Im trying to find some sort of clear plastic pipe. do they make something like this or should i get some plexiglass and try to make a round tube and seal the seam with silicone?
and b.t.w. i bought some rosy tail minnows and put em in a betta bowl with the glow in the dark bb's and theyve been alive since last nite. keep your fingers crossed!
Lee
I found a company that sells clear piping, but it's very expensive. What diameter are you looking for? The supplier I found wanted over £200 per 2m length for 200mm diameter!
good grief im not spending that much for an idea that mite not work. but i was an electrician so i can heat PVC pipe just like i can heat plexi glass to bend it and was thinking of making a pass-between to connect two tanks. make it like a cross between that upside down add-on tank and a habitrail for hampsters. use like a four inch clear pipe. in high school i built lookout towers for the guppies in our class by turning a tall glass vase upside-down in the tank thru a hole in a thick piece of thick plastic. wish i had pics from back then, it got me an A that semester. anyway, im not even sure that the idea will work since there is a way in and out. it mite syphon one tank and flood the other. and this is a risky experiment since it could be a disastrous mess. any gamblers wanna try this one and give me a heads up, be my guest. Lee
BUT.... if you really want to try it, the guy that made the setup there used plexiglass and made boxes with it, which worked for him.
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it mite syphon one tank and flood the other.
As long as the two tanks are the same level and the same height, it won't be a problem. Drawing the water in would involve topping both tanks up at the same tiome while drawing the water up the pipe with a vacuum pump attached to the center of the assembly.
I have the ideal place for this, but not gonna pay that sort of price for the piping, and not easy to get the plexiglass round this neck of the woods. Guess I'll leave this one to others! lol
Even in the small town near where I live there is a plastics dealer who carries plexiglass, I went by the other day to get some flexable plastic to create a 'river' in my new tank, and while I was there picked up just what you are talking about. I got 3" clear plexi pipe I just got a piece 2' long and it wasn't very expensive, I believe they charged $10. They had all sizes. from 1" to about 6". You didn't have to buy a long piece, they would cut it what ever length you wanted. This business does lots of work on boats, but they said they do custom fish tanks as well so..........maybe this gives you some ideas. Good Luck
thanks for the tip ill have to make a day to ride around and check all the local hardware stores maybe even home depot i still cant seem to find any silicone that doesn't have mold and mildew preventer but i may very well be overlooking them its all being written down and eventually i will have enough to post a economical counterpart list for less expensive DIY supplies I'm even going to add my bookmark list as hyperlinks to the sites of the supplies Lee
For silicone to use with your tank, either go to your local fish store, or on line. Doctors Foster & Smith, advertised at the top of this page, have it, and delivery in a couple of days would beat looking all over town!
I am finding on line is a really great way to go with aquarium supplies, you can see what you are getting, and the information is usually sufficient to let you make good decisions. Only thing to stay away from are those items that are so heavy that shipping kills you, like gravel.
with 90 degree elbows on each end and "tee" connectors in the length over each tank one large canister type filter would work for all your tanks that are side-by-side as the filter drew from the final tank there would be a syphon from the previous tank which would cause the same back down the line to the tank where the return is located if all your fish were small (guppies, platys, danios, etc.) they could then traverse between tanks and in essence you would have communities connected by waterway highways three inch clear pipe would look awesome but normal white or any other color would work just the same you wouldn't see the travellers just where they arrived at and then multiple tanks would be filtered with one unit the downside is disease one tank would infect all tanks so a quarantine tank and much patience would be necessary just more late-nite thought burst from the cortex Lee
The key to getting the siphon to work is to have the filter intake on one side of the chain of tanks, and the return on the other side. So the filter would draw up water from the last tank, and water would flow from all the previous tanks to keep the water level even. Having the return on the far side would raise the water level there, and ensure that the current stays flowing the right direction.
It's all about balancing out the water levels between the tanks, if that helps.
That part I understood. It's the part about getting the siphon started. If you put the upside-down u-shaped tube going from one tank to another, how do you draw the air out of it to start the siphon? Would I have to have expensive equipment? I really couldn't hang upside-down with my head in the tank to suck the air out, that's for sure. And If we use rigid plexi-glass for the pass-through, we can't just bend it to suck the air out with my mouth like a straw, then hurry and put it under water before more air gets in and ruins the siphon.
if it was up to me, i would submerge the u-pipe and fill it. then hold my hands over each end to keep the water in and set it in the proper place. let go and "voila" but if you're using more than four inch p.v.c. i would say look at timg's use of a standard air pump reversed to a syphon for the upside-down tank he has. just hand lead the hose to the top of the u-pipe and watch the air be replaced with water. post pics cuz i am not getting involved in anything major before i have to make a thousand mile move. so it'll be at least four months before i can get this idea off the ground for myself. have fun Lee
I had to use regular PVC pipe instead of clear tubing like I wanted and the fish haven't discovered that they can go to a different tank yet but the siphon works! I also discovered that my ten gallon tanks are not the same size. One's taller than the other so it looks less full, but I saw the one tank level go down as the other went up after I installed the siphon, so I know it works.
I'll get pictures of the finished product posted as soon as I can find the digi-camera.
yea post pics!
o you did cool. maybe if you put a little light cut out in the middle...because i dont think they will go through a dark tunnel like that..good job thou..and make sure the waters going thorugh the whole tube.
So you just dropped the pipe into one of the tanks upside down to establish the siphon then? A perfect way to light the tube would be low voltage neon lights simply drilled into the pipe and sealed in with silicone. Xmas tree lights would work well there, but you would need to re-wire then in parallel to a 12v power supply.
You could also sit the shorter tank on a board to bring them both level at the top, the water level looks dangerously close to the lighting on the shorter tank!
that's why I suggested low voltage! You can't get a shock from 12v and it won't hurt the fish either.
Wiring in parallel is easy, just take one side of each bulb and connect them all together, take the other side of the bulbs and connect all of them together, then take one side of the power supply and connect to one bundle, the other end to the other bundle, that's all there is to it. See below: (It's very rough, but should give you the right idea)
One of the Panda Corys made it! I'm not sure whether it was by his choice or not, but he's in the second tank. Now I'll have to watch to see if anyone else gets there and if they can get back.
i wouldn't worry about the darkness of the pipe at all if you had a big dark cave the fish would eventually investigate and swim in it the pipe is the same way its just a cave if you could 90 back off the end of each and let them rest on the bottom the they would see each end as a cave after that its only natural that they investigate whats behind then up then over there and bingo new tank i'm sure after a few weeks that it will become a natural passage but you mite not want to make it go all the way to the bottom it could make them not want to swim all the way up to the top to investigate you could try putting them in the tank that has the return end of the flow then put food in the tank and let the fish follow the scent in the water thats a little like the mice and cheese experiments still could be fun to watch and if you could find the clear pipe you could just make the horizontal center piece clear and the rest still white it would let them have light while they are passing through and you could see them also thumbs up on the pass-tube glad to see someone has started the aquari-trail trend lets see where it goes heres an idea cap the end of the tub off and drill a hole that will only let fry pass through then have one end in a molly breeding tank and the other end in your oscar tank only the fry can get to the tank and get eaten by the oscar ta-daa its now a feeding tube that you can cap off when you don't want them to feed just plug the hole experiment on Lee
I guess that could work if I had oscars, but I don't.
Another fish made it. Now there's a guppy over there with the Panda Cory. on the filter return side I now have 2 guppies, 2 panda corys, and 3 platys. On the filter intake side, I have a guppy and a panda cory.
I've thought of moving the female platy into the intake side and seeing if the males follow (kinda what you were talking about with the food, but a different kind of reward. ) but I haven't managed it yet. I did raise the shorter tank and the water looked a little more even, so that was nice. What I was surprised at was that the tanks had different parameters. The one with more plants (and the filter return) was a lot better off than the one with only a java fern and a baby anacharis. That's kind of surprising because the one with no plants and the water intake also has the 2 hobs on it to help clean all the water pulled from the other tank.
I did a 40% or so water change, so hopefully the levels even out and things look better. It seems like the tanks are re-cycling for some reason even though I moved the bio-tubes I had in one HOB to the canister filter.
I'll keep you all updated on how it goes.
Another thing I thought of earlier today that vertigo's comments reminded me of: why not turn a hamster tube into a siphon tube. I haven't tried it, but it seems like all you'd have to do is fill the holes in the hamster tubes with epoxy so they become water-tight. maybe some day I'll try it, but for now I like the pvc.
let me take you a step further where my brain took me while i was thinking of your tank water proof an actual habitrail and put the end in your tank then your hampsters would have a seaworld and you fish would have a zoo mmm hmmmm i know i looked at hampsters today dwarf chinese hampsters because their habitrails are smaller and would be less intrusive to the fish had this great saucer dish for the end that would look great in the bottom of the tank with fish swimming around it then i thought of Sandy from SpongeBob lmao i know it has to happen Lee
Hey Lee.... how would you keep the habitat under the water? there would be a tremendous amount of air in there and I think you would have problems keeping it down. You would also need an airflow in there, or the hamsters would suffocate! (Must admit, I like the idea though! Lol)
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and this is a risky experiment since it could be a disastrous mess. any gamblers wanna try this one and give me a heads up, be my guest. 
Lee
Even in the small town near where I live there is a plastics dealer who carries plexiglass, I went by the other day to get some flexable plastic to create a 'river' in my new tank, and while I was there picked up just what you are talking about. I got 3" clear plexi pipe I just got a piece 2' long and it wasn't very expensive, I believe they charged $10. They had all sizes. from 1" to about 6". You didn't have to buy a long piece, they would cut it what ever length you wanted. This business does lots of work on boats, but they said they do custom fish tanks as well so..........maybe this gives you some ideas. Good Luck 
One's taller than the other so it looks less full, but I saw the one tank level go down as the other went up after I installed the siphon, so I know it works. 
