Thread by @fuzzygroup

I'd like to talk to you about hacking IKea Bror metal shelves for better holding aquariums. My wife has a large number of aquariums and she recently put a 20 gallon aquarium on the top shelf area of her Bror shelves. #ikea @ikeahacks

And it was ok for about 2 days. Then I walked through her office and noticed that it was cantilevered out from the wall about 20 degrees. Terrifying because if it moved more, it would topple over, breaking two aquariums, killing the fish (No pic; too scared

And dumping 40 gallons of water into the floor (and room below). I got some bar clamps from my shop and clamped it in place temporarily. The next day I screw gunned the right hand frame of the shelf to the door jam and that removed the immediate worry.

But then I realized that what must have happened is the weight of the new tag (7.5 lbs / gallon * 20 gallons or 150 lbs) must have made one of the front shelf supports deform. So this could continue to happen.

The unit might not pull out from the wall but it could still pancake downward and break that way. The angle iron that makes up the vertical supports has inside negative space so my thought was to reinforce the shelf supports with wooden braces.

A 2x4 has between 850 and 1000 pounds of compressive strength. I took two 2x4s and ripped down 24" (approx) by 1 beams and secured them into the negative space. We have these supporting the top and middle shelves 9

The final step was to secure the left hand side of the unit to the wall with 3 plastic wall anchors (rated at 80 lbs each) and metal cross pieces since I couldn't drill behind the shelf supports themselves.

Moral of the story - metal shelves from Ikea aren’t as strong as you think - be careful - water is heavy!