Well, we certainly took our sweet time! Over the weekend we finally moved on this. First step was shampooing the carpet, since we're never going to be able to get to the carpet under the aquarium stand again!

Today the kids and I went out and picked out a background and some decorations. Then the work began.

First was applying the backdrop. This wasn't super hard, but it did take a lot of fiddling to (mostly) line it up right and get the air bubbles out. It looks pretty good.

Then came rinsing aquarium gravel. I ended up using a five gallon bucket and rinsing one 25 pound bag at a time outside with a garden hose. So, that was hauling 25 pounds of gravel out of the stand, pouring into a bucket, carry outside, rinse, repeat (literally), then carry back in, and carefully pour into the aquarium. Three rounds of this.

By now I was tired, so I'm afraid I didn't rinse the five 5 pound bags of multi-colored gravel. I just put them in.

Since most of our decorations are stable out of water, we placed these now. I mostly let my daughter pick the layout. It wasn't much trouble to run the airlines to the two new features that need air. I also got the filter set up.

Then, the most fun of the evening: filling a 75 gallon aquarium ONE GALLON AT A TIME! I guess I could have run a hose into the house or something, but I wanted a reasonably accurate count of the actual water volume for the system.

Finally, around 9:30 the system was filled. I added the water conditioner and powered up the filter, waited 30 minutes, then added the starter bacteria. I moved over the sponge filter and air pump from the other aquarium and found...stupid me. Of course a pump for a 10 gallon aquarium can't push water pressure from a 75 gallon aquarium! I really wanted the sponge filter in there to get the bio filter from it, though, so I left it with air and moved it shallow enough that it mostly works. I'll have to order a new pump that can handle the load. Lucky tomorrow is Prime Day!

2016-07-11T22:32Z[GMT]