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Re: Fish Room budget
Scott McLaughlin wrote:
>
> Hello list, I am finally moving to a new place where I can set up a fish room! What I would like to do is see who can design
> the best room using $1000. Is this budget realistic? I would like to implement some sort of water changer, but have no idea
> what this going to cost.
The budget sounds reasonable, Scott, if a fair amount of it is going to
insulation. I just spent a couple hundred on an air conditioner for my
fishroom. Maybe now the *jorgenscheeli* will start to make eggs.
I have agonized over water changers, and have looked at several that worked
very well. One thing they have in common is that the water levels must be
the same in all containers served. With different-size tanks on a multitude
of shelves, that never worked for me. As a result, I tried to eliminate the
buckets and make changes as easy as possible.
For draining tanks, I have a Python (waterbed) Venturi on an outside faucet,
hooked to about 50' of garden hose and about 10-12' of clear vinyl hose
terminated with one of those little baskets off a filter intake. I set the
basket at the height I want the water to drain to (usually by clamping with
the cover glass) and turn on the faucet to start the siphon. That takes only
a few seconds, and then I turn it off. The outlet goes to the garden or an
outside daphnia tank. I can walk off and forget it, and the siphon breaks
when it reaches the basket.
For filling the tanks, I have a back closet with two 30+G heavy trash
containers fed by swamp-cooler valves mounted near the top. One gets water
through dual carbon filters from the tap, and the other through my RO system
that has three carbon filters. Both are throttled to make the trip through
the carbon long enough to effectively remove the small amount of chloramine
(<1-2ppm) in our tap water.
A waterfall pump, operated from an X-10 switch, can be dunked into either
container and used to deliver water to any tank in the house, via about 60'
of clear vinyl hose with a gate valve (small plastic kind) and a watering
spray-head on a bent aluminum tube that hangs on the edge of the tank. [Some
day I'll put a microswitch float on it o/e so I can walk off from it, too.]
About half my containers are smaller than 5G and can be carried to the sink
for cleaning and water changes. The remainder are too heavy, so the above
system makes pretty quick work of it. [I'm talking 100-150 containers at any
given time, tho!]
The biggest problem with it is that I cannot fill the living-room 55G while
puttering back in the fish room. The X-10 system isn't really reliable
enough to guarantee no floods, so I have to work on that problem.
Otherwise, make it as easy as possible, but do not put in a fully automatic
system. You *need* to look closely at every tank quite often and such a
system might prevent that at just the wrong time.
Comments or suggested improvements are welcome, BTW.
Wright
--
Wright Huntley, Fremont CA, USA, 510 494-8679 huntleyone at home dot com
To err is human. To blame someone else is politics.
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