• What's your worst aquaria

    From Parrotrob@1:278/230 to All on Thursday, January 08, 2004 11:14:00
    Now that my work is finally done (read on), let's have some fun - here's
    mine:

    We came home from 10 days in Florida on the 29th of December to find a
    smallish damp spot on the carpet - the spot was by a high-traffic area and kinda near the 135-gallon aquarium I keep a red-eared slider in. Of course,
    I immediately suspected the aquarium, but the floor directly around it
    wasn't wet, nor was the cabinet, so I figured maybe the pet-sitter spilled something there or, worst case, maybe one of the cats had an "accident"
    while we were gone. So I cleaned it up with the steam-cleaner and left it
    at that.

    A few days later, I noticed it was wet again, and this time VERY wet - yet
    the cabinet was still dry and so was the area around the tank itself. So I start investigating and find a VERY wet spot directly underneath the Fluval
    404 I use to filter that sucker. As it turns out, the thing had been
    leaking around the seal at the top for a couple of weeks. The water had
    soaked through the carpet, wicked along the padding and came through a few
    feet away where we walked on it. This was last Friday. So I drained the
    tank, and moved it out of the way to check everything out. The carpet was destroyed. The padding was destroyed. The subfloor underneath of the
    padding was buckled and soaked nearly through the entire 3/4" thickness.
    All day Saturday I spent tearing up the subfloor to the bare joists, all the while trying to keep cats from crawling into this really interesting 3 1/2
    foot by 7 foot HOLE IN THE FLOOR.

    To make a long story shorter, six days and nearly a thousand dollars later,
    the room looks great, nice new Pergo laminate flooring, and Mr. Turtle has found himself a new home.

    In the basement.

    Where the floor under the carpet is concrete :-)

    We always joked about how much this little guy cost us. I got him in New
    York City from a little old man in Chinatown sitting on a street corner
    selling them when they were about silver-dollar size. I passed him on the
    way to work one day and I said to myself if he was still there after work I would buy all of them. So after work, sure enough he was still there with
    one poor little turtle left. So I bought him. He was so small he rode back home with me, on an Amtrak Metroliner, in the bottom of a plastic cup I took from the hotel room, stuffed in the seat pocket of the seat in front of me. That little $5.00, 1" long turtle is now an 11" behemoth with about $1000
    worth of aquarium, cabinetry, lighting, filtration, etc, etc, etc. And that was BEFORE the new floor.
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