Painting Background

I meant get a black peice of paper and tape it on there. There are aquarium backgrounds that you just tape on the back. Just to make sure its the color you want. Maybe you can find something else black if you don't have black paper.

Or maybe there is a premade black background that you can just tape on. Each has its advantages and disadvantages. I would imagine that the paint could be chipped and the tapped on background could fall off if the tape is old and its pulled. The backgrounds specifically for aquariums have a plastic coat so the paper doesn't get wet.
 
check out my 55 gallon progress thread (do a lousybreed search) i went through this. if you use enamel paint you could scrap it off with a razor blade very easily.

glass is not porous to any molecule, the reason why you can use windex is because it gets in the air and can get into the tank.
 
This says that water slowly dissolves glass similair to acid creating pores. Some chemicals can seap thorugh very slowly over time.


Acid corrosion behaves quite differently. By dissolving the alkali in the glass composition, a porous surface is left that consists of the silica network with holes where the alkali has been removed by the acid. This porous surface slows the rate of attack since the acid must penetrate this surface layer to find alkali to dissolve.


Corrosion by water is similar to acid corrosion in that alkali is removed from the glass surface. Water corrosion acts at a much slower rate. At high temperatures, however, water corrosion can become significant. Gauge glasses for steam boilers are a case in point. These products must be protected from the superheated water by a sheet of mica or replaced on a schedule that insures that they will not be seriously weakened.


Here is the link

http://www.cmog.org/index.asp?pageId=716

A chemistry teacher also told me that glass is porous but the chemicals move through it very slow. How slow? I don't know. But I have always avoided windex.
 
actually you are right glass is porous. in physical chemistry we calculated that it would take 150 years for alcohol to difuse through a bottle. We assumed that diffusion was constant and was a linear process. both are not true. without those assumptions it would first take a computer simulation to solve and the answer would probably be around 300 yrs.
 
I've always used windex to clean the outside of my tanks (spraying it onto a paper towel to avoid overspraying into the water). Now they have those nifty pre-moistened window cleaner towelettes! Love them :)
 
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