My Mid-life crisis - My New Fish Room!!

Thanks @MariaS, my only concern is the high rate of evaporation at present. I actually found it to be quite hectic on the smaller tanks. But I have now shortened the daily light cycle hoping this will help.

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Yes.. the evaporation has been quite a lot in this heat even in our big tanks with the sumps covered.
If the tank is covered it should also help
Lets keep fingers crossed and have faith

 

So for your fish room, you didn't get the space in the house that has the jacuzzi, wet bar and view?
Looks fun. I'll be doing a fish 'nook' in the spring (oppps your autumn down south.)

 

Hi TASA, Its been a while since I did any Fish Room updates, so here goes.

Things have been busy this year so far at the office and in my Fish Room. Most nights when I am home, once family time is over and the rest of my house hold has gone to sleep, I am usually in my Fish Room. I realized this year early on already that a lot of time is been spent in the fish room doing water changes, which is a good thing on the water change side of things but a bad thing on the amount of time its taking me. So a lot of focus is going to be on making things more streamlined and semi automated at this point in the fish room to make things easier as I am going to be adding more tanks.

Their were lots of exciting little success in the fish room last year and 1 or 2 little failures, like the incident with the high levels of ammonia in the municipal tap water last year and then early Jan my carbon block filter literately exploded one morning around 1am and caused a mini flood, lucky I got to it just in time for it not to turn the entire fish room into one big aquarium!! LOL. It turns out the filter housing for the carbon block failed and rip itself from mounting under the water pressure.

Any how with every little set back it makes you stronger and wiser. So now I have a pressure adjustment valve installed as well as a manual shut off that is easy to get to, so the water mains feed to the fish room can be shut down quickly and easily.

I have also installed a 1000L flowbin outside that I still need to get hooked up with a filtering system of some sort to, to filter out ammonia and chlorine. I have some ideas and did some tests with Clinobright, that I got from a pool shop. Its used quite a bit in the Koi hobby on big pond systems to help with ammonia control and its cheap. A 40KG bag is around R250. and its the same stuff you buy at the LFS that comes in a small tiny 250g plastic jar for around R100. I am probably just going to fashion out a very simple DIY bucket filter above the flow bin and have a small pond pump to pump the water into the filter and let gravity do the rest of the work. That way it can never over flow and simply just needs to continuously circulate through the bucket filter. I will probably also DIY some sort of float system in the flow bin so I can automate the filling of the flowbin with the municipal water.

I have to get the stored water preparation tank "SWPT" as I now call it, done ASAP, as I have been reverting to RO water out of desperation and mostly fear and have had very good success, but its slow and expensive and I need to have more space available to store RO water if I were to do this for all the tanks and that would waste space in the fish room so RO is going to be reserved exclusively for the shrimp tanks. (Their water demands are no where near that of normal fish)

Last night I discovered that one of the BN males that I' have been growing out for almost a year now was sitting on eggs in his cave, I was very excited about this and then I discovered that my Ancitrus pair had also finally laid some eggs and they had hatched in the cave. I have pictures of the BN below, but not the Ancitrus as this tank is to low down to the floor for me to get a decent picture. Yet another thing I need to improve as well in the FR. No more low down tanks for breeding!!! LOL

I also added another Puffer fish to my collection. (In his own tank of coarse) and finnaly after almost 2 months he is now used to me and comes to the front of the tank every morning to get his food. I actually gave him a half shell clam the other morning and he devoured it in seconds. I was actually quite shocked at the large chunks that he bit out of it. They have extremely sharp and powerful beaks.

My tiny shrimp colony is also growing nicely and will be expanded out this year. I even ended up with a tank fully of cherries that took up co-habitation in the one guppy tank and to this day, I have no idea how they got their, since I have never purchased any and certainly never put any shrimp in that tank to start with. I can only suspect that a few stowaways got in on some plant swops and well the rest is history as they say.




More updates and Pics to follow soon!!

 

Wait what so many tanks....... I'm definitely coming for shrimp

 

Unfortunately i downscales a bit amd went back to the dark side.

 

@David Kusner

Thanks for the update and sharing the ups and the downs which are always bound to happen... others can learn from what we share

Overall, at least the glitches were not too serious
When the volumes start getting bigger and bigger, i agree with you in that you need to find an easier way or rather less time consuming way to waterchanges
We have been doing the same and @Cesar's tanks are all done, not with a float but at the turn of a valve and he has drilled the sumps and all ready for drip system, just need the dosing pumps now
Mine are almost done done too and it takes 30 min to do a 4000l tank compared to nearly 2 hours before.. what a pleasure

Congratulations on the puffers, love them.. they adorable

 

Just went through this thread from the start, NICE fishroom..love the puffers and corys.
An auto water change system is a must on a fishroom....I find the DIY side of this all very fun and exciting...Great job man