Here’s a pic of my air pump, an Alita AL-60, 68lpm at 2.0psi. It’s next to a 55 gallon, for size reference, and the fishroom is below my son’s room, for noise reference. It’s a very quiet pump, rated at 65-75 outlets. I’m running somewhere around 45 ATM, and bleeding off air. The flex tube connection helps to keep vibrations from transferring to the pvc;
The exhaust fan; I have it on a timer so it runs 3 times daily for about 1 ½ hours. Hanging from the pvc looks rigged, I could have easily screwed it to the wall, but hanging it causes less vibration to be transferred, thus less noise. There is a piece of foam behind it as well. I could also have picked up pipe hangers for cheap, but the drywall screws with wire gives me places to hand things such as nets. I like to think space utilization as well;
The front three 4x4 posts are used, traded fish for them. The plywood decking was free as well, pulled from a flatbed trailer. Most of the hardware used building it was free also. Most of my tanks are used, the cheaper you can get by the better;
Quick shot of the rearranged fry tanks, down lower under the 55, plus my dog’s ear snuck in the corner;
For water changes I use a siphon hose setup, that goes into the garbage can with the pump. I have differing lengths of pvc for the ends of the drain, they stop draining when they run out of water. The can pump is plugged into a switchable outlet on the floor, so I can shut it on & off;
Lighting is any cheap flouro fixture I can find, unless you have live plants you don’t need much light.
When I’m draining 5gpm with that siphon hookup, adult angels will get sucked flat to the ¾” pvc, fry will go on the ride of their life. I have pre-filter sponges that go over the end;
Here’s a typical filtration setup on a tank with a pair of silvers. The sponge filters are low flow bio filtration, the box filters I leave on a slow bubble when I’m not home, as they get noisy when you open them up, think mad scientist laboratory. I usually open them up in the evening, as long as my son who works some wild rotating shifts isn’t trying to get some shuteye;
Like I said, I was watching the Bears/Vikings game on MNF;
Next to a row of tanks I need to set up;
With my little dog Kazimeras. He’s my fishroom assistant, he eats stray fish food that hits the floor, it makes his ears grow;
I have plenty of buddies who are breeders, fellow club members. They all have fishrooms more or less like mine, just set up for what works best for them. One guy has an auto water changing system, which is something I plan on messing with using the drilled 40’s with the overflows. He has siphon overflows on his setup, which are somewhat easier to set up than drilled overflows, but sometimes have reliability problems. Other breeders swear by the pre-fabbed gorrila racks for tanks, which work fine, but are costly and not as space efficient as racks made for a particular stand. Many of the old timers leave the tanks uncovered, this leads to horrible condensation problems. I use the cheap light diffuser panels made for recessed lighting in dropped ceilings.
For bigger setups, in the range of 60+ tanks, centralized filtration is the way to go, but there are always cross contamination concerns. Many folks with this size setup have a separate room or even building for quar tanks, as with this setup if one tank gets some sort of disease they are all exposed. A happy compromise with this sort of setup is banks of tanks with several centralized filtrations systems with several pumps, but this does make it less cost efficient to run.
(Mouth brooders can be treated the same as live bearers, only make sure to wait untill the female is holding before isolating her).
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