Back of tank

[kurt]

what do you guys/gals recommend for the back of the tank? The tank is against the wall so I was thinking either blue or black backing so you could not see the wall behind it. Any suggestions?

 

[balogh03]

personaly i like blue backgrounds, it is up to you though. if you dont care if the it comes off, paint it and get some good effects. if you do want it to come off eventually, then just get the plastic roll up backgrounds from a LFS.

 

[Sherman]

I prefer the black background. Or... if you're going to paint something, why not do a gradient from medium blue on top to black on the bottom? You could do with with only 2 or 3 shades of blue, and a black.

For my tank, I picked up a sheet of cheap acrylic from Home Depot and painted it.

 

[Brenden]

I like blue but why bother? It will be covered in coralline before you know it.

 

[Burrower]

I use cloth remnants cut to size that you can usually get in the crafts section at many large stores like WalMart. I use heat sensitive velcro (an iron adheres the cloth to the fabric...you could use fabric glue as well) to attach to the cloth, and apply the other velcro strips along the top and bottom of the back of the tank to pull it nice and tight. Currently I'm using a very very dark blue..almost black. When I feel like a change, I'll velcro a blue background to it!

 

[Sherman]

Here are a couple of my inspirations for a background:

And from Weatherson:

And my own, plain black:

 

[Sherman]

I like blue but why bother? It will be covered in coralline before you know it.

Scrape it! Coralline is ugly on the glass.

 

[Brenden]

Well if you had to scrape my tank you would let it grow anywhere you could get away with.:| My tank is viewable on 3 sides, 2 long and one short so only one short side has coralline. How do you get around the rocks while scraping. Is it not a pain to move the rocks so you can scrape.

 

[ronj]

i like blue backgrounds myself, but they do get covered in coraline!!!.i just let the back stay covered and scrape the other sides!

 

[balogh03]

how big is the tank with the rippled background?

 

[Sherman]

The first two photos are actual ocean, not tanks .

Brenden, I use a razor blade attached to the end of a stick. I scrape right up against the rocks, but not behind them. I don't move rocks. It only takes about two minutes, once a month, to take care of all sides of my tank (38g). The 240g above (Weatherson) only takes about 5 minutes.

 

[Krish]

I loved the blue I had on my 75gal, but I went with black on this new tank seeing I was having corals and figured they would show up better. Sherman gave me that idea and I figured since he helped me out a lot with my new cube answering questions and giving feedback, I'd put black on to make him happy

 

[shallowreef]

I like black because it makes the colors of the fish and coral a lot more vivid. Everything sticks out and when algae grows on a black background its not nearly as noticable as it is on a blue back ground. If i were to go with blue though it would be a dark blue.

 

[balogh03]

i mean the 2nd one from the bottom.

 

[57reefer]

Hay Kurt, I just set up a 65 gal 3 weeks ago. I used dark blue enamel paint. Go to Home Depot and check out the colors. They can make anything you like. Clean the painting surface with rubbing alcohol first. I used a roller. It looks great but now setup it looks lighter in color so go a little darker than the color you want to end up with. Darker is better. I’m working on pictures of my setup this weekend. Good luck.

 

[shallowreef]

i would say a 125-150

 

[Sherman]

balogh03, Weatherson's tank is a standard 240 (8x2x2).

 

[burning2nd]

i should try the back rounds i guess,

whats up with the coraline not good? (growing on glass) i like the velcro idea with diffrent colors.

i might just go get some of that fish back round stuff at the lfs, black and blue

 

[balogh03]

balogh03, Weatherson's tank is a standard 240 (8x2x2).

that is the same size as my tank, but it looks way bigger.

 

[Sherman]

balogh, it's probably just a function of aquascaping. <shrug>

Burning2nd, my reasoning for not liking coralline is that it's not natural. Now let me explain that. I aim to keep a tank as natural looking as possible. I glue frags to base rock instead of rubble, I prefer a couple large corals over 237 itty-bitty frags, etc. etc. There are some areas of compromise, of course. I don't pick corals all from the same region, or even the same depth. I have powerheads and plumbing showing, and so on. However, to me, cleaning coralline is an easy one, and it makes a huge difference in how your corals "pop" off the background. In the wild, there aren't perfectly flat sheets of coralline behind the corals, ya know? The clean black (or blue, or whatever) background helps the back glass disappear, and your point of focus becomes the corals instead. And I prefer to look at the corals over the back glass.