Raised reef and aquascaping ideas

Well. If you want "better looking rock" check out Marco rock. Free shipping. Very porous and easy to scape with. Ill send you some guides when I get home. I am actually re-scaping tonight haha

What exactly do you mean by raised reef? I live in Idaho and we don't hear terms like that out here!  Sounds cool though.

I used Tonga Branch to elevate most of rock off the sand. I have a lot of open sandy areas in my tank and not only that, the fish love all the caves. You can still get branch rock from the pet stores. It's just not going to be Tonga. You just have to be there as when their get the live rock order in. 

Something else you can do is put a 1 inch piece of acyclic along the back of your tank. You can use that to help stack your rock on and keep it elevate off the sand.

Here is mine.  You can't see it too well, but I just used some small rocks to form  a base, and stacked rocks on top (mark showed me how).  There are only a few points where rocks are touching the sand.

Here it is in 1996, before it went to Dion's house.



Does anyone have a pic of my Reefscaping Competition tank? It was suspended in three ways; rock, acrylic rods and fishing line.

Another pic



Edited by Mark Peterson - November 10 2010 at 9:31am

I was talking about just the back of the tank where you really wouldn't see the acrylic. I plan on using acrylic in the back when I get a new glass tank  

Mark Peterson wrote: Here it is in 1996, before it went to Dion's house.

Mark is officially stuck one decade behind, but he will return to the present year in a modified Delorean.

I would love to come back from the future in a modified Delorean. Yeah, I meant 2006. Thanks Corey.

The structure Dion has, I made with 1/2" PVC pipe and gray sprinkler nipples. There are six legs and also a short skirt around the outer frame angled down at 45 degrees to hold the many pieces of dry Utah Rock sewn with zip ties to the skirt front and sides. I drilled through some of the pieces to hide the zip ties, which made the structure even more invisible. The legs are visible underneath, but being gray, they are hardly noticable.

Here are pics of the reefscaping I did at the MWRF. It was easy to make the stand for the large redrock centerpiece. I looked at where the best support points would be, made a rectangular 1/2" PVC frame and drilled holes for the 3/8" acrylic rod. The rod was secured by squirting Gorilla Glue in the hole and turning the structure around and upside down several times for about 20 minutes to get the glue to set up as a seat on the inside bottom of the pipe. It's very strong.




Finished and critiqued by John Ciotti who said he "had never seen anything like it."

The floating Hallelujah Mountains of Pandora are designed to actually float in water so in real use they will be tethered to the bottom of the tank.  I found out later that John has never seen the movie "Avatar". Unfortunate.