DIY Backing for Tanks

Author: Rob Torrens
Date: Friday, March 29 2003

Every now and then we have someone come along to our local club to talk about judging considerations for tank competitions. They always seem to mention about having a backing on the tank - to hide all those electical wires or hoses that inevitably seem to straggle down the back of the tank.

This posed a problem for me, as I had already got my 4' tank setup and in place (without any backing). I wasn't going to wrestle it out from the wall (at the risk of a hernia or other injury) just so that I could paint the back, I'm not that keen on the backgrounds-on-a-roll and didn't want anything that actually went in the tank.
The way I got around these hassels was to get a sheet of polystyrene the same dimensions as the back of the tank and paint it.
The local fish shop was quite happy to provide me with the piece of polystyrene. As for the paint to use - make sure that it is WATER-based. You can't use oil-based paint as the solvents in the paint will dissolve the polystryene. I went off to the hardware place and got one of those house paint test pots (tinted to the colour I wanted). It took two coats of paint to completely cover the polystyrene (after one coat there were still flecks of white from some of the pores in the polystyrene). Once the paint was completely dry it was reasonably easy to slide the sheet in behind the tank and just secure it in place each end with some wide adhesive tape.
The benefits of this method:

- because it is the polystyrene that is painted rather than the back of the tank it is quite easy to change the background colour (tank doesn't have to be moved, no scraping off of paint). You could either paint over the original colour or paint the alternate side of the poly-sheet.

- because the poly-sheet is rigid you don't get any sagging in the middle or ripples that you can get with the background-on-a-roll (particularly on longer tanks).

- the polystyrene will insulate the back of the tank (so there should be less heat loss from the tank).
Considerations:

- the colour of the paint looks darker when viewed through the water in the tank. The paint colour I chose was Oxford blue - quite a dark blue - when viewed through the width of water it looks black. I'm not too upset about this as it still looks very effective, the black look seems to give a greater feeling of depth and emphasises the fish and plant colours.

- I would recommend darker colours rather than lighter - it's my belief that the darker colour is more natural for the fish and provides a better contrast (just like pale gravels making fish look washed out).

- If you're one of these people that has an artistic bent you may want to paint an image rather than just a solid colour. My thoughts on this are don't make it too detailed - you probably wont be able to see alot of detail when viewing it through the water and also the fish and aquascaping are supposed to be the feature of the tank, not the background."