Hello, hivers!
First, a bit of background to explain what I'm doing. We have 2 ponds in the yard, a 300 gallon one out in the front yard, and a 150 gallon pond next to the front porch. Both of these ponds were made using livestock watering tanks dug into the ground. Both of these tanks have goldfish in them. Every fall we take the largest fish out of the ponds and put them in a tank in the greenhouse, with the exception of a few that go into an aquarium in the house. We always have more fish than we have room to save because they spawn every summer, and there's always small goldfish in the big pond by the end of the summer. The reason that we take the big fish out of the pond in the fall is because the winter here gets cold enough that the pond water freezes completely, and that usually kills the fish in the pond.
The first thing I had to do is move 3 or 4 of the big pots out of the greenhouse to make room for the winter fish tank. I put the tank in the same corner every year, but I always have to make a modification to the floor in the greenhouse so that the tank can sit flat on the floor. I had to change what I do for that this year because I had to buy a new tank for the fish. The old tank had developed a leak in the bottom edge that I didn't have a way to fix. Of course, this new tank has a different shape than the 25 year old tank I had been using, so I had to set up the greenhouse floor a bit differently this year. The new tank is listed as a 110 gallon tank.
In order to make the floor of the greenhouse relatively level in the corner, I have to add a layer of pavers to match the height of the floor edge blocks on the side wall. I started on the project and then remembered to take pictures.
The first problem that I ran into is that the slope of the concrete blocks and the floor pavers didn't match. It was easier to dig the cement blocks in a bit more rather than trying to raise the floor pavers.
The raised floor looked pretty good when I was done with digging in the blocks and laying the extra pavers.
The pavers are wider than the bottom of the tank, but that's not a problem.
The problem was that there was a bit of a hump in the middle of where the tank sits that caused the tank to not sit flat. The weight of the water in the tank once filled might cause excess strain on the sides of the tank, so I decided that I needed to fix the problem with the hump. The easiest way to solve that problem was to raise the floor just a bit in the corner to get rid of the hump. More work, of course.
I had to pull the pavers out of the corner and add a bit more pea gravel fill, and then set them back in place.
Then I just had to place the pavers under the edge of the tank to hold it. The tank sits much flatter on the floor now.
The next thing I have to do before I fill the tank with water is to put the insulation board between the tank and the 2 walls of the greenhouse that it sits against. The insulation helps to hold some warmth in the water once it gets cold outside. I'm not in a big hurry to get this done, but I do want it full of water and ready for the fish before the end of October. I've waited until it was cold in the past, and that makes getting the fish out of the pond much less enjoyable.
That's all I have for this post, I hope you found it interesting!
