Marc's fish room build

[bekateen]

Haha you seem to be pretty resourceful when it comes to power outages, luckily.

Hi Marc,

Yes you are working hard at that. In Central California this summer, our utility provider (Pacific Gas & Electric, PG&E) is threatening to turn off power to large areas of the state on hot dry windy days because of the risk that their equipment might spark wildfires, like the ones in years past that destroyed entire towns, the worst of which killed about 90 people.

Those threatened power cuts will be for up to 5 days at a time. How does a fish keeper prep for that, other than storing a lot of gasoline on hand for a generator?

Fortunately, my fish are small and so are my tanks. The problem is my tanks are spread throughout the house, and a whole-house generator is not an option for me. Currently, three action plans I have in place for the tanks in the event of such a shut-down are

• Immediate large (90%) water change in all tanks to get water as clean as possible.
• Refill tanks only to about a depth of 6-7cm and perform frequent WC during a multiday power outage.
• Do not feed fish during power outage.

I've considered in the past using APC type battery power for air pumps but from what I've read they won't last long enough to aerate tanks for up to 5 days at a time. So I'm hoping and praying that shallow clean water will experience enough passive diffusive oxygen exchange to keep fish alive for days.

I appreciate that it's a risky strategy, but so far I've found none better given the arrangements of tanks throughout my house.

Good luck with your fish.

Cheers, Eric

[MarcW]

Wow Eric, that sounds like a challenge, 5 days would be a struggle for anyone.

The first thing that comes to my mind is consolidating the fish, providing they have similar needs and won't eat each other! If you can get all the fish into 2 or 3 containers, maybe the laguna pre formed ponds, I have one outside, see the UK summer pond thread I started. They have a big surface area and are quite shallow, also easy to move and store when not in use.

If these could be temporarily put close to each other in a garage/guest room/porch then you might get away with using a small low powered air pump to run a seasoned sponge filter, or an air powered box filter with media from existing cannisters, fairly easily. Combined with a couple water changes over the 5 days should get you through.

Some of the small air pumps I have (marketed as for ~100G tanks typically with 2 outlets) only use 5-6 Watts, and would power 2-3 air driven filters, especially in shallow water. Paired with a deep cycle (often sold as marine or motor home batteries) with say a 50Ah capacity, and an invertor should see you through the 5 days.

Of course you need the battery, a charger, invertor, and new containers/ponds, unfortunately the cheaper invertors have a higher parasitic load and would likely consume more power than the small air pump!

However what if the 5 days turns to 6 or 7? It'd be nerve wracking that's for sure, and a small generator or perhaps some sort of solar powered battery bank (the kind hikers/campers use to charge cell phones) would add piece of mind. I've seen some small USB airpumps which could be powered from a battery bank similar to those which are popular for cell phones that may be worth looking at, they may even be cheap enough to buy several so you can keep the fish in the tanks they are currently in. Then maybe charge the power banks from the 12v socket in a car if needed, providing you are driving somewhere so you don't drain your car battery too much!

Apologies for rambling on, hopefully something there will be of use .

[bekateen]

Hi Marc,

Thanks for the suggestions. There are some good ones there.

Yes grouping fish is needed. Sadly, too many of my tanks are overstocked already, so consolidation into current tanks offers little improvement; but the idea of moving them to a few pond-like structures is good.

PG&E has already turned off the power to a few county areas this summer, but not for more than a day so far. Many here regard the PG&E plan as more of a vindictive threat to punish Californians for suing PG&E in court for responsibility/liability for the fires. From a practical point of view, the "power off" threat is far worse of a fire threat if you think about it - imagine hundreds if not thousands of residents in dry climates starting up diesel- and gas-fueled generators outdoors, presumably in random and unpredictable garden conditions. Tell me there's less fire threat with those on a 41C - 44C day with high wind and zero humidity than there would be by leaving the power on.

Many of us in California hope and pray that the PG&E proposal is more of a scare tactic than something that will come to pass. Myself, I don't live in the wildfire prone area, but my county is along the transmission lines from the valley to the mountains. Wish there was a better way to assess the risk.

Cheers, Eric

[MarcW]

I agree with you on the fire risk, lots of people starting up generators which may have never been serviced/not used for years, spilling gas, or leaving the hot exhausts near dry vegetation seems more likely to cause fires than presumably reguarlly maintained and regulated power transmission equipment.

Any chance you could silicone in the plug and move all the fish to a bath tub?! I guess that wouldn't go down too well!

Hopefully it is just a bluff and it won't come to anything, I also hope there isn't a repeat of last year's fires they looked devastating.

[bekateen]

Agreed.

[Viktor Jarikov]

Wow, Marc! ... Wow, Eric!?

Great write-up Marc, I appreciated it. Looks like utility workers can be clueless anywhere, even in the highly civilized England too

After hurricane Irma (4th category, 120-140 MPH sustained wind) that hit Naples, Florida, USA straight on with its eye on Sept 10 2017, we have not had power for 9 days. I managed to run the fish room on a single 7000 running watts generator, water half level, pumps half capacity, almost no feed. That's a thousand of fish, perhaps about a thousand of pounds of combined weight. The roof over the fish room "gone with the wind", so full Florida sun blazing... I believe Eric you can do it. You don't need whole-house as in back-feeding the electricity from the generator into the house circuitry but a bunch of extension cords should suffice.

I'd surely practice the drill before the actual thing, if it ever comes to it.

Just keep a stash of gasoline. Use gasoline stabilizer if storing for long times, even a year or longer. I use Marvel Mystery Oil. I had to add 5 gallons of gasoline every 6 hours to keep mine running uninterrupted. You are supposed to stop the generator when refilling. I didn't. It'd be a huge pain to unplug everything, close all valves, then reverse. Just add carefully and don't spill. I too stood for hours in lines at gas stations.

All in all, this can be dangerous. When messing with electric power, lots of things can go wrong, especially when saving time, labor, money, etc. and cutting corners.

[bekateen]

Thanks Viktor. That sounds like good advice. I'll look into a smaller sized generator, since I'm only managing less than 200 gallons total at home among 9 tanks spread across 6 rooms of the house.

Moving the fish from 10 gal tanks to centralized totes might be the best way to simplify that.

Cheers, Eric

[MarcW]

Turns out they didn't learn from the last time they forgot diesel for the generator, it happened again this morning! Luckily my batteries had charged enough to cover the 1 hour outage, so I didn't have to break out the generator.

Reading Viktors post, I would lean towards a generator in your situation too, I didn't think of daisy chaining a few extension cords so you could leave tanks and fish in the same place, no manufacturer will officially say its OK, but I'm sure we all do somewhere in our homes!

If it's just low powered filters/air pumps then you can fairly easily work out the load and be confident things will be OK.

This would work especially well if you had notice of the cut so you could set it up, if you didn't have any advance warning and may be out when the cut happens then you need to look into transfer switches and things get more expensive and slightly more complicated.

My generator is just a small one 700w, but that should be plenty to run 10 tanks with mid sized external filters. The downside is the fuel tank is small so it only runs for 2-6 hours depending on load.

[kvnbyl]

i moved from a place that had a lot of outages (Cambridge MA)., of all places to a place that has somewhat less issues and the very first thing that went into the downsized house went was a 14,000 watt standby generator.
how much are my fish worth? how much are yours worth?
my days of staying up all night and fueling a generator are 1. dangerous and 2. over,
big expense. yep. worth it? absolutely,
the last big outage was during a blizzard 2 years ago, 10 degrees /f and blowing like crazy, i sat in the fish room and listened to the heat going on and off. it powers the ac too, 3 circuits for the fish
i have neighbors who are very elderly and they came over, they probably would not have made it.
i let people charge phones.
was it a lot of money?
Yes it was, but having heard first hand of someone from the local fish society talk about losing thousands of dollar of breeding stock it didn't seem as bad
i'm not pushing my do -gooder tendencies as i have relatively few but knowing the family was warm on one of the worst days of the year was priceless (not an add!!)
the generator was 5,000 installed and yeah i bought a lot less fish that year and put off the 180 probably forever.
don't know about you but the local electricity companies here are doing no upkeep ( the electric wires on top of of the poles are almost without insulation) and installing no new capacity while condos are going up everywhere so i consider it a good investment, it's 10 years old and i maintain it and it runs like new
i consider it one of my better investments

[Bas Pels]

Looks terrible to be needing such a device.

Once I had a presentation about the Dutch high power lines, and to summarise it to what's important, the Nijmegen area, where I live, is the area with the least power problems in the country. In fact I can't remember whether I ever had a problem lasting for more than a few hours.

That makes it for me a lot easier keeping fishes: As long as I can have a lack of power for an hour, I'm safe. And the way it is now, I can just outwait such an hour.

[Viktor Jarikov]

Yeah, nothing beats a properly wired stand by generator. I need to save toward one, so I could travel with ease, let it be a 30 min errand, or a week long trip. The estimates on mine are rough though. By code we need a generator that would match the main breaker amperage, which in our case is 400 amps on one house and 200 on the other. So if done by code, we'd need a 55,000 watt on the one house and perhaps get away with a 22,000 watt on the other and these are around $40,000 and $15,000, respectively, installed.

Even if not up to code and installed by a more friendly electrician or self, the smallest standby generator in our area, the 22,000 watt, would cost around $10,000, so roughly $20,000 for the two (we use the circuitry from both houses to run our fish rooms, each house has its own supply and meter, so I presume we would need two standby's). Ain't got that $$ either.

As for our 7000 running watts and 11,500 starting watts generator we used after the hurricane, its gasoline tank is roughly 7-8 gallons and we ran 11 pumps off it, each pump 360 watt and 5000 GPH. As stated, the generator would spend 5 gal of gasoline every 6 hours. So that was approximately half of the max load. There were other minor things we ran off the generator - lights, fridge, freezers, fans.

After the hurricane I was scared straight and bought another gasoline generator, 12,000 running watts. In part, because I couldn't run the continuous water change on our fish tanks during the 9 day outage, nor supply the house with water. We make our own water, well + RO, it's power-costly.

Each generator cost $1000.

[MarcW]

Wow Viktor, those generators to meet code sound huge, and extremely costly!

My little one was under £200, ~$230, it'll just run the fish room and maybe a fridge freezer too.

We don't get extreme weather (although we are seeing more frequent hot spells in summer), so I'm not concerned about running anything in the rest of the house, just keeping the fish alive!

This is a very unusual situation for us, the power company are still running our street from a large generator. Apart from the 4 hour outage mentioned previously in this thread I don't remember ever having a power outage of more than 30 to 60 minutes before. I've lived within a couple miles of my current house for my whole life.

Although having said that I bet the infrastructure hasn't changed in that amount of time, and there are a lot more houses around here now.

[MarcW]

The rain water system is starting to pay off. I got 250 litres of rainwater into my IBC, mixed with RO and HMA filtered tap water earlier.

I'm re-routing some of the guttering to collect rain from a much larger roof area to improve collection rates.

Despite having mesh/foam before the water enters the container, I passed it through a 7 inch 100micron sump sock before putting it in the IBC.

[kvnbyl]

the theoretical standard of service here is 1 -10 minute outage every 10 years, what a joke
at least in Cambridge we would get a flyer detailing scheduled outages, that's not happening here

[MarcW]

I've started off a daphnia colony in a spare tank next to my sump, hopefully I'll be able to maintain enough numbers to feed them once a week or so.

There is also some java moss in there I'm hoping to grow and use as a spawning medium in the tanks with Corys and tetras. After my success with the kogal tetras, I have now seen 4 young, hopefully moss will help me spawn other species.

I'm feeding the daphnia with yeast and spirulina powder.

[Lycosid]

I've started off a daphnia colony in a spare tank next to my sump, hopefully I'll be able to maintain enough numbers to feed them once a week or so.

I've managed to keep Daphnia going for the last year, but I always have colony crashes. I've started splitting the colonies out, with a few 2-liter bottles as back-up colonies. I offset them, so I start them at different times and harvest the bottle cultures by dumping the entire bottle through a fine mesh net and starting it with new water, in the hopes that at least one culture will ramping up as the others crash. I've definitely needed it. Just last month I went from 10 colonies to 1 over a single weekend, and have only now gotten everything back up and running again to the point where I feel safe harvesting Daphnia to feed fish.

[MarcW]

Wow that's a lot of crashes! I have a couple really small tanks, 2.5 USG, so I might just stick one next to the larger tank with a handful of daphnia in as a precaution. Thanks for the tip!

[Lycosid]

Wow that's a lot of crashes! I have a couple really small tanks, 2.5 USG, so I might just stick one next to the larger tank with a handful of daphnia in as a precaution. Thanks for the tip!

I don't think I actually had nine separate crashes as the bottle that survived was also not very close to the other bottles (and was furthest from the window), but having small environmental variations crash nine thriving colonies was a solid warning. I'd also been a little careless about letting the colonies synchronize their boom-and-bust cycles.

I know everyone hates duckweed, but I've been in a lot of biology labs where people keep duckweed and Daphnia together for very long periods of time. Daphnia get tangled in plants with fine leaves or exposed root hairs, but I suspect the plants really help manage the nitrates. I keep meaning to set up a floating container that keeps duckweed in it so it doesn't get anywhere else but allows water to flow through.

[MarcW]

That's interesting, I put a couple small water lettuce in the tank, they have long fine roots, I'll keep an eye on things and maybe remove them if I see any issues.

[dw1305]

Hi all,
If you add some hay (or any dead dry grass) to your Daphnia colonies, and feed them less, it tends to control "boom and bust". I've stopped using yeast as well, and I also add a floating plant and a snail.

I got the hay idea from a post on Caudata.org (https://www.caudata.org/forum/showthread.php?t=77665), and it definitely works.

I don't have a specific indoor culture set up at the moment, I don't have many fish and can harvest enough from the outside buckets and water butts, but when I set one up again I'm going to use very small amounts of spirulina powder, paprika and gram flour as the supplementary food.

Daphnia feed by particle size, so any particle of the right size in the water column will be ingested.

cheers Darrel

[MarcW]

The first catfish spawn in the fish room happened this morning!

The

Sturisomatichthys festivus

are still at it, I noticed them looking ready to spawn this morning when feeding and they are still going after laying the first egg at about 10am (it's 1.30pm now). I got three fish as juveniles from the CSG convention in March this year, both fish involved with the spawning are 10cm SL.

I didn't do anything to trigger them, the only change recently is me mixing in more tap water with water changes after a pH crash a month or two ago.

The fertilisation of the eggs appears to be similar to Corys, the female shakes and stretches then the male positions above the female and directs the sperm apparently into the females mouth and eggs are laid 1-3 seconds after. This is repeated for every cluster of 3-6 eggs every 10-20 minutes.

There are over 40 eggs so far.

[bekateen]

Congratulations Marc on the spawn! Wonderful news for the "new" fishroom!

And those are great videos of the spawning.

Cheers, Eric

[TwoTankAmin]

We have had a whole house backup generator since 2012. We have two buildings each of which has 100 amp max capacity. Out gennie is a Generac which can put out a bit less than 200amps.

It is our second machine as out first one had a major component fry the week before a blizzard was forecast. The part could not be made that quickly so we had no option but to replace it. The consideration for what capacity we would use was lower for the replacement than the one that we lost.

Bear in mind that your house will never use the maximum capacity of your circuits. Certain things will not run at the same time. For example, our heating and our air condition never run simultaneously. We never have 100% of the lights turned on at the same time. Further, one can exercise some control over what runs.

The point is, you can spend less because you actually need less than the potential max. capacity all your circuits would take if everything ran at the same time.

We have one more advantage. Our second building was added 10 years after the first. Things were built so all of the electricity enters the newer building where it then splits with 100 amps used in the first building and the second 100 amp passed on to the main house. This lets us use a single generator for both buildings.

We realized we needed a gennie because we were caring for mom who was in her 90s and had dementia and home health aides. She could not manage with a major power outage. At the same time I had started having big success with breeding zebra plecos and the value of my fish had come to exceed $20k.

If you live someplace where power outages are not uncommon, I can tell you the money you might spend for a gennie will rapidly prove worth every dollar. After installing our gennie we had a 13 day power outage in 2011 and again in 2012 from the hurricanes.

[MarcW]

The eggs are coming along well, the male has eaten 2 which went white, I've removed 3 fungused ones from the floating trap which contains the eggs that didn't stick to the glass. I can now see eyes, mouths and a spine inside the remaining ~40 eggs.

I need to be so careful in that tank though, the Entomocorus gameroi go crazy when I slide the glass lid back, opening the lid by about 3 inches to get the 3 fungused eggs out, one jumped into my hand, the same one then jumped back out and landed on the glass lid, then jumped out again but landed back in the water!

They were very relaxed after I first got them and in the past few months they have become very skittish!

[MarcW]

The eggs appear to be developing well now, I lost 3 more to fungus in the floating trap, although it could have been that they weren't fertilised I suppose. The male has sorted out a few other bad eggs on the glass, but I have 25+ remaining.

Hopefully they will hatch in another 2-3 days, then I'll have to leave instructions on how to look after the young as I'm off to Cataclysm next week!

[MarcW]

The Sturisomatichthys eggs hatched on Friday, I've lost a few of them since hatching so I've now moved them into a tank with just a young L260, plenty of algae and some old oak leaves. Hopefully they'll find enough food in there while I'm away.

This morning I also found the first spawn of Ancistrus sp. L393 'Cheese Creek', these are F1 fish which I got from the CSG convention last year. The male seems to be doing a good job with the eggs so far, so I plan to leave him to it over the weekend.

[MarcW]

It's been a while since I've posted anything, not a lot has changed in the fish room, I've put the heater back in and insulated the skylight for the winter. Rainwater collection has been going well, I've not had to use my RO unit for a while now.

I attended a CSG meeting at Pier on the 8th December and took home two new

Pseudorinelepis sp(l095)

and two male

Spectracanthicus zuanoni

. The L020 had been there for at least several months I believe they came mixed in with some L354. I have three L020 already and they all appeared to be females, and have looked gravid for a couple months.

Today, just over a week after adding what I think are two males into the tank with what I think are the three females they have spawned! It is in a home made cave, the exact one which my L128 spawned in despite these L020 being much smaller in size.

I've attached a picture below, not great quality, as I was surprised to see it and didn't want to spook the male! As I haven't had much luck artificially raising eggs/fry in the past I'll leave the male to it for now.

[bekateen]

Hi Marc,

A spawning that fast? Terrific! It's great to see things (things meaning fish) working right, doing what they're supposed to do.

How are the baby Sturisomatichthys? Did any survive and grow?

Cheers, Eric

[MarcW]

Yes I was really surprised, the two males were only introduced on the 8th December, I've had the three females for 4 or more years.

It's puzzling to me that I really struggle to get things like common corys, ancistrus and hypancistrus to spawn, yet these spawned so quickly!

Unfortunately the Sturisomatichthys fry died one by one, the last one disappeared when the suction cups holding the fry basket failed and it escaped into the tank, I've not seen it since. They were certainly growing and eating, and made it to 6-8 weeks before the last one escaped into the tank.

I've now moved the adults into a smaller tank by themselves, they are looking ready to spawn again, so I plan to leave them to it next time without any other fish in the tank.

[bekateen]

Unfortunately the Sturisomatichthys fry died one by one, the last one disappeared when the suction cups holding the fry basket failed and it escaped into the tank, I've not seen it since. They were certainly growing and eating, and made it to 6-8 weeks before the last one escaped into the tank.

I've now moved the adults into a smaller tank by themselves, they are looking ready to spawn again, so I plan to leave them to it next time without any other fish in the tank.

I've heard the fry can be difficult. Better luck next time. In the meantime, enjoy your successes and this early Christmas present from the zuanoni.

Cheers, Eric