Phirefase

2022 Fish Room Status: Personal Stability with 30 tanks. Now we get to my current fishroom in its infancy. I moved into a two bedroom apartment on the ground floor so I don’t have to worry about the weight of the tanks. I set up the remainder of the fish from moving in my dining room temporarily while I planned out the fish room. I probably went through 10 or 12 different floor plans for what the fish room was going to look like and finally settled on the plan in around May. I wanted the fish room to be one that was easy to work in, organized, and made for breeding fish. I ended up trashing the acrylic tanks that I made and buying more 10s and 20 longs to go on NSF racks. I would say I built the room to around 40% of where it is today in 2022. I put in a central air pump with 1” PVC looping the whole room. I also hooked up all the lights that I had to breakout blocks with a variable voltage power supply. This allowed all the wiring and air supply to be on the ceiling level, and not cause a tripping hazard in the room. For heating the room, I had a dehumidifier and baseboard heating that was free for me. I honestly have more problems in summer keeping the room cool than keeping it hot in the winter, since the AC unit is in the opposite end of the apartment. I would say the amount of fish that I bred this year doesn’t reflect just how much work went into the fish room. It really is a proper journey to get everything in the room just how you want. I wouldn’t say I did everything right, but it got me through the year and laid the groundwork for finishing the room in 2023. Pterophyllum scalare/Phillipine blue angelfish - 2022 I got a group of 6 of these guys around quarter size in 2021 and had them in a 29 gallon tank to grow out. These guys were the meanest fish I had kept so far. I noticed that they had made 2 pairs on either end of the tank and the 2 that were stuck in the middle were missing fins because of the aggression from the pairs. So I ended up moving and selling 4 of them to a store and the one pair would not stop breeding. I had angelfish coming out of my ears. Once they start spawning, I dont think you can stop them. I have had them spawn on 3x12 tiles, on an anubius leaf, on an uplift tube, on a watering spike etc. I eventually got rid of them because I didn’t want my fishroom to turn into an angelfish room. I raised the fry on BBS and then vibra bites and the parents successful spawns were done in RODI water. I raised the fry in hard water after a month-ish with the parents. I have found this to be the most efficient for soft water species because the eggs aren’t fertile in hard water but hard water is what comes out of my tap. Ancistrus sp./Bristlenose Pleco - 2022 TLDR: Stick a pair in a tank with a cave For bristlenose plecos, I bought a group of 6 around 1-1.5” in length and grew them up for around a year before they bred for me. I had them in a 20 gallon long and put enough caves in the tank so that they didn’t have to fight over limited caves. I have tried pleco caves from the coop and water spikes from amazon and I have yet to have them choose the pleco caves over the water spikes. At this point I have probably spawned close to 1000 bristlenose, with each spawn being anywhere from 50-200 eggs. The only thing that is annoying about them is that raising the fry up to a sellable size sucks without an automatic water change system. I can usually keep around 100 of them in a 10 gallon tank with 50% water changes twice a week but after they get to around 1” in size I move to around 50 fry per 10 gallon tank. Its a chore but I really do like spawning them. My method for hatching the fry is to take out the cave with the male that guards the eggs and move it into an empty 10 gallon tank and wait until the fry all leave the cave. This usually takes about a week for the fry to hatch and use up their yolk sac. I have tried to keep the fry with the parents, but with only a 20 gallon tank, it becomes a problem trying to catch them and keep up with water changes. I have also noticed that if there are fry in the tank, the plecos don’t tend to spawn again until they are gone. When these guys are really going, I can get a spawn ever month, but I usually stop them after a while by not changing water as often. The variations that I have done are common color, albino, super red, lemon blue eye, and super white. I have noticed that the common color and albino ones have larger spawns and the lemon blue eyes have smaller spawns. Not sure if that is just my fish specifically or an overall trend. For the fry, I fed them green beans in the beginning but have moved to feeding them Purina Aquamax Fingerling Starter 300. I just got tired of opening so many green bean cans. I do have to be careful with how much I feed with the 300 because it will foul the water much faster and I have lost entire spawns. I also want to mention that these fish are what I would consider a utility fish. I use them to clean that glass on all my grow out tanks and they will eat extra food since I feed pretty heavily. I think that if anyone has a fish room should breed these guys because they make maintenance easier.

2021 Fish Room Status: Trial and Error. Lots of Error… And somewhere around 20 tanks After I moved in with my mom, I took up shop in the basement with all my junk, including my fish tanks. I had a job with a place that I worked at in high school, but it wasn’t going to be a career for me. I ended up living there for around 5 months until I got a better job a long ways away. Over the course of this year and a little in 2020 and 2022, I moved from uni to my moms, then to my grandparents, then to a small town apartment, then to my aunt and uncles, then finally to my current flat. Sufficed to say I think I have more experience moving fish than the average fishkeeper. This is the year where I accelerated my learning on fish, getting involved in my local club, and when I graduated from someone with fish tanks to a real NERM. I started the year with building a rack with DIY ~5 gallon acrylic tanks that I made with scrap material from my job. Nothing of that setup still exists. The rack was in my moms basement and too cumbersome to move, and I had an incident with one of my acrylic tanks blowing a seam right in front of me. When I moved to the small town apartment, it had 2 bedrooms so obviously one of them became the fish room. I still had the acrylic tanks with me, but had now shifted to using 14x36 NSF wire racks from a big box store. I still use these and 14x24 wire racks to hold 20 longs and 10s respectively. If I had to sum up the year as a theme, it would be trial and error. I was starting to figure out what I liked to keep and learned through experience just how complex a fish room can be. Some of the lessons that I learned are that heating individual tanks becomes a mess of power strips and cords, having a usb air pump for each tank is also a mess of cords and they failed more often than expected, and that its worth the peace of mind to just buy half off tanks from petco. Poecilia reticulata/green tiger guppy - 2021 Learning from breeding the platies, I separated the female guppy when she looked visibly pregnant. Like the platies, I just fed them with flake foods and I kept these guys in hard water. I sold them all eventually to a store because I didn’t spending so much time culling them. I also had a heater in their tanks, but don’t remember what I had it set to. Apistogramma cacatouides - 2021 I bought a pair of these guys and set up a 20 gallon long similar to how Dean set up the 10 gallon tank in his Apisto video. Line of sight blocks and java moss and java fern. I fed them vibra bites and BBS, and used an RODI unit to change their water. Then just wait until the parents decided they wanted to spawn. I think I had a heater in this tank, but at this point I had a fish room and some of the tanks had heaters and some didn’t. Anyways, when the fry hatched, I kept both parents in there and didn’t notice any issue with the father eating the fry, but the mother wouldn’t let him near the fry for a couple weeks. This pair ended up spawning for me a bunch after this and to this day I have yet to find another pair as prolific as them. After this original pair passed away, I have had trouble with spawning their children, as they have smaller spawns and more have bent spines and other deformities. Other than that, if you want to see real paternal care, this is an easy enough species to spawn and its just cool to watch the fry.

Thought I would share some fish breeding successes that I have had over my short time keeping fish. Maybe it will help others, and it will probably keep me from forgetting how I bred some fish later on in life. I'll go year by year to start, but might go more often depending on how much fish breeding I have done. 2020 Fish Room Status: 2 tanks I was in my last semester of uni and was bored out of my mind in quarantine. My roommate had got a saltwater tank in January and I decided that I should convert my snake tank to a fish tank since the snake had long escaped(my roommates were not happy with that ordeal). I had just a 20 gallon and a 5 gallon tank sitting on my desk for the rest of the year. I then moved home at the end of the year. Xiphophorus maculatus/bumble bee platy - 2020 This was the first fish that I kept and I got I think 6 of them in total. The second day that I had them they had already given birth to fry. Since I didn't really know what I was doing, I tore down the tank and caught every little fry I could find and put a divider in the tank for the fry. This worked out fine when I was a bored college student, but I found more efficient ways to get the fry with later species. I eventually got to the point where I just had a big clump of java moss that would protect the fry from their parents. This sustained the colony until I sold them around 2022 due to a move. Interesting thing to note about these guys is that they did have cancerous growths on some of the black parts of their body. I just fed them and did water changes with hard water. I had a heater on this tank but have no clue what it was set to. Neocaridina davidii - 2020 Put them in a tank by themselves, feed them well, use hard water, and wait. Honestly the biggest challenge with these guys is culling the ones that don’t color out right. I have a blue variant right now, but don’t intend on selling them because counting them is too tedious for what I can sell them for. I have them mostly for just enjoyment and I am experimenting with using them to clean eggs instead of methylene blue.

Update on the spawn. 170 eggs counted in soft water, 48 fry counted. 140 eggs counted in hard water, 55 fry counted. Now to put an asterisk in this, I put the soft water ones in a specimen container for a day and had a bunch of eggs fungus over. Now I put the hard water ones directly from the spawning tank into the Deans Fry System I have. Since this was successful enough by just dumping them into the fry system, that is how I will raise them from now on.

Moved my Snow White Bristlenose Pleco to a fry tank to wait for the little ones to hatch. This is the 5th time they have spawned and hopefully the third time I will get the fry to raise up. Still amazes me how comically large the female gets when she's full of eggs and how small she is when they are all laid.

I would say your luck with the more commonly available apistos will be better with your hard water. Cacatouides, agassizii, panduro, mcmasteri etc. will do fine in hard water as long as it is kept clean. When I was cranking out cacauoides, I would breed them in RO water and grow them out in hard water for ease of water changes since I have hard water out of the tap.

I have 2 of the rubbermaid stock tanks and they come with a bulkhead in the bottom (if you get it, buy a spanner to tighten them, they leak if you don't). One of my saltwater buddies has 2 roto-mold containers (75 gal each I think) that also has spots for bulkheads. I'd recommend looking at saltwater forums for tank storage since they seem to do more of it than freshwater folks. For getting the garden hose outlet upstairs, my first thought is to run some pex tube from the basement to under a vanity in the upstairs, throw on a quick connect fitting for garden hoses and have a hose that you run from the vanity to your tanks. I would also run a wire with the pex to turn the pump in the basement on and off too. Granted this is all without knowing much about your house.

+1 for this. They also make a dolly for the brute trash cans if you want to be able to wheel the whole thing around.

I'll preface this with my experience. I have been in the hobby since Sept 2020, I have had 2 proper fish rooms, and moved the fish tanks 4 times(life has been hectic) My current setup is a manual water change system with 60+ tanks, in around 300 sq ft. and it has been running for just over 2 years now. Below is a mix of my opinions and advice I have received from fellow hobbyists (shoutout to Minnesota Aquarium Society and its members). First thing to ask yourself is what is the goal of the fish room. Are you looking to just show off cool fish, do aquascaping, breed for fun (or "profit") etc. This will guide you in making your decisions further along. I would recommend writing all your thoughts down to keep track of them. The goal of the fishroom may change as time passes too, and thats ok. The hobby is for you and you have to figure out what you like to do with your aquariums. Now to the fun stuff. Planning. Take your time and research other peoples fish rooms. Look on here, google around, and check youtube for fishroom tours. For my current fish room it took about 6 months from moving in to having a 90% plan of how I was going to set up the fish room. If you can, go tour other peoples fish rooms and ask why they did things and what they would change. No need to reinvent the wheel. For the not so fun stuff, you have to consider your 4 walls constraining your fish room. "Your time, money, size of the room, and the sanity of your spouse" - Randy Carey. Fish rooms are always more expensive than you think, I have spent around 10k on just the equipment for my room. 10'x8' is the physical space limitation. Feeding 60 tanks takes me about 30 mins. 1. Stands - I'm looking at industrial racks, probably Galdiator, Husky, Kobalt, etc. Any of those will work. I have the 6' and 4' husky racks with 2' and 4' wire NSF shelves. on the 6' shelves, you can fit 6ea 10s edgewise and a 5, or 7 10s depending on the cross bracing location. you can also do 2 40s on a 6'. 4' racks will fit a 60B with the edges sticking out or 4ea 10s. I did not care about leveling the racks when I put them in. Might be worth getting some shims if your floor is super uneven. 2. Tanks - mostly 20 highs and 10s but I might bring some 40s with. Tanks will be positioned short side out to fit more. Final count around 40-60 tanks. Speaking from experience, changing water with that many tanks takes a lot of time. Feeding too. I have them each running individually so problems don't compound. 3. Lids - Probably polycarbonate +/- a hinge. I used the greenhouse panel, put a cheap handle from menards on it and drilled a 2" hole for feeding. I'm too lazy to open and close hinges 4. Water - EXTREMELY hard. Auto water change? Continue with manual water changes? First plan the drainage, then the filling - Dean. I have 2 pythons that I use simultaneously when I do a whole room water change that go into a toilet. Auto water changes add complexity to the fish room and increases the chances of water getting on the floor, but it saves a bunch of time. 5. Lighting - I currently run cheaper aquarium lights, one light over 3-4 tanks. I've been trying the Co-Op light and will probably replace the cheap lights as they die. I run cheap nicrew lights, but have made it so I can run 24 on one plug. I split them off one adjustable power supply and use DIN splitters to run wires to it. 6. Heating - I have been heating the current room and had partially settled on an oil radiator heater for the new room. If a do a central sump system, I could in theory heat the room less and put heaters into the sump. I get free heat in my current apartment, but don't underestimate the heat that gets put out of a dehumidifier. I can vary the temp in the summer mostly by the dehumidifier. 7. Drilling - I have never drilled tanks before but after many videos, we're pretty confident that we can accomplish it if needed. Please see next point on +/- for drilling. I have drilled a 75 and it wasn't that difficult. The only thing I would recommend is ear protection because it causes the entire tank to become a speaker. I have also heard that 5gal and smaller tanks are finicky to drill due to the thinner glass. 8. Filtration - A part of me is tempted to just continue with the sponge filters and just keep up with everything manually, it just takes so much time though. The other part of me is seriously tempted to create central sumps, say one for each rack. I do quarantine but having multiple tanks on one system would be new for me in my own fishroom. What makes sense with this many tanks? Matten filters and auto water changes for non-breeding tanks. I like to control the parameters of any tank that is used for breeding, but when I have to change water twice a week on a 10gal with 100 ancistrus fry in it I question my sanity. 9. Opinions - Manual water change vs auto water change vs central sump? What would you change? What would you add? What did you wish you knew when setting up a fishroom? My next fish room will have auto water change to individually filtered tanks, with the option of RO or hard water at each tank. Plan for around 30" of space for anywhere you plan to walk. You will thank yourself later. Buy a nice step stool. Put in more shutoff valves than you think you need for your auto water change. Cold water dissolves more gas than hot water. This is a problem when the gas comes out of solution inside a fish. Age the water in a storage tank if you live somewhere where it gets cold. For the size of your fish room, a simple air loop will work, but if you have larger ones, gridding the system gets you better air pressure. For every tank, have 2 air outlets. Have a backup power supply for your air pump. Do not have a garbage can in there that you only take out once in a while. I still have these annoying little flies. Heat the room. All this makes me realize I should just do a fish room build thread....

In my experience, these guys are really good at hiding when they are breeding. I would guess the male has holed up in your decoration somewhere. I actually have a pair of these in a display tank on my desk and the male dug his own cave under a rock and hangs out there most of the time. I barely noticed the cave and I am still surprised he can fit in there.

Since I have found Cherry Barbs (Rohanella titteya formerly Puntius titteya) easy to breed in large numbers and pretty enough to offload easily, I want to do an experiment regarding when is the optimal time to move the eggs/fry from soft to hard water. I spawned them yesterday and gathered the eggs. I then split them into two groups, where group 1 is put in hard water before they hatch and group 2 is kept in soft water until they hatch. I will probably run this multiple times with cherry barbs as well as other species I have, but I am also curious if anyone has observed any difference in hatch rates with other egg scattering fish?

I have had males fight but I haven't found any lasting damage on the fish. I threw some susswassertang in a tank a fry a couple days ago and haven't seen any go missing. The only plant I have heard plecos eat is sword plants.

I've bred lots of bristlenose plecos and it's a fairly hands off breeding project. I keep anywhere from a pair to 6 adults in a 20 long and throw in ceramic water spikes so there is one more "cave" than the number of adults. I will also put tiles (3" x 12" ones) over the caves to create more space for them to hang out. The things that I have found to increase the chances of a spawn is to give them meaty foods for the females to make the eggs, lots of water changes(50% 1-2 times/week), and patience(they take about a year and some to go from fry to breeding size). I have used Hikary Vibra Bites but switched to Purina Aquamax 300 because they don't seem to care and supplement green beans to mix things up every 3-4 days. The only thing that I have noticed that's different with my snow white plecos that is different is that their eggs are less resilient than other bristlenose varieties. Out of the 4 spawns that they have laid, only two have been successful, where every other variety of bristlenose I have done has had close to 100% success spawn to fry stage. The only thing I will caution is that they can spawn every month with 50-200 eggs per spawn(from my experience: Lemon blue eyed ~ 50 eggs/spawn, Super red & Snow white ~ 100eggs/spawn and albino & common color ~ 200 eggs/spawn) and have overrun my fish room when I was breeding them full tilt. Feeding the fry once you get them is easy, as they eat the same foods as the parents. Vibra Bites, and Aquamax 300 with some green beans mixed in works for me. The only change I make for the fry is that they don't like the skin of the green beans as much so I will split them before I put them in. Also they are the most hassle of fry that I keep because they eat so much I will change 50% water twice a week, though part of that may be because I keep ~100 fry in a 10 gallon tank... TLDR Caves+Food+Water Changes+Time=Bristlenose Fry

@Theplatymaster yeah the shelves are listed as 48” wide but the tanks are 48.5” wide

I should clarify, the weight I’m not worried about, it’s the physical fitting of the tank on the shelf that I am curious about. The shelves that I’m looking at are rated for 1000lbs per shelf

I am trying to figure out if the 60 Breeder tank from Aqueon/Petco will fit on a 4 foot rack from a big box hardware store and my google-fu is failing me. Wanted to see if anyone has done this before or if I will be stuck making a custom rack. Thanks

Thanks for the thorough response. I should have clarified, the patterning on the dorsal fin is what I as looking at culling for. I have also noticed the variable growth rates in the fish. Since you seem to know what you’re doing, is there a certain density of A. caca that will cause aggression to be spread out similar to overstocking African cichlid tanks? I ask because I have another spawn of 130 three month old fry that are in a twenty long and want to know when I start selling them off, at what point should I start watching more carefully. Also what is your preferred ratio of males to females when trying to pair them off?

Hello, I have some apistogramma cacatuoides that I have that I plan on picking my next breeders from. Currently they are 6 months of age and the females are starting to stake out turf. I am wondering if anyone has any rules of thumb for when to start culling fish, as there are a few with very little patterning on them. Thanks

I am having trouble with a couple of my tanks getting these strange brown fuzzballs, red hair algae looking stuff, and white growths on the substrate and plants, and cannot figure out what they are. The stuff seems to coat the entire substrate fast even after I vacuum it up. Any help identifying what they are is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

I would assume this spike is caused by what usually causes ice spikes in ice cubes. Basically the ice is formed on the edge of the container first and since water expands when it turns to ice this causes the pressure to rise inside the water. Then the water slowly "shoots" out of the top and freezes causing the spike. Here's a 4 min video explaining it better.

The eggs are still laid, but they don't hatch. Mystery snails lay eggs above the water and you can look up how to hatch them or just remove them fairly easily.

Does this apply to larger tanks with center bracing? My roommate has a 75g with center bracing and was curious.

(COMBO-030-B) M6 x 12mm BHSCS & Standard T-Nut for 30 Series | TNUTZ WWW.TNUTZ.COM 30 Series M6 x 1.0 Standard T-Nut & 12mm long Button Head Cap Screw, TNUTZ Part #COMBO-030-B. (CB-030-A) 30 Series 2 Hole Inside Corner Gusset with tabs | TNUTZ WWW.TNUTZ.COM Click here for suggested hardware 100% Equivalent to the following manufacturers: 80/20 - P/N 14073 T-Slots - P/N 671213 Bosch Rexroth -... I like using these type of connectors. The only hitch is that the t-nuts have to be loaded in the end, so if you forget to put them in you have to use these. The big t-nuts just feel more stable, but I don't know if there's any benefit. (QT-030) 30 Series Drop-In Quarter Turn T-Nut | TNUTZ WWW.TNUTZ.COM They are 100% compatible with the following manufacturers: 1/4-20 - 80/20 #13110 10-32 - 80/20 #13112 8-32 - Unique M6 - 80/20 #13117 M5 -... You don't have to get these specific ones, just find some at a hardware store or on amazon. Just stick the brackets on every corner and you should be fine. For the plywood, I don't see a need to fasten it down, the weight from the tanks should be enough. Maybe add some rubber grip stuff on the bottom if you want.

http://mechanicalc.com//static/img/favicon.ico Beam Stress & Deflection | MechaniCalc MECHANICALC.COM This page discusses the calculation of stresses and deflections in beams. EXM-3030 – 30mm x 30mm Smooth T-Slotted Aluminum Extrusion | TNUTZ WWW.TNUTZ.COM These extrusions are 100% compatible with the following manufacturers: T-SLOTS #670007 Bosch-Rexroth #3 842 502 538 McMaster #5537T97 I don't have the willpower to explain how beam stress works in a forum post. If you want to learn, the first link explains it, and the second link gives the properties of extrusion. Doing the napkin math for 20mm extrusion, you end up with the horizontal beams failing. I am assuming all the weight is a distributed load side beam(666N/m), which is wrong on many levels, but gives a worst case scenario. I end up getting a maximum tensile stress of 400MPa while the tensile strength of aluminum is 200MPa. I must stress this is all THEORETICAL WORST CASE SCENARIO so take it with a grain of salt. In the real world you might be fine with 20mm but I would just stick with 30mm.

The general sentiment that I've noticed from the experienced fish-keepers is that RODI water isn't necessary for keeping fish unless you are doing something that really requires specific water. I've been RCS for a month in water around 7.8pH and haven't run into any issues yet. That being said, I do have an RODI system that me and my roommate, that has a saltwater tank, has worked well for us. I have water at 8.4 out of the tap, and use the RODI to get the pH down a bit. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00204CQF6/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&th=1