2 Story tanks

red devil

red devil

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Jan 7, 2003
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Shenzhen, China
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I have a bookcase built into the wall of my dining room. I want to put an aquarium in each of the two lower shelves. The upper tank will be almost exclusively plants, the lower will be a combination of plants and fish. I want to pump the water from the lower tank to the upper tank to be filtered, either exclusively by the biological action of the plants or with assistance from a filter.

Aside from leaking can you suggest any things I should be cautious about? I am thinking of having a drain installed near the top of the tank as an overflow to feed the water to the bottom tank and having a pump from the bottom tank move the water to the top.

The tanks are not very big. The bottom one will be about 16 gallons, the top about 10g. If the shelves look like they will support the weight I think I will try for 3 shelves of fish ...hey, why not do the whole rack?
 
wouldnt the upper tank just siphon into the lower tank and onto the floor? you would have to be very careful about water levels! other than that it sounds good. Just remember 10 pounds for 1 gallon of water. 100 pounds for 10 gallons etc.
 
The setup would work, I just don't think that the filtration will be as good as you need. I don't know what you're putting in them but it isn't that good of filtration. Also 1 gallon of water is 8.345404 pounds
 
He wants to have 2 setup tanks but have only 1 tank with a HOB filtration... that's what I'm getting from his post. His idea of transporting the water will work just fine however the problem is he won't have enough filtration.
 
I think he is talking using the planted tank as his filtration, which I have read and seen done, some planted tanks can pretty much run with out a but load of mechanical filtration.

I think though, I would use the planted tank as the larger of the two, and also put the fish up closer to eye view, you will need to monitor them much more , than the plants themselves, ..
 
theoretically this would work... am i wrong? If there are (2) of the same size tanks, (1) with fish and (1) with plants, the biological load on the tanks equals to only (1) tank. The plants would not do enough filtering for just (1) tank so additional filtration would be needed in that particular tank which would leave the fish tank free of a typical filtration device. Depending on the fish load of the second tank, does anyone think that a simple sponge filter would work?
 
I agree with JM. You're basically building a sump with the lower tank. The problem is that there will be some drainage if/when you shut off the pump for cleaning, power outages, etc, so the lower tank will not be able to stay completely full all the time. If it were me, I would put the fish in the upper tank, and that would stay at the same level all the time, and use the lower tank as the veggie filter. You get the advantage of having the higher water level usable by the fish, and having a cool display tank that also works as a filter.
 
The to[p tank would have to be sealed airtight, and the inlet aon outlet intot he bottom tank would have to be below waterlevel at all times.. Then the top tank couldn't drain into the bottom tank, any water to fall from the top tank would have to be replaced by water drawn up from the bottom tank since the top is airtight... would create a vacuum effect.
 
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