Don't try this at home!

I just drilled a hole in my 150 DD tonight....while it was full!

***Before anyone tries doing this themselves, I've drilled over 200 holes in glass tanks throughout the years and I know what I'm doing, I wouldn't recommend anyone doing this!***

I want to get rid of power heads in my tank, so I picked up an Ecotech Vectra M1 last week. For the intake, I thought about having a hang-on-back style intake, but I really didn't want the pump working hard to suck water, as well as I didn't want to worry about the intake loosing it's siphon, plus it would look terrible.

So after a lot of careful planning and thought, I decided to drill a hole for the intake and the only reasonable way to do it was while it was full. My tank has two big epoxied rock "islands" and all the fittings are hard plumbed, so to take it down would have been too much work. By having a bulkhead I was able to position it directly behind one of the rocks and I'll be installing a low profile screen", so it shouldn't be very visible at all.

I built a little 5" x 5" x 2" box for the whole saw area, complete with 1/4" water feed hole and 1/2" drain. I ran 1/4" tubing to my basement where my RO/DI hooks up and ran 50' of tubing up to behind the tank where the hole is. My tank sits right next to a big window, so I removed the screen, lifted the blinds, and drilled the tank from outside on the deck.

Here's a couple pics:
The first one is of the drain that went into the brute trash can. The second is of the box itself. I duct taped it to the hole location. The clear tube on top is the 1/4" tap water feed to keep the hole saw lubricated and cool. Please don't judge my acrylic work Bud, I threw it together quickly for single use.

 

Not much after pics besides a 1.5" bulkhead with a plug in for now. It was pretty chaotic and high stress during the "operation", so I didn't take lots of pics.

I got about half the pump plumbed, once it's done I'll take the full plumbing pics. The vector pump will be plumbed to a 1" scwd, which goes to two T's, then down the 4 corners of the canopy to a 3/4" x 1/2" split loc line.

So to make it simple, in the end I'll have two 1/2" loc line nozels in each corner of the tank pushing about 300-400 gph each, switching left/right side. You'll only be able to see the tips of the loc line and I'll be taking out all the power heads, so nothing but fish/coral to look at!

Every combination of power heads on the back wall just push the sand away in the front, so hopefully by doing this half the flow will be from the front aimed to the back. Better for the corals and better for the sand situation.

 

I know I'm crazy! The whole time I was planning and executing it I was thinking, "I'm putting a hole in my 150 gallon fish tank while its full, what is wrong with me?"

I already have everything plumbed to the basement with all the plumbing ran through a vent next to the aquarium. I told my wife this is the last crazy aquarium project I do.....for a while. I still want to plumb up a seahorse tank eventually.

 

Here's the plumbing laid out and glued before painting.

You can sea the scwd and start to get an idea of what's going on.

And here you can see inside the canopy. Each outlet comes down, has a 45 degree fitting, then split to two loc line nozels.

The back left had to come down a little to the right of the corner because I didn't want anything I front of the overflow.

That's it for now. I might get some more done at half time of the nfl game.