how much rock(weight) can tank support

is it acrylic or plexiglass? eitherway its going to be a lot, even if its glass im sure the bottom is tempered. i know somepeople put eggcrate under the sand for rock support. im setting up a 40 gallon with about 50 pounds of liverock and im not worrying.
 
If you are setting for cichlids which dig, you cannot or should not set the rosck on the sand - the fish will undermine the structure. The rocks need to be on the glass, or for me, on eggcrate to distrubute the weight and avoid pressure points against the glass.
 
RTR said:
If you are setting for cichlids which dig, you cannot or should not set the rosck on the sand - the fish will undermine the structure. The rocks need to be on the glass, or for me, on eggcrate to distrubute the weight and avoid pressure points against the glass.
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RTR - you have concerned me now, I recently set up my new cichlid tank with huge pieces of slate on top of sand. I put a fine layer of sand over the bottom of the tank then added the rockwork and then just added more sand around the rocks in the spaces afterwards. The slate is all on flat sides down and I made sure there was no 'wobble' where pieces were stacked, would you say this is ok?
 
I put a LOT of rockwork in my cichlid tanks. If there is enough sand under any rocks to cause the pile to shift if the fish dig, you are likely to have problems. I line the bottom of my tanks with something to protect the glass against pressure points and against impact in case a rock should fall. I have used pieces of slate or layers of plexiglass. (I haven't used eggcrate because I don't want to see it if the fish dig away the substrate, but eggcrate is widely used and is safe.) I then stack the rocks and only add substrate after the piles are stable.

I often take up 20-25% of the tank's volume in rocks for mbuna tanks, and haven't had any problems yet with weight issues.

HTH,
Jim
 
if memory serves me correctly, tempered glass has a burst stregth of about 10,000 PSI. That means you could support 1,440,000 pounds on a square foot of glass if it was distributed evenly. If you have 10 pounds of pressure on 1/1000 square inch though, the whole sheet shatters. I think the biggest thing is to avoid pressure points. a layer of thin acrylic or a piece of eggcrate on the bottom of the tank will serve to eliminate the pressure points by spreading them out over the glass.
 
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