Saltwater Tanks in the Long Ago Time...

[Doug]

Saturday past, I visited the aquarium store I worked at 25-30 years ago. As of that date, it had only been re-opened two weeks since Katrina. The memories flooded back of a time where saltwater hobbyists themselves were pioneers, innovators, experimenters, jury-riggers. Those were heady times. A non-aquarist friend back then told me he observed there were two types of saltwater tankkeepers-- the affluent and the obsessed. He was right. (And may still be.)

The state of the hobby, 1977:

Your filter: The Undergravel. Yes, you may have first tried to keep a damsel or a clown-- if you could get one-- alive in a 20 gallon tank with a "Bubble Up" filter and "Rila pH Pebbles", but if you were going to approach the hobby seriously, you needed an undergravel.

Commercial undergravels were not made for any but the smallest of tanks. Even then, it was known a bigger tank was a key-- one of many-- to potential success. (Notice I didn't say guaranteed success-- there was no such thing; maybe still isn't.) You therefore needed to come up with something on your own. Common at the time was to purchase the recessed fluorescent light fixture plastic eggcrate grid-- the one that was about 1/2" thick with the 1/2" squares. At 4' x 2', it was perfect for a 55 or 75. You would cut it to the interior dimensions of your tank, leaving an inch or so open at the front. To support it above the bottom of the tank, you either cut chunks of leftover grid, or, more commonly, used those large 1" glass toy marbles. A dab of clear sealant on each kept a dozen or more of them in place while you positioned the grid over them in the bottom of the tank. Next came fiberglass window screen, cut to the length of the inside of the tank, but about 2-3 inches more than the width (front to back) This is where the aforementioned gap comes in. You would drape the excess in the front over the front edge of the grid and then glue it to the tank bottom at the front seam. This would assure the gravel could fill the gap, and make a better cosmetic presentation of the front of the tank. Next, you ran a bead of sealant around the edge of the screen on the left, back and right of the tank. At this point it was a good idea to seek some fresh air for a bit, because the acetic acid in the sealant would start to become quite volatile. Now you had your undergravel "plate". But what to do for uplifts? Back to the hardware store for some custom cut pieces of 1/8" or 1/4" glass, typically 3" wide and long enough to reach from the top of the grid to the bottom of the tank frame, minus 3". These pieces you would glue in the back corners of the tank at a 45° angle. For larger tanks, you would construct additional uplifts in the middle of the back wall of the tank. In the leftover 3" x 3" gap, you would glue in a 6 x 6 square grid of eggcrate, again with clear sealant. Add a 3" deep layer of dolomite gravel, and you were ready. Voila! Homemade undergravel filter.

Power was traditionally provided by the gold standard air pump of the day, The Silent Giant. And silent it was, guaranteed by the fact that the pump mechanism was sealed inside the large plastic housing in a metal soupcan, surrounded by about 2-3 pounds of pea gravel. A typical 75 gallon salt tank of the day would have a minimum of 4, or, more likely, 8 of these pumps. Standard aquarium flexible and rigid tubing connected the pump to another standard of the day, the Kordon Mist-Air airstone. "Bonded glass beads" were fused together by some mysterious process that made Mist-Airs long-lived and cleanable for re-use. You would run one or two airstones per uplift. Sometimes, if you could find rigid "Y" connectors, you could more efficiently run an uplift with one tube and two airstones.

If you were a knowledgable hobbyist, you always had an ancillary filter. Since salt leaching out of every crease and hole was pervasive, hang on filters were disdained. Besides, they only promoted evaporation and even more salt leach. You, Mister Power Hobbyist, lusted for the Eheim cannister filter. Only two green tubes went from filter to tank and back, with a "jet bar" return pipe providing enhanced water circulation. Oh, there were knock-offs from Hagen, but you required Eheim (even if for years, you incorrectly called it an "Ee-hime", when actually pronounced "Ay-hime"). Your Eheim sat on the floor, out of sight under your fabric-curtained wrought iron stand (next to your array of powerfully-purring Silent Giants), its veritable layer cake of filtration materials assuring the highest possible water quality and clarity.

Next time: Settin' It Up, Breakin' It In

[Gerwin]

and today they use the same homemade undergravels for Plenum construction with 4-6 inches of sand on top minus the uplift tubes....

They were onto something and did not know it..

sad note...I remember what he is saying, and I still call then Ee-hime..