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@Bullsnark The 20 gallon is probably a bit small, but it's all I really had space for and I didn't have to go buy an additional tank. This setup is more than likely temporary as the original owner of the fish should be taking him back at some point. There's no filter over the overflow because on the tank it's being used on, there's only one fish to worry about and he's too big to get sucked into anything. I had only put it on my platy grow out tank as an experiment to see how it worked and eventually added a makeshift skimmer on the intake after some of the platys got a little too curious.

@KentFishFanUK It seems to be going OK so far. The tank is still relatively new, so I think things are still getting established. But, previously without this setup, nitrates would get up to about 30 or 40ppm in 3 or 4 days. With this new setup, after 3 or 4 days, it's been reading around 15 or 20ppm, so that's promising. I was going to give it a few more weeks before posting an official update, but so far I'm optimistic that I'll be at least able to cut down to weekly water changes instead of twice a week.

No, it's one big, curved piece along the back and then a smaller, straight one in front with a few smaller pieces scattered on the top.

I'm currently fostering a very large Central American cichlid that might as well be another dog. He swims over to me whenever I enter the room and will chase my finger around the glass. If he's cranky, he'll pretty deliberately spit sand at me and will try to bit me if I'm doing work in his tank he doesn't approve of (especially on Sunday which is his day to fast)

YES! Pretty sure that's the only thing that saved my stand when my 75 sprung a leak while I was two states away.

Whenever I build a stand, I also always try to make it tall enough. As a tall guy, it drives me nuts how low all the stands on the market are. For small tanks, I like to have the top almost at eye level. For bigger tanks, I like them a good 6 to 8 inches taller than your average stand height.

I just built one myself for my new 125. The three main things I'm most proud of: Small shelf to hold a rack-mount PDU so that when I do maintenance, I can just flip switches to turn off my heater/canister filter/air pump (1st picture below) A towel bar on the door so that I'm not just throwing a soggy towel underneath to get moldy/stinky (2nd picture below) A kind of wide U-shaped cutout along the back of the top, so that when viewed from the side, the top appears to sit flush against the wall, but the cutout leaves space to route cords, air hose and canister filter hose through (Unfortunately almost impossible to take a picture of, but hopefully you see what I mean)

Well, let's see how this works... Of all the "iums" to keep track of, I think this mostly closely resembles a refugium, which is apparently fairly common in the saltwater world, but mostly used for culturing worms and such in freshwater and avoid them getting eaten right away. I've broken down my 20 gallon quarantine/grow out and and put it next to Casper's 125. For the overflow, I watched a lot of YouTube videos on an overflow system and the one I ended up building out of PVC isn't exactly like any of them, but it probably most closely resembles the one from Blake's Aquatics. I didn't want to limit the flow too much, so I used 1 1/4" PVC and 5/8" ID vinyl tubing across the top. I ended up putting a 90 degree elbow on the inlet to keep the water level up a little higher and above the frame. The idea of using a spare powerhead to move water out of the small tank and into the big one didn't really work, since that's really not what they're designed to do, so I end up getting a (what turned out to be very small) submersible pump from Amazon. It's much smaller than I thought it would be, but so far seems to be doing the job. It's connected with 3/8" ID vinyl tubing that runs to the opposite side of the big tank, up into an old canister filter outlet tube. The pump is only about 95 GPH, so it's definitely not blasting water out of there, but it's enough. I've tried to set it up so that if either the pump fails or my overflow loses the siphon, things won't get flooded. Unless Casper somehow hulks the elbow off of the overflow (unlikely), there shouldn't be enough water to flood the 20 gallon and I've placed the pump pretty much as high as I can in the 20 gallon, so that if the overflow loses siphon, it would only pump and= additional gallon or two into the big tank, which shouldn't be enough to make it over the lip. I guess that's the advantage to such a small pump. I am a little worried about the lack of water movement in the 20 gallon, since the flow is so low though, so maybe I'll add a spare sponge filter or air stone or the original power head in there just to get some water movement. For plants, I was able to find some hornwort and Amazon frog bit locally (Shout out to World of Wet Pets in Beaverton--I just wish they were closer to me). I figured I'd start out small considering how quickly they are both said to propagate. I've covered the top with that plastic light diffuser grid from Home Depot (how versatile is that stuff in fishkeeping, btw???) and then put some pothos clippings from a friend of mine through that so the roots are in the water. @Guppysnail recommended that I try sprouting a sweet potato in the water as well, so I plan to give that a shot. I've mounted a Fluval Plant Nano above the pothos and I have a spare 18" Current USA LED that I can either put on top of the grid or slip down between the two tanks if the frog bit goes crazy to make sure the hornwort gets some light. Both are on timers for about 8 hours a day. It's too soon to tell whether or not this will help cut down my water change schedule, but It seems promising so far. I've been pretty impressed with how well the overflow works, too. For an initial test, I set it up in my 75 gallon grow out tank that's across from this one. I threaded a garden hose onto the outlet and used it as an overflow to do probably about a 40-50% water change. It was able to handle the flow that comes out of my faucet, so I'm confident it will handle the tiny pump that's in there now. It was a little nerve-wracking watching my baby platies "investigate" the open overflow, but as far as I could tell, nobody actually got sucked out. So if this experiment fails miserably for some reason, at least I've built a pretty nifty way to handle a simple water change on larger tanks... I'll keep updating here as time goes on. Normally, it takes about 3-4 days for nitrates to reach 30-40ppm, so I'm hoping that once this gets established, it will be able to stretch it out so that it fits a little better into my existing weekly water change schedule.

I've done it before with some success. I think as long as you stick to the hard plastic bricks, you should be fine. It's when you get into some of the other, more bendy pieces where I would question whether or not things would start to leech. The problem you'll have is getting it to sink/float consistently. I had a floating Lego submarine in my betta tank (linked above) that floated for months and looked great. It then started to grow a bunch of green spot algae on it since it was so close to the light, so I put my nerite snail on it and just his weight caused it to sink to the bottom and never float again. So, if you're planning on trying to have it float, it could be tricky, but if you're wanting something on the bottom of the tank, you'll probably need to anchor it somehow.

@eatyourpeas I suppose I could ask them. I love them, but if there's one thing they're not great at, it's plants, unfortunately.

The anoxic approach is certainly interesting, but probably not something I'll attempt on this tank. I'm fostering him until the previous owner is able to establish a more permanent living situation so having a first time anoxic setup go horribly wrong and potentially kill his fish is not something I think he'd appreciate. Maybe I'll give it a try in one of my other setups at some point, though. I think I'll attempt some hornwort and some floaters with the pothos I've already got to see how things go initially. Maybe some bamboo in there as well, just because I like the look of it. I'll report back with how it goes. In the meantime, does anyone have any recommendations for plants other than Aquarium Co-Op? The don't ever seem to stock any floaters and I could swear I've seen hornwort on there at some point, but they don't seem to sell it anymore. I've ordered from Buce Plant with mixed results before, but they're out of stock on hornwort at the moment, too. Anywhere else that people have had good luck with?

@GuppysnailI've got a couple pothos plants in an spare AquaClear 110 on the back right now. The don't seem to be doing much yet, but I'm thinking it might not be a bad idea to add some light above them. The tank is in my garage, so it doesn't get a huge amount of sunlight.

It's hard to tell exactly how thick my sand is because Casper is often "landscaping" the tank, but I'd say I have a solid 2 or 3 inches. There's 200 pounds of sand in a 125, so there's definitely a decent amount.

So...I have an idea... I recently adopted/inherited a very large Central American cichlid. You can read more about him here if you would like. Long story short, he'll pretty much destroy anything you put in the tank with him, be it flora or fauna. He also eats a lot and produces a lot of waste. Consequently, the nitrate levels in his tank stay pretty high. His previous owner was doing 75% water changes every three days to combat nitrates. If I need to do that, I will, but honestly, I would like to avoid it. I think there's a smarter way to handle it. Obviously, I can't put plants in his tank because they'll get eaten or uprooted. So, my thought was to build a kind of sump system with a spare 20 gallon, put it next to it and just stuff that 20 gallon with plants. I've found promising-looking plans for an overflow that doesn't involve drilling and I figure I can just add a spare powerhead to pump water out of the sump back into the tank, so the engineering of it is not the problem. I'm wondering how I get the most "bang for my buck" plant-wise. I've got some pothos I can root in there and various stem plants (water wisteria, ludwigia, rotalla, bacopa), but they don't seem great at really sucking up nitrates. I've heard Amazon frog bit is really good, but as near as I can tell, Oregon classifies it as a noxious weed (for good reason), and no one who knows what they're doing will ship it here. I've heard hornwort is also good, but my normal plant sources don't have it in stock. Bamboo could also be an option, apparently. I'd like to avoid duckweed for obvious reasons, but if it's amazing at sucking up nitrates, I guess I could give it a go. What plants would anyone recommend? And what of lighting? I have no shortage of various aquarium lights, including a few Fluval Nanos. Do I just blast that sump tank with light all day? If algae takes over in that tank, is there a risk of it spreading to the main tank? I don't mind the small tank having algae, but I'd like to keep it out of the main tank if possible. What are peoples' thoughts here? How can I work smarter not harder?

Before this year, I always gave her a lot of crap about how much she had spent on her pets (multiple surgeries, medications, treats, hundreds of toys they had no interest in). I don't really have room to talk anymore...

This is my new friend, Casper. He's a rare leucistic coloration of Amphilophus Sagittae, an absolute beast of a Central American cichlid, apparently native to Nicaragua. He's currently about 12 inches long and is solo in a 125 gallon in my garage, mostly because he will straight murder anything you put in there with him, be it plant or animal. He's even been known to bite those who are bold enough to try to clean his tank. As for how I came to acquire this absolute unit of a fish: I was out of the hobby for about ten years until getting back into it during quarantine. I work from home anyway, but the extra time at home meant needing to find something to do and I can only remodel my house so much. In the span of 6 months, I went from a single 10 gallon tank to over 500 gallons of water in my house. I've previously kept mostly tetras and livebearers throughout the years, but big fish were never really on my radar. I had a 75 gallon tank in my garage that I was waiting to move inside after the painting in my living room was done. I liked the size of the 75 gallon, but I had also really loved the idea of a big 125 and had built a custom stand that would accommodate one if I decided to go that route, thinking it would be hard to convince my wife to get a tank that big, especially since a previous 75 gallon had leaked all over our floor...all while I was 400 miles away and I had to Facetime her way through draining the tank and moving the fish. I routinely cruise through OfferUp and Craigslist looking for used tanks that look promising. (I don't know what it is about used tanks, but all the used tanks I've gotten don't have algae issues. I don't know what it is.) At one point, I happened across a posting of someone who was being forced to get rid of all their tanks and fish for reasons they didn't really say. There were three 125 gallon tanks filled with various cichlids and other fish I wasn't super familiar with. I bookmarked it, just to kind of keep an eye on it, but not really thinking it was a possibility. I moved my 75 into the house, full aquascaped and put community fish in. The tank itself looked great (if I do say some myself), but a 4 foot tank looks awkward on a 6 foot stand. I needed a 125. I casually mentioned it to my wife and she was surprisingly on board. I think she's secretly just as into it as me, but she knows if she shows more than a reluctant curiosity, that we'll end up with even more thanks. Plus, she had just adopted two dogs from the Humane Society, so she owes me one. I revisited the original posting and saw that prices had dropped on the tank setups and all the fish were now free. Things were obviously getting desperate. I don't know the exact situation, but if you know what rents have been doing in the Pacific Northwest lately, you can probably guess. I wanted to help out if I could and we started messaging back and forth. I could see that he really had a love for his fish, especially Casper, and I had original inquired about taking all three tanks and all the livestock in the process. I researched all the fish that he had and didn't feel confident in my ability to care for that many (soon to be) large fish. In the time that I was researching, he ended up selling one of the tanks, which made my job a little easier. I offered to buy the two remaining tanks and foster Casper until the owner could be in a situation where he could take him back. I know it was tough for him to give up Casper, but I'll do my best to give him a good home in the meantime. I think he was a little cranky about being moved at first, but has since settled in nicely and I feel like he's been much more interactive in the last few days. He didn't seem to want to eat much for the first few days, but yesterday, I went to feeding him around his normal mid-day feeding time and he was much more agreeable to eating. That's OK. I'm not a morning person either... I turned Casper's original tank into a planted community tank and combined all the sand with the sand from the other tank I bought so Casper has plenty of landscaping material to work with. He's dug himself a nice little pit in the back that he hangs out in when he wants to hide. Other than that, he's been exploring around and making himself at home. He hasn't bitten me yet, but I'm definitely very aware of where he is whenever I have my hands in the tank. He did very deliberately spit a whole mouthful of sand at me yesterday, though. I'm going to say that means "You seem cool. Let's be friends.". You can see him spitting some more sand in the video below. I've never really thought about having such a big fish like this, but he's been really cool so far. Despite being a murderous little death machine, he's got quite the personality and will definitely interact with me, either chasing my finger around or coming to check out anything I'm doing when I'm working in the garage. I'm already a big fan of him and my family likes him too. My kids like "playing" with him, having him chase their finger across the tank and my wife has nicknamed him "Frank the Tank". The new dogs, who are super jumpy, even seem to like him. He's on a built-bench in the garage now, but with how active he is and how fun he is to watch, I might have to see about making him some space inside. I've always found the bubbling of a sponge filter very soothing, but the gentle waterfall of the couple AquaClear 110's is quite pleasant, too. I'm thinking there might be something to these bigger fish... I don't have a time table for when the original owner can take him back, but right now I'm in no hurry. He's since set up a GoFundMe to help him buy a car to live out of until he can figure out a more permanent living situation. If you'd like to help a fellow fishkeeper get back on his feet, check it out here: https://gofund.me/9ac57a1a Or don't. That's not why I'm here. I just wanted to show off what I thought was a really cool new friend.

Today, I finally set up my new (used) 125 on the custom stand that I built. It's been a long road to get here, filled with leaky tanks, a home remodel that took way longer than it was supposed to and waaaaaay to much money spent. It's not perfect, but it's pretty close to the tank I've always dreamed of. I can't wait for the plants to fill out and to be able to get some more fish in there. If I can pat myself on the back for a minute, the idea to put a server rack-mountable PDU (Power Distribution Unit) into the stand was a stroke of genius. It's somewhat difficult to plug things into, but It makes it soooooo much easier to switch things on and off for maintenance, etc.

I've heard the best thing are those little desiccant packets that you get in a lot of things you buy. You know, the ones that say "DO NOT EAT" all over them. I've personally never tried them, though, but I since their main purpose is to absorb moisture, I can imagine it would work pretty well.

Talk to your local fish store. Once you grow them out to a sellable size, they might take them for cash/store credit. I currently have about 40 red wag platies that I'm growing out for that scenario.

@Gator Definitely the valve block. Something about it is making the lid fill up with water and drip out the sides, making it look like the the lid seal is leaking, which is why I replaced the lid seals and O-rings to start with.

Can't go wrong with rummy nose or pandas! The more the merrier! They have a great selection, so I'm sure your trip will go "swimmingly"!!!!! 😉😉😉🐟🐟🐟 Enjoy your visit to The Wet Spot!!!1!!!

@Guppysnail Yeah, there's a bunch of those available everywhere. Unfortunately, they're for the previous version of the filter. The ones for the new Magniflow version have red hose nuts and a more square release lever. These ones apparently don't fit.

I haven't had much luck for just the valve block on Facebook Marketplace or eBay. The real problem is that I've done the "buy a cheap used one for the valve block" trick twice now. So now I have three canister filters and only two functioning valve blocks. It's definitely the valve block. The first thing I did when I found it leaking was to replace the O rings and gaskets. The leaking continued, so that's what started the whole canister filter shuffle I'm currently in.

Did you check the USB wall adapter? I had one that I thought was dead and it turned out to just be the adapter that plugged into the wall.

So, this is definitely a long shot, but does anybody out there have (or know anybody who has) a dead Marineland Magniflow canister filter C-160 or C-220 they'd be willing to part out? My valve block is leaking and the Marineland website has been out of stock for three months. I can't find anything on eBay, Amazon, OfferUp, Craigslist or Mercari. It seems ridiculous to buy a whole new filter to replace one single part, so I'm hoping someone out there might have one they'd sell me? I'm happy to Venmo/PayPal/CashApp you if you'd send it to me. Anyone?