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This stand was one of my most adventurous builds to date. Several pieces of equipment had failed on my 90 gallon aquarium and needed to be replaced. I wanted to upgrade my equipment, but with a large tank the cost is just too high. In order to get the upgrades that were required, downgrading the size of the tank was needed to level out expenses. I also took the opportunity to build a stand that I thought was visually interesting and uniquely designed.
This stand was one of my most adventurous builds to date. Several pieces of equipment had failed on my 90 gallon aquarium and needed to be replaced. I wanted to upgrade my equipment, but with a large tank the cost is just too high. In order to get the upgrades that were required, downgrading the size of the tank was needed to level out expenses. I also took the opportunity to build a stand that I thought was visually interesting and uniquely designed.
Design
Design
This design came from the adage, "form follows function". I had an idea of what I wanted this to do before I started designing it in my render software. It was important to me that this stand be space saving, contain all of the equipment necessary to maintain the system, and look good.
The stand would need to contain the sump. This includes the protein skimmer, the return pump, and any filtration system held inside of it, like filter socks or carbon. The stand would also need to house a full filtration unit and a reservoir for the purified top-up water. These are the two largest consumers of space on the aquarium and they needed to be worked into the stand seamlessly. Something else that was important to me was getting all of the controllers for the system in a single place. They would be stored in a dedicated unit that was easy to access, but blended into the stand so it wouldn't be easily noticed. I didn't want people pressing buttons on the controllers and accidentally causing a disaster.
The intended use for each compartment of the stand
A dosing pump would also be utilized, along with storage space. In order to achieve this and conserve space, a tower was built to the left of the aquarium. This tower also conceals the plumbing so no pipes would go over the back of the tank. Running the overflow and return lines inside of the tower like this instead of over the back also allowed me to push the stand against the wall, without having to worry about leaving room for the plumbing on the back.
Construction
Construction
The stand was designed in blender (the software that I use for all of my projects) using real world values so I could easily build it to the proper dimensions. The base was constructed quickly and I was ready to continue to the next step. The siding was added to the stand with relative ease and the doors were built to match the vertical planks above and below them. I elected to screw the panels on with this build, which meant that I would have to use plugs to cover the screws. In the future I will probably do this a different way so the stand doesn't have caps placed everywhere on it. Once this process was completed, it was time to move onto the more difficult tasks.
The frame of the stand, showing how the supports were set
Notice the cutout for the controller box in this image
In the past, extension cords and power strips were utilized to deliver power to the components of my aquariums. Because I had an opportunity to build everything from scratch, I decided that I would run power through the stand to receptacles installed cleanly. This was no simple task, however. Housing would need to be built for the electrical boxes and because I didn't want to see all the wires running to the boxes, channels were cut into the wood so the wire could be hidden inside of them. I was also confined to a fairly small space, so shallow boxes were used to conserve room.
I always seem to run out of outlets for my hardware so I made sure there were enough in this stand
Once all of the electric was run in the base of the stand, it was time to design one of the more difficult pieces. The design called for a drawer that held the filtration unit, which is a reverse osmosis system with deionization cartridges that unloads purified water to a reservoir beneath it. Because this stand is intended for space saving, it was designed to fit into the corner of a room. That means the drawer would need to pull out so I could access the cartridges from the right side of the stand.
The most difficult part of this task was figuring out how to get the filtration unit to hook up in a way that would still allow it to be pulled out. I managed to do this with a drag chain configuration, the kind you would find in machinery that carries wires on an extending arm, and modified it to carry water tubes.
The input, waste, and output lines are fed into an appropriately sized chain. All the lines run to the other side of the chain which is connected to the front of the drawer. When the drawer is pulled out, it drags the chain along with it, which also takes the water lines, reducing stress on the lines and preventing kinks.
At the front of the drawer the water lines attach to the filtration unit, which allows the unit to continue functioning even when the drawer is pulled out. This means that I can do periodic maintenance on the system without having to shut everything down to pull the unit out.
The drag chain wraps to the back of the stand, allowing enough tube to be stored for pulling the drawer out
The next step was building the tower and getting the plumbing run, which was more of a challenge than I expected. Starting at the plumbing, there had to be room for the return unit, which is plumbed to the main pump with a check valve and union in line. A slim overflow unit is also used to save space inside the aquarium. Notice in the photos below that there are two unions on each line. This is so the plumbing can be taken apart if required, which is just good practice when plumbing an aquarium.
The most challenging part of this process was getting the overflow and emergency overflow pipes to line up. There was no room for error here. Because of the compact design, all the plumbing had to line up perfectly and the odd angles made this quite an interesting task. There was a little bit of wiggle room because the holes were cut slightly larger than the pipes, which I could use to correct slight misalignments in the plumbing. At the base of the plumbing for the overflow unit you can see some collars that were used to both cover the holes and hold the pipes in place once they were aligned. These collars were designed and printed by me and I'll talk about that process a little later.
The return pipe, overflow, and emergency overflow
The sump displaying the return, overflow and emergency overflow plumbing
The tower was a straight forward build, but it would need to accomplish four main tasks:
Conceal all of the plumbing for the return and overflow
Store unused equipment and house the dosing unit
Connect to electric that ran up from the base
Hold the light bar and LED pendant
The tower was built to be disconnected from the base with relative ease. There are four screw holes in each corner that allow it to connect to the base and a junction box at the bottom left corner to connect the electric. This was done because the base is actually quite heavy and moving the stand would be made awkward if the tower was permanently attached to it.
The light bar is just a hollow aluminum bar that's screwed down at the top of the tower and the wires for the light are run through it, both concealing the wiring and allowing the LED pendant a place to mount, rather than drilling a hole in the ceiling for it.
In the process of building the tower
Once the tower was complete, I was finally ready to select a finish for the outside of the stand. I decided to use an epoxy resin by SystemThree because I like their products and it would provide a strong finish that's also easy to clean. The epoxy is a two part mixed at a 2:1 ratio which makes it extremely easy to use. I simply tape up the edges of the stand, mix the epoxy, and pour it on. This leaves a glassy finish over the wood that looks incredible. I continued this process over the entire stand by tipping it on whichever side needed to be finished, taping it off, and pouring. Once the entire stand was coated, I sanded the rough edges down with incrementally finer sand paper to complete the finish.
The glass like surface of the wood after the epoxy had been applied
I had considered keeping a high gloss finish on the stand, which could have been accomplished by continuing with finer sand paper and polishing it back to the gloss finish, but I ultimately decided to go with a satin finish because it wouldn't show any streaky saltwater drips left on the stand from splashes and I honestly really liked the interesting look it gave the wood. The stand still has some shine, but no longer a glassy finish, which can be seen on this door.
Once the epoxy was sanded smooth it was finished with a wax to polish the surface to glass smooth texture. Even though it no longer shines like glass, it still feels like it. This was important because splashing does occur and the smoother the finish is, the easier it can be wiped off.
This image shows the waxy finish of the epoxy before it was polished to a sheen
That wraps up the construction phase, I'll quickly talk about the parts that were designed and printed for the project, then move on to the installation phase.
3D Design and Printing
3D Design and Printing
There were many parts printed for this aquarium stand. The majority of them were miscellaneous holders for things, but a couple parts were very important. I won't cover them all here, but I mentioned earlier that the collars around the pipes were all designed and printed for a specific task. Any time that I find it difficult to locate a part for purchase, or I need something that just doesn't exist, I turn to my 3D printer. In the image below you can see my general workflow from left to right. For the collar, I'll start with a simple cylinder and go from there. It's important to note that all of my components are designed using real world values. Blender can export these items in a .stl file format and they can then be printed accurately so everything fits as expected.
This image shows my workflow from left to right when creating parts and the real world values associated with the part
When I first began 3D modeling, I used to physically model the mesh of the item, which can be seen in the picture below. That is a difficult and time consuming process. Now I model almost all my hard surface models using a boolean method. This method is used primarily to cut away what's not needed from the mesh and create something in minutes that would take hours to model by hand. In the above image you can see these boolean modifiers, as they are called in blender, being used on the second model from the left to change the shape of the initial cylinder.
An image showing the geometry of the mesh used to create the pipe collar
When the part is completed and I'm ready to begin printing, I'll export that component as a .stl file and transfer it into a slicing program. I used to use Repetier-Host almost exclusively, but I recently upgraded my 3D Printer and Cura has the printer settings built into their application already. I decided to give it a try and I'm really a fan of its simplicity. Now that the model has been sliced it can be printed and used for the intended application.
This is a screen capture inside Cura, which is used to slice the model for printing and shows the estimated completion time at the right
Installation
Installation
Before the stand was ready to be placed I needed to prepare the aquarium. I like to make sure that the back of the tank is blacked out so no wires or hardware are seen. In this case, there should be nothing running down the back, but I don't want to see the wall behind it. I taped off the sections that needed to remain paint free and used a plastic dip type spray paint to cover the aquarium. This will give the tank a nice look and also be easily removed in the future should I decide to make any changes. Now that the tank has been completed, the stand can be placed.
The aquarium in the process of being painted
The aquarium stand was placed in the corner of the room as it was intended. Everything was hooked up once the aquarium was placed on the stand and the plumbing was checked for leaks. It's worth mentioning that before the tank was filled with water and the stand could no longer be moved, a GFCI outlet was installed to provide power to the stand and to protect users from harm should any saltwater contact the electric outlets. In the photo you can see that the drawer where the dosing pump would be held is out of place. At the time I was getting the tubing for it run and had the whole drawer pulled out.
After tightening a couple of the bulkheads and verifying that everything was watertight, It was time to mix up some saltwater and fill the tank. Everything went very smooth from this point forward and I was able to successfully transfer the inhabitants of the lightly stocked 90 gallon aquarium to this 24.1 gallon tank without any mishaps.
The aquarium stand being prepped for water
This build is obviously going to have some custom electronics designed for it. I'll be refining the Automatic Water Top-Up circuit to utilize a DC input source and designing a couple more circuits. I'd like to have a temperature control circuit as well as a way to control the light, possibly remotely. I may also design something for the pump since it has a jack built in for controllers from the factory. I have plenty of ideas and the stand has ethernet ports built in, so there is definitely room for some interesting circuits here.
I'll update this page as I delve further into this project, but until then be sure to check out the gallery for some more images of the process that weren't included in the breakdown above.
The aquarium stand build was a complete success. All of the inhabitants are happy and healthy, living their new life in their noticeably smaller, but overall better home.
The aquarium stand build was a complete success. All of the inhabitants are happy and healthy, living their new life in their noticeably smaller, but overall better home.
Gallery
Gallery
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