Drainage System for Rainforest Habitat | The Rainforest Exhibit

Speaker: All right, guys. I just want to show you real quick what I’m doing with a drain tube for. Actually, I have it for both the 25-gallon vivarium and the reinforcements in it. All I’m doing is I’m putting a wet/dry vac like one of the two-gallon ones or three-gallon ones permanently underneath. I’m not going to use it for vacuuming the floor. I’m not going to use it for anything else.

All this is just to collect water from the false bottom when it starts to build up. Maybe a couple of gallons, maybe an inch where I have to empty it a few times. All I do is I’m taking one of those adapter kits to make a wet/dry vac small. They come with a pack like with this and brushes and a couple of things so you can attach to degrade the whole of the wet/dry vac.

This is just a regular wet/dry vac hose. It goes to a wet/dry vac, any size of use. This was that funnel tip that goes on the end of it. What I do is I might even blow this on to the end of the wet/dry hose or I might not, but I definitely will glue the limiting tube. The one that you use. Sometimes they use them to vacuum off your keyboard of your PC or whatever. Sometimes they have little brushes on the end of it. What I’ll do is I will glue– I rub this end up and rub this side there. I’ll glue that to that and that will go on. This will go right to the wet/dry vac.

I’ll just hang from there. I haven’t glued it yet, so it’s just going to fall off, but anyway. This end, I put a ring hose clamp on it on this end. Do you see it? This is one-half-inch braided tube. The other end will go to the PVC line directly into the back of the cage. If I put it, you could– If your enclosure has a hole dedicated for drainage or if you make your own or you can actually put it over the top like you did on the 75-gallon, where I actually did something like this and put this on the lid of the aquarium.

Let’s see if you can see. Yes, like that with this part going to the wet/dry vac and then this part to a drain PVC tube underneath the false bottom. Anyways, the way I’m doing this is this will go into the back of the tank. This is going underneath the enclosure and this will be braided on to or hose-clamped on to this end and then this is to the wet/dry vac. They’ll just sit there firmly.

I already showed you guys the drain underneath the false bottom with the rainforest exhibit. I’ll post other pics to it. That’s all there is to it. This will constantly be connected to the wet/dry vac through this braided line like I just showed you. Like that. This was it to the tank enclosure, PVC-glued. I could even put this on a timer if I wanted to just so it kicks on five, 10 minutes.

Usually, I wouldn’t do that because I want to make sure, let’s say, if there’s four gallons of water. It just spills out of the wet/dry vac. Usually, I would put it on a tire, but you can if you know that there’s only a certain amount of water that’s going to be collecting during a certain time and you’re vigilant in checking. I would probably end up just putting it on there and just flick on the wet/dry vac once in a while.

If I see water build-up, I put a little sight glass, a little sight area so I can see how far the water is on the false bottom getting high or low and then just suck it on the wet/dry vac and just drain the wet/dry vac as needed. I hope that helped. If you got more detail on what I’m doing here on the parts and stuff, let me know. I could always do a real quick vlog on how to do it.

I’ll start with one from scratch on a smaller tank. This basically is really simple. You could get it just from this video. In this way, you know you have a system to drain under your false bottom. Some people do gravity-fed, which works too. They leave like an inch of water underneath. That would’ve worked too. Maybe this is a little more technical way of doing it. Hope it gives you some sort of ideas.

Speaker: To give you an idea, that was the drain that I just did, wet/dry vacs connected to it, then we could either connect it to a vac outside. Just leave this out. The ball valve, you can shut it off. There’s no siphoning going on, which I doubt would happen anyway, but it might. You can have that. Turn off the ball valve in the back and just have the hose sitting there. When you’re ready to turn it on, hook that Shop-Vac to it. Make sure the ball valve is open and then hit it in any water.

Hit the power on. Any water that’s in the bottom, we can suck out down through here with wet/dry vac and you just empty it. When you’re done, turn off the ball valve. Unplug it. Make sure that there’s no water in here dripping on the floor. You might want to put a rag or something on the end or a sponge or something or maybe just have a little hook here hanging it so it’s higher. That’s it. That’s the inside of it. There it is. The drain right there with the ball valve. That’s it.

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