The Fishouse project
November 4th, 2007 | by Tim |We are in the process of converting our garage into a fish house. The challenges are many, not least the lack of water and power to the garage and as it is detached from the building, this has given us a lot of problems.
We have overcome the water problem quite simply. A hose pipe will run from the main building to a tap on the garage when it’s needed. The water will then be filtered and fed into three 20 gallon containers mounted just below the ceiling inside the garage. There are two reasons for this:
Firstly, the water will be cold when it comes in, being fed directly from the municipal mains supply. If we add this to the tanks straight away, the temperature will drop dramatically throughout the whole system, so by storing it in the heated room, it has time to warm up before it’s used.
Secondly, our water system, like most others, has chlorine added for public health reasons. This is not helpful to the fish though, and allowing the water to stand for a day or two will allow this chlorine to vent off. The filter that the water will be passed through will be a 0.06 micron filter, which should remove most of the chloramines, trace metals and other debris, as well as most of the chlorine, but it won’t do any harm to give it some extra time to disperse the remainder.
The mains power was not as easy to solve. The area surrounding the garage is concrete, which made it impossible to run an underground supply in without digging the concrete up, so we had to go overhead. this meant suspending a cable from the apex of the garage roof to a pole mounted on the roof of the flat opposite, high enough to allow vehicles to drive underneath. that was no mean feat, since the cable is very heavy, being able to carry 40 amps at 240 volts!
Having installed the power, we can now start to insulate the walls and ceiling of the garage.
3 Responses to “The Fishouse project”
By Tim on Nov 7, 2007 | Reply
After 4 days of work, the fish house is now taking shape. The walls and ceiling have been insulated and lined with foil-backed plasterboard and the whole lot has been painted out.
All the electrics have been fitted and the racking is now underway. The first rack has been built with 4 shelves, each containing 2 45L tanks, linked together by siphon and connected via an outflow at water level to a bottom sump. These will be supplied via a lift pump with up to 100L per minute capacity through control valves to each shelf.
By Tim on Nov 11, 2007 | Reply
Well, it’s been another 4 days and a lot more work has been done.
The first 100 fish are resident in the 8 tanks on the first rack, and the room and water are stable at 80C.
there have been a few teething problems, but we sorted out the leaks, and so on, so that now the rack is working well. The sump has been seeded with gravel from an established tank to help the cycle on it’s way, and I don’t foresee any major problems with this now.
By Tim on Jan 8, 2008 | Reply
2 months on, and massive improvements!
We now have 3 completed racks, working on 2 sump filters, both with UV sterilization built in.
Most of the 37 tanks that we have installed are now occupied, most with growing out angels, guppies and mollies, 3 tanks are waiting for dwarf gourami fry to hatch and several tanks contain conditioning bettas, (delta, HM and plaket) and black lacy, white and platinum angels!
The pumps we are using are extremely powerful and work on 40mm water piping, moving up to 100 litres per minute. At present they are at 50% & 40% capacity, serving 50L per minute to racks 1&3, which has a capacity of 700 gallons and 35L per minute to rack 2 which has a capacity of 400 gallons.
Both sumps are stable and cycled and working at around 50% capacity, giving adequate expansion room for the other tanks still to be added to the racks.
The water parameters as of 3pm today are:
Temperature - 27C
Ammonia - 0
Nitrites - 0
Nitrates - under 20