Author Archives: Erik Zandboer

The new cabinet has arrived!

After a lot of thinking, rethinking and selecting kitchen suppliers, I finally managed to get a cabinet ordered tuned to my exact requirements! In this blog post I’ll share some of the details that make up “the perfect cabinet” for me.



How it looks on the outside

The first thing to consider, was that the new cabinet should fit neatly into our living room. So we wanted the style of the cabinet to match. That is where the idea of using kitchen cabinets first came to mind (also see “First Idea for the Cabinet“).

The next challenge was to find kitchen supplier that could build what we required. We started out with the supplier that supplied our kitchen. Unfortunately, they where unable to deliver the height we needed. As it turned out, almost all kitchen suppliers were unable to deliver what we needed. Especially the lower part of the cabinet turned out to be impossible for most suppliers to deliver.

Finally we found a kitchen supplier that built all of their cabinets themselves, and were able to deliver any (!!) size we wanted. As an input we had these requirements:

Kitchen cabinet to double as both paludarium and TV cabinet

And here is the final result:

The paludarium cabinet as it turned out; TV on the right on a lower section, and room for the paludarium on a higher section on the left.

We are very happy with the result; this cabinet should deliver enough room and strength to carry my beloved paludarium 2.0. Please note I did not use the original stands under the cabinets. As they are not in line with the vertical sides of the cabinets, the huge weight might destroy the cabinet. Instead, I used small wooden beams positioned directly under the vertical sides that support them from back to front (as you can see in the schematical drawing).


A look inside the cabinet

Inside the cabinet I now have the luxury of having tap water and a sewer drain, so I can completely automate the process of refilling, changing water. Also, the rain can now come directly from the tap water pressure, so I’ll just need an electric valve and no longer any rainwater pumps. The rain will be completely silent apart from the hissing of the sprinklers. I can live with the downside that it will be raining cold tap water:

Details of the drain and tap inside the new paludarium cabinet.

The total space under the paludarium should be more than enough to house all the stuff I need under there like a reverse osmosis appliance, all the plumbing and valves, the external filter and the a bunch of electronics. If I can store all this stuff there, I should not have a problem:

If I can store all this stuff under the paludarium, it should surely be enough to store all filters, valves, plumbing and electronics!

Up next… Finalize all details around the paludarium sizing and pass-throughs, then order the glass…!!!

Go with the Flow

As I’ve started to think up Paludarium 2.0, more and more ideas are popping up. The most recent one: How to build the water household. With all the things I want, and all the technology I can build, I am now thinking up the specs and features I need/want, and how I can build them so that it will actually work, and most important, KEEP working.

Specs for the flow of water

I have quite an extensive must have / wanna have list. Here they are in random order: Read more »

First idea for the cabinet

As Paludarium 1.0 is sold and gone, I’ve begun to design the cabinet that will be built under the new paludarium. I plan to use kitchen cabinets for this purpose, and include a section to put the TV on as well.

Using kitchen cabinets

When building our new kitchen, it dawned on me that using kitchen cabinets might make the perfect cabinet Read more »

Going once… Going twice… Gone.

It finally happened. I sold of Paludarium 1.0 to a nice person who is going to refit it for keeping poison dart frogs. The cabinet underneath was already old and not that nice anymore, but he gladly took it with him to patch it up.

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Paludarium 1.0 empty & ready to be sold

The glorious days of Paludarium 1.0 have definitely come to an end. The realtime page at http://realtime.paluweb.nl is offline, all fish have been transferred to a temporary tank, and I have posted it “for sale” n a Dutch trading site.

Fish Migration

The fish that were still in the Paludarium 1.0 have been relocated to a new and temporary home in separate tank. I surely had Read more »

The final days of Paludarium 1.0

After just over two years, the day is nearing: Paludarium 1.0 is going to be shut down, including the real time statistics page realtime.paluweb.nl. At that time I will start building out Paludarium 2.0, which of course will get a realtime statistics page once again (possibly a nicer one!!) but that will take at least several months to complete.

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Paludarium 2.0: Ordering glass

Just as Paludarium 1.0, I decided to once again not build the glass tank myself, but have this pre-built. In order to be able to get what I want, I needed a technical drawing of the glass tank.

General sizing

General sizing was quite straightforward. I want to reuse my old paludarium lighting hood, so the top measures should be the same as the old one: 100cm wide and 60cm deep. The current height of the paludarium is 100cm (divided in 30cm water, 70cm land). I found the 30cm of water to be somewhat too low, and really want a water height of 50cm. That would bring the Plaudarium to a total glass height of 50+70 = 120cm. Quite a construction!

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1.5 Year stop-motion video from Paludarium 1.0

So why would you put up a webcam to a paludarium and save a screenshot every day? Well, because you can! Now that I was working with videos and youtube anyway, I figured to check out my fileserver and see how many captures where there. I was surprised to see that my fileserver had been capturing screens for over 1,5 year! Now I have strung them all together into a short video for all to see.

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How to choose aquatic lighting: A test!

I have heard a LOT of different stories on aquatic lighting types and plant growth. From horror stories on blue light boosting algae growth to people buying the most expensive “Amazone”-type fluorescent lighting tubes for horrifying prizes. I did not want to join into all of these made-up or heard-of “facts”, and I decided to do my own testing! In this blog I will post what I did, and most important… the outcome of my test.

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Lighting of the Paludarium 2.0

Paludarium 2.0 is going to utilize the same lighting system as the current (1.0) version. Because I am often asked about this technology, I decided to translate my original post (see Verlichting van het paludarium (in Dutch) and post it here.

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