Lighting used: Acan Lighting LED Light Fixture 18″ Black (Mfg# A104AC -18B/600-18B)
Automatic feeder: Automatic Fish Feeder for Aquarium Fish and Turtles W/timer (style may vary)
Mechanical Filtration: Nu-Clear 530 Canister Filter – 30 sq. ft. 25 Micron Mechanical Filter
Pumps: BlueLine 100 HD External Water Pump
This aquarium holds approximately 700 gallons of water which weighs near 6000 pounds. If you add the weight of the glass it easily eclipses 7000 pounds. Now here’s the amazing part: It’s suspended from the ceiling!
Since it was hanging from the ceiling we needed to keep the bottom of the aquarium free of any filtration components to keep the floating in mid air effect. This along with the home being 3 stories high, but not very wide, led to some interesting plumbing. We utilized a small filtration room on the floor below the aquarium along with a super powered pump to send water all the way up to the roof where we set up the chiller.
While we normally wouldn’t put a very large roof sized chiller on an african cichlid aquarium, we wanted to make sure the filtration could handle any future changes. If the customer decided tomorrow that they wanted to switch from african cichlids to saltwater fish, or even to a reef tank we know the filtration is ready to handle it.
That’s not to say there is anything wrong with african cichlids. These fish offer a great diversity in color and they have already began breeding in this tank. Here is one of the little guys now. Normally cichlids are very territorial and they love making caves.
The decorations in this aquarium along with its sheer size give the fish a lot of room to hide and protect their young. When they dig in the sand a lot of times they are trying to create a nice flat spot to lay their eggs. Since they find nice smooth glass under the sand they can comfortably breed behind the rocks.
To light this aquarium we used 3 – 18 inch LED light fixtures from Acan lighting. Even when set to 70% power these fixtures are more than enough to light up the entire tank even at almost 48inches deep. Again this gives us flexibility to hold more delicate fish in the future.
