Some of you may know about my betta tank renovation (see sig) It was suppose to be completed before Thanksgiving weekend but it was obvious when i started that this would not be true. My order from Bigalsonline would not be arriving until Monday (curse you UPS!) and i haven't gone to The Home Depot for my bag of sand. So far all i can do is start cleaning up that dreaded 10G betta tank:
new to pictoral logs so yeah, kinda pointless to take the picture AFTER the bettas and water was removed but you get the point from the aftermath..

acclimating my lovely bettas in the 20G, where they would be temporarily housed until the tank was completed. used a breeder net i "borrowed" :devil: from the lab dept at my HS and used pieces of leftover plexi glass to fashion a temporary divider:


after 4 hours of slow acclimation (i forgot about them sometimes...) they went into the breeder net and off to sleep we all went:

the next morning, i discovered something quite shocking:

a fight had occured! it wasn't just the torn fins that was an indicator, the two bettas had completely switched sides! i wasn't sure who got into where first but i determined they had gotten under the divider because the breeder net floor sagged a bit. i took another piece of plexiglass and placed it under the whole thing:

thinking that was that, i left to do other things. an hour or two later, both bettas were on the same side again! they probably had just finished fighting again because they looked exhausted. while trying to net one of the bettas, the second guy blasted through corner of the net and to the other side. thats where they were sneaking through! again, using my endless scraps of plexiglass, i effectively covered that part up. they all better work because the next fight looks like it might be the last for one of them :thud:

more to come!

thanks for clearing that up webcricket. it seems that i have to explain the whole history of my 10G..... (by the way, i was thinking about putting one of them in the 20G, but my Black Phantoms don't see eye to eye with bettas and they will nip each other.

anyways, NO i did not JUST purchase these bettas (don't know where you got that). in fact i've had them for more than a year now. as said before, they were housed in the 10G that you see in the first picture. im redoing the tank so that they would have a better place to live, along with a new roomie.

this is just a temporary housing, maybe for a week or less. its obvious that i did not patch up all the holes around the plexi glass divider but i've got them covered now. it was an unfortunate lesson but it's not like it was intentional

update 11/30/06

well i threw away the old substrate, washed the glass and cleaned out the 10G.


i've also finished my DIY plexiglass plates. i was hoping to get them "smoked" or tinted but thats not the case now. There are small holes drilled for filtration and heat transfer throughout the tank. Unfortunately, my calculations were slightly off and in my attempts to make the dividers a snug fit, the width is short by 1/8th of an inch! as you can see, i made do using the spray bars on my internal filters (came along with my other stuff, ordered from bigalsonline) to hold up my dividers. that and along with 2-3inches of sand substrate will hold those dividers in place.

the internal filters were smaller than imagined, they are pretty cute looking. i just loved the spray bars because they help to deliver clean filtered water to all three compartments. more updates to come! this will probably be a busy weekend. picking up the sand tomorrow at home depot. deluxe hood is currently MIA for now.

12/2/06 - update

well, i went to the home depot yesterday looking for pool filter or play sand. amazingly, i did not find them, nor did the two employees that worked there. a bunch of masonery sand and "natural" sand but thats about it. a little disappointed, then again i didn't have to lug home 50lbs that day. i had some estes marine sand leftover (about 2 lbs or so) so i went to Petland's today for 2 5lb bags. ended up using only one of the bags so im returning the other:

after a good 4 or 5 thorough rinses, its in the tank and filling with water:

and a few minutes later, complete! it's settled a bit and clearing up pretty nicely. so far working with sand for the first time has been a pleasant experience:


more to come!