breeding in small tanks

[Il_bristlenose_catfis]

i want to expand my breeding setup for my bristlenose and i want to setup a small fishroom similar to keepingfishsimple's fish room and i just want some advice/tips

 

[Colin_T]

Do you want advice on tanks or on fish rooms?

Tanks, try to go for tanks that are no smaller than 2 foot long.

Use a blower (big air pump) and run some pvc pipe around the room in a loop so the air circulates around the loop and there are no dead ends. Hang it near the ceiling from curved hooks that screw into the wall. Get some plastic or brass airline taps and put them in the pvc pipe. Then attach some airline to the taps and run it down to the tanks.

Use air operated sponge or undergravel filters and run them from the blower.

If you have 5-10 tanks, use heaters in each tank. If you have more tanks or are limited to power points, use a room heater (preferably reverse cycle).

Insulate the walls, doors and windows with 4-6 inch thick sheets of polystyrene foam. If you are building a fish room from scratch, you can buy a secondhand cool room and use that for a fish room.

Use rubber mats on the floor to insulate that. You can buy rubber mats made from recycled car tyres from places like Clark Rubber. These last forever and are waterproof and provide really good insulation. If you do use them, lay them out on the floor and leave them for 24 hours before cutting them. They get squished outwards when stacked at the shop and shrink when you lay them out. If you lay them and cut them straight away, you will have gaps between them the following day. Laying them and leaving them for 24 hours allows them to shrink back to their normal size, then you can cut them to fit the room.

Try to insulate the ceiling too.

If you are building a fish room, try to put some clear or lightly tinted panels in the roof to let light in during the day. It saves a lot of money by providing daylight and you can run LED lights above the tanks in the afternoon evening or on cloudy days. You can also install a couple of LED lights on the ceiling to use instead of having lights above the tanks.

If you want lights above the tanks, get 4 foot long LED light units and run them over a couple of tanks. You use less power points and one light unit can provide light to a number of smaller tanks. The bigger light units also produce more light so you get better plant growth in the tanks.

Get a garden hose and gravel cleaner so you can clean the tanks easily. Run the hose out the fish room door and gravel clean the dirty tank water outside onto the lawn. then refill the tanks with dechlorinated water.

Try to have a few containers in the room that are used to hold tap water. You can let it dechlorinate and warm up between water changes. You can use 200 litre plastic wine barrels or any sort of food safe container that holds water. I had 3 tier stands in my fish room and used the top tanks to hold water. When I did water changes, I syphoned water out the door and refilled the fish tanks with water from the tank above them. I had a separate syphon hose with a tap in the water holding tanks and simply drained water down into the tanks below. I used the tap to stop the water when the tank was full. When the water changes were finished, I would fill the top tanks with tap water (via some black poly pipe), added some dechlorinator and any mineral salts if the water was for hard water fishes, and left it to aerate until the next water changes.

If you use a garden hose to fill the tanks, make sure you flush water through it for at least 5 minutes before using it to fill the tanks. Garden hoses have a softening agent in them that is poisonous to all life forms. The softening agent stops the hose kinking and bending. The warmer the weather, the more softening agent that gets released from the hose. This softening agent sits in the water in the hose and if you add it to the tank, or give it to animals or birds to drink, or drink it yourself, you can get very sick from it. So turn the tap on and let the hose run on the lawn for 5 minutes before using the hose to fill tanks.

 

[emeraldking]

I don't know how keepingfishsimple's fish room looks like. My fishroom is in the house itself. I don't use heaters in each tank. We've got a central heating system at our place. But I don't heat it up too much. And those fish that need higher temperature are higher in the shelfs of those metal racks. And the ones which prefer lower rates are situated on lower shelfs. All tanks are air filtered to keep the costs down and I'm only using led lighting.
I myself prefer to keep it as basic as possible. And it has been working perfectly for years.

 

[Il_bristlenose_catfis]

Do you want advice on tanks or on fish rooms?

Tanks, try to go for tanks that are no smaller than 2 foot long.

Use a blower (big air pump) and run some pvc pipe around the room in a loop so the air circulates around the loop and there are no dead ends. Hang it near the ceiling from curved hooks that screw into the wall. Get some plastic or brass airline taps and put them in the pvc pipe. Then attach some airline to the taps and run it down to the tanks.

Use air operated sponge or undergravel filters and run them from the blower.

If you have 5-10 tanks, use heaters in each tank. If you have more tanks or are limited to power points, use a room heater (preferably reverse cycle).

Insulate the walls, doors and windows with 4-6 inch thick sheets of polystyrene foam. If you are building a fish room from scratch, you can buy a secondhand cool room and use that for a fish room.

Use rubber mats on the floor to insulate that. You can buy rubber mats made from recycled car tyres from places like Clark Rubber. These last forever and are waterproof and provide really good insulation. If you do use them, lay them out on the floor and leave them for 24 hours before cutting them. They get squished outwards when stacked at the shop and shrink when you lay them out. If you lay them and cut them straight away, you will have gaps between them the following day. Laying them and leaving them for 24 hours allows them to shrink back to their normal size, then you can cut them to fit the room.

Try to insulate the ceiling too.

If you are building a fish room, try to put some clear or lightly tinted panels in the roof to let light in during the day. It saves a lot of money by providing daylight and you can run LED lights above the tanks in the afternoon evening or on cloudy days. You can also install a couple of LED lights on the ceiling to use instead of having lights above the tanks.

If you want lights above the tanks, get 4 foot long LED light units and run them over a couple of tanks. You use less power points and one light unit can provide light to a number of smaller tanks. The bigger light units also produce more light so you get better plant growth in the tanks.

Get a garden hose and gravel cleaner so you can clean the tanks easily. Run the hose out the fish room door and gravel clean the dirty tank water outside onto the lawn. then refill the tanks with dechlorinated water.

Try to have a few containers in the room that are used to hold tap water. You can let it dechlorinate and warm up between water changes. You can use 200 litre plastic wine barrels or any sort of food safe container that holds water. I had 3 tier stands in my fish room and used the top tanks to hold water. When I did water changes, I syphoned water out the door and refilled the fish tanks with water from the tank above them. I had a separate syphon hose with a tap in the water holding tanks and simply drained water down into the tanks below. I used the tap to stop the water when the tank was full. When the water changes were finished, I would fill the top tanks with tap water (via some black poly pipe), added some dechlorinator and any mineral salts if the water was for hard water fishes, and left it to aerate until the next water changes.

If you use a garden hose to fill the tanks, make sure you flush water through it for at least 5 minutes before using it to fill the tanks. Garden hoses have a softening agent in them that is poisonous to all life forms. The softening agent stops the hose kinking and bending. The warmer the weather, the more softening agent that gets released from the hose. This softening agent sits in the water in the hose and if you add it to the tank, or give it to animals or birds to drink, or drink it yourself, you can get very sick from it. So turn the tap on and let the hose run on the lawn for 5 minutes before using the hose to fill tanks.

Thank you so much for the advice. i have a space for a fishroom in my garage so i'll most likely make it in my garage.