Habitat - Indoor :: Different kind of tanks?

[babystar]

What's the difference between plexiglass, glass, and acrylic tanks? Are some of them better than others? They seem the same in pictures to me....

[DavidY]

Plexiglass and acrylic are the same. They are a type of plastic but much stronger and very clear. They are lighter than glass and they are much harder to break than glass. Acrylic is also much clearer than glass. There is no distortion when you look through it no matter what angle you are looking from and there is no green tint like there is with regular glass. Acrylic also has better insulation properties than glass which can save you a few cents on heating.

The cons of acrylic are that it is easy to scratch and it can melt if you put a heat lamp too close to it. It is usually more expensive than glass too. I would be too afraid to put a turtle in an acrylic tank since they love to claw and scratch at the tank walls. I wouldn't want to take any chances of having them ruin the tank. I don't know if anyone here uses acrylic to house their turtles. I'd be interested to know if it could handle the turtle's scratching.

[Caton420]

they do scratch the inside all up untill its horrible 2 look @ and u replace it....

[cover2cp]

I have a 100 gallon rectangular acrylic tank by TruVu. While it does have some scratches, none of them are from the turtles. They are just from me handling the tank poorly

[N4784N R4613]

How big are your turtles?

[DavidY]

Yea I'm curious too. I once got a 55gal glass tank from somebody who's brother used to keep a turtle in it with only a couple of inches of water, and he managed to scratch up the glass pretty good. I would hate to see what that turtle would do to an acrylic tank. I have a acrylic tanks for my saltwater reef tanks and they scratch up really easily. I once had a sea urchin that was able to chew into the acrylic before I caught him and moved him to a different tank.

If your turtles are small you would be safe, but a full grown turtle constantly swimming at the walls of the tank must do some damage.

[cover2cp]

I have two...the female is about 6 inches and the male is around 5. So far, I haven't had any problems and hopefully it will stay that way

[Kallistos]

That's weird. From what I've heard, anything more than fish can easily scratch acrylic. I don't know about you, but whenever I come near my turtles they come up and start scratching the glass (begging for food)

[DavidY]

Are you sure your tank is acrylic and not lexan?