Mixed Salt/Freshwater Land Hermit habitat.

[Salty Cracker]

I've had the tank itch for a few months, but 4000 feet up the mountain in an area with questionable electricity AND wildfires, I really can't justify a salt system, they're just too fragile and dependent.

BUT I think I'm going to do a hermit crab setup. I had some as pets as a kid but could never provide a perfect environement for them, with access to salt water, freshwater and proper filtration. There's a glass place in town, I am thinking about doing a tank with two chambers, salt on one side, fresh on the other, and two sumps, which will be off in a closet, I'll just run some feed and return lines to that. There's not a lot of other critters that you can keep with hermits, they sort of eat everything, but we'll see.

Dimensions will be 2'X2'X9' which gets me 36 cubic feet of space to use. I'm thinking of 3D printing the shapes for the lagoons, then just use rubber liners. That makes it easy to change later. I'll just run rubber hose or something for the feed returns, it doesn't have to be reef style water exchange. Just enough for a bit of a waterfall on the freshwater side and water movement on the salt side.

Here's the concept so far, I'll have to get in to the glass place and get prices. I figure 3/8" tempered for the front and visible side, but regular glass for the back so that I can drill it. I have to do a bunch of research on proper humidity levels and whatnot, but at least it lets me dip my toe back in the water so to speak.

Oh, it's a log/chalet house so wood and timbers is the motif. Being in logging country there are mills all over I can get custom timber from, I'll likely just weld up the steel frame pieces.

 

[chrisstevens]

I think that would be super neat, looking forward to the build.

 

[Shooter000]

Cant wait G.

 

[Salty Cracker]

It's in a line of projects, but once I visualize it (and AI, love it or hate it, is great for that), it WILL get done.
I'll have to arrange the glass first, but I have to find a company that will do custom glass for my bathroom renovations, so those I can get two birds stoned at once there. There's also a lot of research into humidity, rain, plants, bugs, etc before I just dive in. There is/was a channel called antscanada, he was sort of the inspiration for this, even though that guy was batshit crazy with the amount of bugs he let into his house. I just learned that mistakes are costly and frustrating. So merging the saltwater experience with the benefit of the internet should make it more or less a one shot deal, but I'm not running into it just to get it done.

 

[dale]

that antscanada guy has giant ecosystems in his house now..

 

[MrHermit85]

Hermit crabs are awesome! Looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

 

[RyanCallahan]

Cool project. One thing I'd flag with the steel frame: land hermits want roughly 75-85°F and 70-80% humidity around the clock, so any mild steel near the lid or the salt side will rust fast unless it's powder coated or sealed. Same idea with the printed lagoons, PETG handles warm and wet better than PLA, and keep the liner over it like you planned.

On the power worry, it's not a reef but they're still tropical. Below about 18°C they basically shut down and under 10°C you can lose them, so up at 4000 ft in a BC winter a battery backup for the heater is cheap insurance.

Substrate depth catches people too, 6 inches minimum or 3x your biggest crab so they can bury to molt. How deep are you going on the land side?

 

[Salty Cracker]

Cool project. One thing I'd flag with the steel frame: land hermits want roughly 75-85°F and 70-80% humidity around the clock, so any mild steel near the lid or the salt side will rust fast unless it's powder coated or sealed. Same idea with the printed lagoons, PETG handles warm and wet better than PLA, and keep the liner over it like you planned.

On the power worry, it's not a reef but they're still tropical. Below about 18°C they basically shut down and under 10°C you can lose them, so up at 4000 ft in a BC winter a battery backup for the heater is cheap insurance.

Substrate depth catches people too, 6 inches minimum or 3x your biggest crab so they can bury to molt. How deep are you going on the land side?

Sand depth is going to be as deep as I can make it, depending on how deep the overall tank is, and what looks good from teh front.

There's more to this than I thought, as I look into it. Humidity is a big one, we run about 10% humidity here in the house at all times other than spring and sometimes bits of fall. So it can't be an open topped tank. Drainage is another issue, I'm looking at tilting the bottom of the tank so that rain going through the substrate doesn't just sit and build bacteria. The beams and hardware are the easy part here...