Fish Room Build

[DBam]

Hey folks,

I'm finally at a point where I can build a proper fish room. I've waited for a few key things, like owning my own home and not needing to move again in the foreseeable future. I've gutted and completely redone part of my basement so that the majority of a "rec room" can be used. The wife asked that we also be able to put what little exercise equipment we have in there also, so this room that measures 18' x 10.6' (5.5m x 3.2m) will be about 60% aquariums and remainder exercise space and maybe some furniture.

I'm sharing this in the hopes of getting feedback on building the room as perfectly as possible from the very beginning. There was no real possibility of having a water source in the room, nor a floor drain. These are my only regrets so far, but adding both to this part of the basement would have required too much demolition and jackhammering of concrete and the areas of the basement that have water and drainage are heavy traffic areas with a bunch of appliances. I wired in an additional dedicated electrical breaker to split up this room. Ceilings are lower, about 80" (2m). A 3-tier rack would leave only a few inches to work above each tank, so I think I'm limited to 2-tiers to have a minimum of 12" or 30cm working space. It would be nice to use tanks I already own but they range in dimensions and may not utilize the space nicely. There is also a larger custom aquarium I recently added, a 240 gallon (84" x 33" x 21" or 213 x 84 x 53 cm) that I definitely want to have in the room, and it will take up a lot of space. My goal is to have the big tank for L128s, some Satanoperca daemon, and other SA or Orinoco fish to add some variety. The rest of the room can be mostly racked tanks.

Most of the fish I want to keep are Loricarids with similar requirements. If possible, I would like to centralize water and tie tanks together. Should I:

- have individual glass tanks plumbed to a sump?
- use larger tanks like a standard 135 gallon and add acrylic, stainless steel wire, or matten foam panel dividers?
- build my own larger acrylic tanks with built in acrylic dividers?

I think a central linear piston air pump will be a no-brainer. Something like the MEDO LA-45C. Will also be using 55 gallon barrels and pumps for a dedicated water-out and new-water-in waterchange system. I have the barrels, still need the pumps. The fish I currently have are basically what I want in the room. The L-numbers look like this:

L46 x2 separate groups
L128
L134
L174
L260
L397
L519

Additionally I have Dicrossus filamentosus, D. gladicauda, various Apistos and rams, Poecilocharax weitzmani, and various tetras, dwarf rainbowfish and Neocaridina that will be in breeding groups or as dithers in with the various plecos. The L46 I may keep separate from any larger system and will be separate from each other as they are of different origin; I'll cross groups to avoid in-breeding.

I'm open to any advice or input. I know many of you have fish rooms or manage larger numbers of aquariums and have for quite some time. If pictures or diagrams of the room would help I can add that in here. Thanks in advance.

[Bas Pels]

You wrote "and maybe some furniture"

That was the biggest mistake in my fishroom, no furniture. Thus no place to relax and enjoy the fishes.

Do make room for at least 1 comfortable chair

[Jools]

I'd go in priority of power,water and heat. Then think about tank layout, plumbing and filters.

I would focus on how you are going to get water in and out and also the temperature of the room. Are you going to heat every tank, or heat the room?

In terms of water in and out, I am guessing you could run a pipe down from above to a tap or sink unit in the room. In terms of getting water out, could you pump water out from a common container all tanks drain to?

Cheers,

Jools

[aquaholic]

I run 3 separate fish rooms and in a perfect pre-planned world, I would definitely have floor drains, a wide diameter water line, platform sink, high ceilings and good insulation. I'm into breeding, run species only tanks and require 4 times the growout space to breeding space so I am constantly run out of tanks.

I'm not sure how cold your winters get. Are you able to run an above ground water waste drain? What about along the exterior wall (outside) for water drain and water supply? Hoses strewn accross floors and tank overfills creating floods get old very fast.

Are you able to put in an inground sump outside? This could double your working water volume.

One thing that is certain is that your needs and consequent layout will change over time and experience. Only you will know what appeals best. Each of my rooms change but I now know my ideal aisle widths, doorways, skylights, tap locations etc.

Some suggestions keeping in mind that I have my own working fish room priorities.

* Add a second or third electrical circuit while your installing one. Keep one circuit solely for air pumps only and this circuit can have electrical back up for longer durations.

* Use a soft solids water pump so you can flood feed all tanks with a single battery fish feeder into the pump inlet.

* If you want furniture and neat displays as well as a working room, consider installing an internal false wall with multiple tank viewing cutouts in this wall - so inside is the cramped messy humid noisy working, maintenance and feeding fish room zone. The exterior side is the furniture, mixed use, quiet zone. Wall cutouts can be framed much like an art gallery.

* L Numbers don't need much space and are time consuming - hard to catch. I use shallow glass tanks small enough to lift out when half drained so all the fish can be "poured" into next stage bigger growout phase. If space is tight, you can "effectively" double or triple your tank volume size with a heavy water change regime. I change 50% daily on growouts but take the water from my much larger broodstock systems (this water is already fish tested and stable). Higher stocking rates come with more risk, less safety margin and higher maintenance so constant water drip systems are good. To facilitate pulling glass tanks out easily, I have the tank drain outlet drop into a slightly wider pipe drainage system. (Not fixed).

* I have sliding lids to save tile and space but where tanks are tightly packed, I use 50mm lips all sides and no lids.
* I rack all tanks 90cm or less end on to conserve space. I'm able to double the number of tanks this way. Definitely ditch your hodge podge of different sized tanks.
* Don't overlook using your outside garden area in warm weather. It's easy to have floating net cages in a rpond. It's easy to grow live food or green water that can be flood fed inside to boost fish colour and health naturally.

* The usual paraphenalia of water level alarms, WiFi taps, microscope, net board, fish bagging station, push trolley, fridge carcass for fish food store above and medications below.

[bekateen]

@DBam,

Since I don't yet have my own fishroom, I can't offer specific advice. But I can agree with the others who've mentioned standardize the sizes of your tanks as much as possible to best utilize your space. Go with low height tanks if you want to even try for a 3rd tier (e.g., 30 breeders at the highest), or consider 2 tiers that utilize tanks with same footprint but different heights (e.g., a 60 breeder and a standard 75 gal tank can be stacked one atop the other on the same footprint).

All that said, none of the L numbers you listed are large, so you're probably better off with smaller tanks, except maybe for grow-outs.

Good luck, and please share pics as you progress. I'll be planning a fishroom in the next couple of years (1/2 (side) of a typical 2-car garage in the USA). I'm gonna need plenty of advice when the time comes.

Cheers,
Eric

[Shane]

Some pictures of my current basement fishroom below and some thoughts and opinions.

"- have individual glass tanks plumbed to a sump?"

I would strongly advise against this. In a limited space sumps take up too much valuable real estate. Same for canister filters. It will only take one disease spreading between tanks on a common sump and you will be tearing the fishroom apart to start over.

I have gone to all poret foam corner filters run on Medo blowers. This also keeps each aquarium modular so I can quickly bring additional tanks online when needed and then shut them down when not needed.

"- use larger tanks like a standard 135 gallon and add acrylic, stainless steel wire, or matten foam panel dividers?
- build my own larger acrylic tanks with built in acrylic dividers?"

As others have said, 30 or 40 breeders are perfect for what you want to and are easily stacked on cheap heavy duty metal shelving from Home Depot. These tanks are super cost effective. Dividers in large tanks lead to the same issue as sumps. Disease can spread to every population in the large tank. You also (like a sump) lose the ability to medicate only one population or change water, heating and/or lighting parameters in a single tank.

"I think a central linear piston air pump will be a no-brainer. Something like the MEDO LA-45C."

Agree 100% but you need to go much larger. I use a single Medo 45C just to run the filtration on a 75 gallon Panaque tank. The Medo 80BN will run six 30 or 40 breeders. You will want a lot of flow for your loricariids. Lastly, the huge draw back of an air system is that it is a single point of failure for the fishroom so you will need at least one extra on hand as a back up. That drawback aside, it is the cheapest, easiest way to run filtration in a small to medium fishroom.

And as was said, leave room for furniture and a beer fridge.

-Shane

[bekateen]

Lastly, the huge draw back of an air system is that it is a single point of failure for the fishroom so you will need at least one extra on hand as a back up. That drawback aside, it is the cheapest, easiest way to run filtration in a small to medium fishroom.

This reminds me of my friend Carlos in Napa, CA. He used to run a fishroom with two large air pumps inline simultaneously. Alone, each pump was sufficient to aerate the entire room of tanks (I recall that being roughly 50-75 tanks, but I may be overstating it). But he ran two identical air pumps connected to the same air piping, under the theory that together, they were over-aerating the tank (providing the bonus water movement that is good for so many corys and loricariids) and if either failed, the other was already running to provide uninterrupted continuous airflow... albeit weak, it was still sufficient to protect the fish. That way, he didn't have to worry about a single pump failure while he was asleep or at work each day. Granted, this strategy doubled his maintenance cost, but to avoid loss of a fishroom worth of fish, it was worth it to him.

Although I'm not positive, I think he had each air pump on a different electrical circuit for the same reason - redundancy.

Cheers, Eric

[DBam]

Wow, thank you for all the responses. I'll include some more details to give some context for my thought processes.

I live on the west coast of Canada where my microclimate is wet, foggy and cold (just above freezing) all winter and then 35°C for most of the summer. It freezes enough for it to be a concern for running outdoor equipment. I just reinstalled all the insulation on the areas of the house I gutted, and then insulated the concrete floor and the joists to help retain heat. I'm also in the process of replacing the old oil furnace with natural gas. I don't plan to run anything outdoors except for maybe a rainwater/fish water cistern to water the garden in the summer. Year-round I take all the waste water outside on waterchanges and water plants with it, I hate putting it down the drain. I've been doing all waterchanging by bucket so far so pumps/barrels/cisterns will be a welcome addition. Without getting into specifics I work in wild pacific salmon biology and deal with large numbers of fish (millions in peak spring), flow-through systems running river and well water ranging up to tens of thousands of lpm in flow, and all kinds of SCADA alarms. There's a lot of redundancy there. Some of that will work it's way into the fish room; backup linear piston airpump, generator, and heaters will likely be in order.

I had been leaning towards plumbing individual tanks to a tank sump below. One of the primary reasons was it would allow me to heat the bank of tanks without heating the room. I really don't like the idea of running individual heaters on single, isolated tanks because of how many stories I've heard of heater failures regularly wiping out people's tanks. Would 2-3 Eheim 300W heaters running in a sump give me enough time to respond to obvious temperature swings? To the point about disease spread, I may just be lucky but I haven't seen obvious widespread disease in my tanks since I was a kid. My losses are usually a heater malfunction or a mistake on my part. We have consistently good water here, low TDS and slightly acidic, and all rainfall or snowmelt on coastal mountain watersheds. Waterchanges have been my friend. We've also lost access to basically all aquarium medication in Canada, I can't even find a vet who will prescribe fish medications. I basically have to start with good healthy stock, feed well and change water religiously.

The Husky brand racks at Home Depot look great. The 24" (60cm) of shelf width should let me fit standard 15 or 20 gallon aquariums on end. The idea of draining 6 of these tanks into a 135 or 180 gallon sump that doubles as growout space with lighting and hornwort really appeals to me. I use hornwort already in most of my tanks and it seems to do it's job well.

The idea of heating the room is appealing in the winter and horrifying in the summer, especially because my bedroom is above the fish room. The basement stays cool in the summer but heating that room up might make my house less comfortable. It leaves me thinking that it's still best to heat the water instead of the room, and to mitigate heater failures causing losses.

[aquaholic]

With a background like that, you will have no issues tweaking a fish room to suit your needs.

I run 2 airpumps per central air manifold loop, each air pump on different dedicated electrical circuit but only one electrical circuit on ememergency power backup. There are a myriad of other redundancies possible but having a low stocking rate on most treasured fish is the optimum.

I run central filters, it's as simple as turning that tanks inlet tap off if you want to isolate a tank. Despite central filtration, the air driven sponge filter is considered the main filter. If space is tight for a sump, it's relatively easy to house trickle towers or moving media beds above your tanks - in the attic crawl space or different rooms.

I use water heat pumps on my central filtration due to my large water volumes. However in your situation, I'd run an air conditioner /room inverter due to the efficiency and humidity removal. One kilowatt of electrical power produces 16 kilowatts of heat - depending on brand. Heating the room/air also removes condensation issues (super annoying having to wipe down tank fronts or have water pooling oon top of glass lids) and can be used on a timer and to cool in extreme summers. It's easier to trigger a spawn by dialing down or up a digital temperature setting.

With a central filter, its very easy to add UV if you want to treat say White Spot or viral outbreaks without medication. I have an over sized UV unit that I only use for disease control, I don't run it 24/7 .

I've used gas room heaters before, you would need an air fan to prevent stratification and there is a gas smell.

A couple of photos of one UV below. Previously I used an over sized single chamber UV that I moved from tank to tank if required but this one I have permanently mounted externally and plumbed through the wall.
Noting that UV may not be required for you but I have found the ability to treat very delicate fish or sentimentally valuable fish without chemicals to be priceless and comforting. I've lost hugely expensive fish from overdosing as treating large water volumes is challenging.

I use whole of house UV systems - stainless chamber, high intensity amalgam lamps - which can increase water temperatures on smaller volumes. Lamp tubes rated for 9000 hours effective radiation life. the chambers can be opened for lamp replacement either end without any water loss or plumbed vertically. A light intensity meter and lamp hour counter option is available but it is more economical and safer to replace lamps every 9000 hours of use. I have a box of spare lamps.
I size the intensity with total water volume and water flow (pump) to achieve 60mJoule/cm2 which will eradicate white spot. On a closed recirculating system you don't need single pass kill but that was my target. Then I doubled this specification because there wasn't much of a price increase. Since I had the controller, it wasn't much more to add a second stainless chamber and lamp which I plumbed in parallel but kept only for emergency use. It wasn't much more to add a third chamber either but realistically I only need one chamber. I did make sure the control box has full redundancy capability. It's also possible to reduce UV intensity with lower wattage lamps as this unit can take various lamp wattage sizes and lengths. However for disease eradication, over dosage is safe and preferred.

I've just noticed in last photo my redundancy extends to a spare secondary electrical conduit laid under concrete

[aquaholic]

BTW; my very first fish room didn't have floor drains but I used low pressure constant drip to water change around 150 small tanks (predominantly 10 to 20 gallon). Simple water displacement to change out water and because the drip rate was so slow, I was able to use 25mm conduit to take waste water out. Most of the drain waste conduit was hidden behind tank racks. I think I stopped using buckets to water change about 40 years ago.

The slow drip rate makes chloramine removal and water temperature differences very simple too.