My 525 will be here next week and I’m trying to prepare for it. I know the weight of this tank will be around 1200 pounds. Should I use bottle jacks under the floor? Will 4 be enough or overkill? Just curious if anyone has done this to their crawl space.
How to brace crawl space?
- Thread starter FragOut
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I would put 4x4 or a 4x6 across the floor joists and jack that. But I'm not an engineer. Last floor I reinforced I overdid it a bit and got a big hump in the floor.
I will try to avoid that. With the 2 kids running around my 90g liked to wobble just a little bit. Always made me really nervous. I want to try and avoid that and reinforce the floor. What type of jack did you use??
I actually made a couple t shaped beams and sledgehammered them in place, but I was working in a full basement. It actually held my 185 just fine, but I just measured the posts a bit long.
mfinn
likes zoanthids
I would use concrete pure blocks as a base and something way more substantial than 2x4's.
Plus anywhere a bottle jack is supporting wood, there would have to be a metal plate so the narrow top of the bottle jack doesn't just bury itself into the wood.
Plus anywhere a bottle jack is supporting wood, there would have to be a metal plate so the narrow top of the bottle jack doesn't just bury itself into the wood.
ca1ore
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Without any details on your floor, it's impossible to offer any useful advice. Frankly, 1,200 pounds isn't all that much for most properly constructed joist floors. If your goal is to just stiffen the floor a bit, a couple of Jack posts will certainly suffice. They typically come with both header and footer metal plates.
Aardvark1134
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by 525 do you mean 525 gallons? If so that is going to be way more than 1200 lbs. I my 120 plus filters and rock is about 1200 lbs. For my 300 gallon I used 2 4x4 perpendicular to the joints one 6 inches from the wall and one 3ft6inch from the wall and put post jacks from the hardware store at the ends of each and one in the middle of each for 6 total. Floor didn't even go down 1/4 inch when I filled the tank.
FFFishy
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Best thing to do would be to have a structural engineer take a look. I'm working on my new build (180G Reef Savvy, Custom Cabinet, etc) which will have a weight of approximately 2,500 pounds. My home is typical wood frame construction and it's not designed to handle a load like that. Would it be safe without any extra reinforcements? Maybe . . . but I'm not going to take that chance. It's very possible that my floor (or your floor) would support the weight with minimal deflection initially. But over time (we expect our tanks to last many years), that deflection will increase and may create enough stress on our tanks to cause seam failure or glass cracking.
The engineer that designed my reinforcements specified that the new support columns have footings poured. We'll be cutting the existing basement floor to do this. It's necessary because the average basement floor can't take a point load of more than a few hundred pounds. If you installed proper reinforcements, but supported them with only the existing basement floor, you risk having that floor crack / shift. Certainly enough disturbance to cause a tank failure.
I'm sure my plan sounds pretty extreme to some, but I really don't want to turn our house into a saltwater swimming pool and lose my dream tank with all of its inhabitants.
The engineer that designed my reinforcements specified that the new support columns have footings poured. We'll be cutting the existing basement floor to do this. It's necessary because the average basement floor can't take a point load of more than a few hundred pounds. If you installed proper reinforcements, but supported them with only the existing basement floor, you risk having that floor crack / shift. Certainly enough disturbance to cause a tank failure.
I'm sure my plan sounds pretty extreme to some, but I really don't want to turn our house into a saltwater swimming pool and lose my dream tank with all of its inhabitants.
mfinn
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That's what I thought at first.
Then after re-reading the first post, I'm thinking maybe a Red Sea Reefer 525 ?
Aardvark1134
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Under any jack or pole jacks in a craw always put a solid concrete block or poured footer under it.
The crawl space is concrete. But now I’m questioning whether it’s needed now or not. The home was built in 2016. Seems sturdy under there I just wanted the extra support. And yes I mean the reefer 525. My apologies for that.
Not extreme at all and much to your views this is my dream tank as well. My children are by far the biggest concern. My little man likes to run. While I obviously keep this to a minimum I want to minimize any type of movement of the tank. And yes it’s a Red Sea 525.
ca1ore
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OCD is an occupational hazard in this hobby
, so reinforce away if it makes you feel better. But for a 110 gallon tank, it's completely unecessary. I'll bet there's thousands of R2R'ers with comparably sized tanks sitting just fine on a standard joist floor. Now, if you were talking 220 or up, some supports would be a good idea. 
If you are going to add a brace (and I would, just because, well, cheap insurance) a brace made of 2x material (I'd use 2x6's) with a piece of 3/4" plywood of equal length/width sandwiched between, glued and screwed will be pretty much impervious to flex. 2x lumber by itself is more prone to warping/twisting as it dries.
