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 State of the Tank: (cont.) |
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Me: (Bracing myself for the oncoming stupidity): …”Yeah”. |
| Them: “Oh, well you gotta call a pet store for something like that”. |
| Me: “Ah, of course. Why thank you ver..” Them: ***click***! |
| But then, I guess it could’ve been worse. I could’ve needed screws |
Anyway, not long after this foolishness, we received some good news: The guy on his way to the store got a call from them stating they did NOT have the bulkhead. I understand this shouldn’t be considered ‘good’ given the circumstances, but it’s what caused him to frantically call around and to even HIS surprise, he actually found some (though schedule 80’s) at a real hardware store the next town over.
I told him to get several.
By the way, a couple days later, we found out the original LFS really DID have the right size bulkheads. They’d just been mislabeled. Probably called ‘em ‘hardware’.
But the important thing was we got the bulkhead so we could keep going. We were also well aware of the tank’s ‘off’ time so the fellas went about the rest of their work with quite a bit more urgency  . In |
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my case, we weren’t so worried about the water IN the tank going stagnant as we were about the small bits of water trapped in some of the hoses going stagnant and then flowing back into the tank once the power was restored. This, I believe, is a detail often overlooked amongst even the most neurotic of us when we’re doing a job of this magnitude. And I have heard of tanks suffering very significant damage due to a hobbyist shutting down a faulty pump, for instance, then switching it out the next day but forgetting to bleed out the water that sat putrefying in the pipes overnight. Always be mindful of that. Believe me, we certainly were.
So perhaps in another half hour or so, all the plumbing was done and the sump was ready for water . By the way, that small Rubbermaid Brute with the red lid tucked under the stand is going to be out new DIY kalk doser. The current equipment configuration no longer allowed for our old 44g can so we had to downsize a bit to this 32g job.
But due to a crazy amount of preplanning and measuring, nothing even came close to an ‘oops’ in regards to the workflow and now it was just a matter of looking out for leaks. Here, by the way, is a shot of the new sump and skimmer in action .
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