HCA: Hermit Crab Association

Since my father has decided he's only getting grandcritters from me, he spoils them. Little did I know what a medium or so tank was going to be. I was thinking 100 gallons.

225+ gallons and it's deep. Like 34" deep. The small tank is about 175 gallons.

Grandpa is building a base and cabinet for both tanks that will support 16" substrate, won't fill them near that full, but figure on planning for too much weight is better than a broken mess.

But where do I start building Crabtopias? Can I still do the false bottom with PVC and egg crate? I assume I need to go to heat lamps instead of UTH? With a tank for an salt water pool, do I need a same size fresh water pool?

Meanwhile, the crabs say hurry it up!

Those are huge tanks! I know that 180 and 210g tanks are about 6' long, 2' wide and about 2' high but yours seem to be even larger. Assuming 12" of substrate, that would leave you 12"x72" (at least) of tank to heat. Ultratherm does make an 11"x47", an 11"x35" and an 11"x23" pad so, by combining the 47" and the 23", you'd cover most of a 6' long tank above the substrate.

I would definitely construct false bottoms in tanks that large because a flood would be beyond disasterous! Can you even imagine having to remove all the substrate in one of those tanks and starting all over again?!?

Re pools: although I've had only far smaller tanks (10 and 29g), I've always keep both pools the same size as they've seen pretty equal usage by the crabs. Many of the larger set-ups with filtered pools that I've seen posted here appear to use the same size pools for both waters.

There are HCA threads about setting up large (over 125g) crabitats so do a search to see what you can find. Hopefully, some of the folks with super large tanks will chime in with advice.

Well, for proof of my crazy - I just bought a pallet of half bags of play sand. They're delivering next week. It's a local place, it's a perfect grain in my mind, and it's carefully washed first. It's sold as premium sandbox sand, half bags are 25 pounds and easier to handle/mix up for me. I just mix up the EE to dripping soup then use a grout mixer in a 10 gallon trash can to mix it up with a bag of sand. Repeat some 40 times per tank.... But I'd rather dump 40 buckets of this than 20 buckets of twice the weight. Plus I've found the half bag is easier to catch if I'm too wet and then dry it out. But in 7 years, I've worked the soup level out.

The pallet will likely just fill both tanks. Yup, I will have a literal ton of substrate going on. Part of this is a contractor who is making sure the floor can handle weight. The check is tomorrow, and I'm pretty sure we're ok since last check was that we had was good for the current tanks plus a potential 100 gallon fish tank which I opted against.

I AM SO GLAD I ONLY HAVE A 55 GALLON TANK! I went from 29/ 30 gal to the 55. Now I am finding it is getting so hard for me to clean..I have put so much into this tank I will never get what I put into it labor or $ wise. So if the crabs die it will just become a plant aquarium