DIY Betta Betta Tank 2.0
Version 2.0 of our “Betta Betta” tank was intended to be an improvement on our original 1.0 design but brought a whole lot of new challenges with it! A couple of new ideas were incorporated:
- Using a hard plastic container shell for the base to minimise leaks
- Increasing the water capacity to 10 litres
- Placing the heater in upright position to improve heat dissipation
- Including a “built in wet/dry filter” compartment on the back of the waterfall
Heres a run down on the construction…
Raw Materials
- Bits of throw away polystyrene packaging collected from the neighbor’s garbage
- 10 litre plastic basin/container
- Concrete / Quickcrete / Buildcrete
- Playpen sand
- Coarse Salt
- Concrete stain pigments (Red, brown, yellow, white & black)
- Sheet of 4mm thick window glass
- 2 Large tubes of marine grade silicon sealant
- 500ml Powertex Hobby sealant
(A trial sample of which was kindly donated to our cause by Bobby from Powertex’s local distributor) - A small powerhead/water pump
- 50 or 75 watt aquarium heater
- 60cm of 10mm silicone tubing
Construction Details
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The hard plastic shell container used to form the base of the tank - chosen for it’s interesting shape!  |
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Cutting out the window area - quite a mission as the plastic shell is difficult to handle… |
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The window cutout was bolted onto the back to form a solid mounting point for the waterfall. Don’t try and glue or silicone this plastic it just doesn’t hold! |
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Now comes the tricky part - shaping the mountings for the window glass. This needs to be very rigid as glass will not bend along with the plastic shell! |
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Lesson learned - If you don’t want to use 3 times more silicone than you should use, give it some elbow grease and sandpaper treatment to roughen up the plastic shell before attempting to stick bits of polystyrene on to it! |
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A couple of hours of sticking all the random bits together and we’re on to the mountings for the pump and heater… |
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Most of the hard work complete now and heres a basic view of what goes where… |
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The filter compartment feeding into the back of the waterfall. We call it a “wet/dry” filter since part of the filter media will be exposed to air… |
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Another view showing the removable pump cover… |
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We’re aiming to make the hardware totally invisible so the the heater has it’s own cover too… |
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The first layers of concrete are painstaking painted onto the polystyrene after shaping it with a soldering iron and candle… |
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A bit of creative coloring with oxide stain pigments and it’s time to coat the concrete with Powertex sealant…And now the horrible part - waiting 2 to 4 weeks for the coating to cure properly before adding water… |
| To be continued… |
Lighting
We’ll definitely need to include some form of lighting for the tank to ensure healthy plant and fishy growth. We are currently looking for an adjustable “goose neck” type fitting that we can mount on the back wall of the waterfall - more on this later…
Result
We’re still waiting for the powertex coating to cure and after 5 weeks it’s not looking too good as it develops a thick white layer of film on contact with water! 
It’s starting to look as if the powertex coating will not work and we’ll need to take a few steps back, sand it down and add a few coats of concrete over it… or maybe we’ll just be patient and wait a couple more weeks? lol
Back to the drawing board, or not…
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