Frag Tank

LOL.. that "myth" is spread around sooo much. I have done tests on tanks with copper and I will tell you it is a complete myth about copper soaking into silicone and leaching back out. Yes, very very minute amounts do so, but at such a small level that it doesn't even register on any normal copper test. I used a 10G tank at the LFS I work at to try this out.. put in 10x the amount of copper in the tank than was recommended, let it sit for 30 days, then drained, rinsed/cleaned with vinegar, then put new saltwater back in and let sit for another 14 days and then tested for copper.. came back ZERO on all standard aquarium copper test kits I tried. You would literally have to remove the silicone, send it to a lab, and have them destroy the silicone sample to test for copper just to discover it contained .000000001 points, not enough to hurt anything.

As far as the tank price, ya, I have noticed that Petsmart doesn't list ANY of their standard glass tanks on their website.. just a empty tank with nothing, no hood/light, etc. When you go into the store though, 1/2 their tanks are bare tanks and usually have all sized from 10-55G in a bare model.
 
Maybe that myth goes back to the days of the old metal framed tanks when they used some sort of black hard black stuff to seal the edges. That stuff acted almost like a hardened tar material. Good silicon shouldn't absorb much of anything. Heck it doesn't even like itself. :D
 
Ace25 said:
LOL.. that "myth" is spread around sooo much. I have done tests on tanks with copper and I will tell you it is a complete myth about copper soaking into silicone and leaching back out. Yes, very very minute amounts do so, but at such a small level that it doesn't even register on any normal copper test. I used a 10G tank at the LFS I work at to try this out.. put in 10x the amount of copper in the tank than was recommended, let it sit for 30 days, then drained, rinsed/cleaned with vinegar, then put new saltwater back in and let sit for another 14 days and then tested for copper.. came back ZERO on all standard aquarium copper test kits I tried. You would literally have to remove the silicone, send it to a lab, and have them destroy the silicone sample to test for copper just to discover it contained .000000001 points, not enough to hurt anything.
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Good to know. Like I said, that's what's been propagated forever, and I've never had it happen to me or heard about it happening to anyone else, but I figured since I didn't have anything solid one way or the other it was just safer to not risk it.
 
Ya, I figured you were just repeating it. I was guilty of that myself for a while until I decided, after someone else told me it was false, to put it to the test myself and answer the question once and for all. GregAW may be right, it may have started with older tanks that used different materials to seal/join the panels of glass in the early days of aquariums and just kept getting repeated from that point on, even though building materials changed over the years.
 
Believe it or not, I had one of those old metal frames 10 gal tanks and I did run it as salt water for a few months. Didn't loose anything either. Then we upgraded to a 40 All Glass tank and everything went well with that too. I don't recall ever having to treat anything. I know the black stuff did allowed for salt creep and as you cleaned it the stuff would wash out like black sand.
 
You would need a TON of frags to fill that tank, plus that is still a little pricey for my taste. If you were to even 1/2 way fill that tank with frags the equipment required to maintain them would be equivilent to your main tank in lighting, flow, ca reactor, etc.
 
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