“The fish must go!”
. . . and a new fish room is born
by Jim Cormier

Well it had to happen . . . “The fish must go!” When your spouse has no interest in fish you can only expand into the house so far before they say the most dreaded 4 words “The fish must go!” At this point I was up to 80 tanks, consuming two of the three bedrooms and the dining room. In most parts of the country houses have basements and they make good fish rooms but here in Florida we have no basements but a garage is the next best thing. So I was off to the garage.

It only took me a year to find a contractor to build the garage (fish room). They started in September and two months and four hurricanes later it was finished.



Well, the contractor was finished but my work was just starting. The contractors were only finishing the outer shell and I had to paint the inside and the outside, insulate and finish the ceiling. It doesn’t sound like that much work but I had to do it all my self and this isn’t a small room, 20 ft by 26 ft.





A big concern was temperature control. I had a wall mount air conditioner with heat that I mounted in the middle of the end wall to take care of the temperature in both the summer and winter.

Six weeks later I was ready to start moving in tanks.

Since I would have to break every thing down to move it I was going to make as many improvements as I could. The first improvement would be to the air system. Before the move I was running a medium size linear air pump that could only handle about 30 tanks with sponge filters and I was running seven large diaphragm air pumps to run six 30-gallon tanks, six 55-gallon tanks and my shrimp hatchers.



For the new room I purchased a Gast
1/8 hp blower to run everything.



At maximum capacity I will have about 150 tanks and the blower will be able to run them all with out having to bleed off lots of excess air.

The first tanks moved in were the 55-gallon tanks that end each row.



Next the system for the small fry went in.



Then the big fry system.



This one had 20 10-gallon tanks arranged in two rows, ten tanks in each row. Each row is feed with a 700 gph mag drive pump, into ¾” PVC and the water is passed into the tanks with two air valves. An air valve is only 1/8” tubing and it isn’t big enough to pass all of the water into the tanks. The other down side to using air valves for this is they clog too easily. To improve this I decided to replace one of the 1/8 tubing with a nipple for ¼” tubing for each tank.


These will double the flow into each tank.

Before the room was completed I designed the tank layout on the computer with two improvements in mind. First was to be able to have more tanks. This was a two-part solution. Using the computer I was able to layout the rooms in the most efficient way. Next was to change the racks so I could use the 3rd row (top). The way they were, the top row was too high. So I cut 4.5” off the bottom and 2” off the middle and top sections for a total reduction of 8.5”. This lowered the top and didn’t hinder my access to the bottom and middle rows. This allowed me to go from 80 tanks to 142 tanks. The second improvement was to increase my isle space. In the rooms in the house I only had 28”-30” of isles. In the new room I have 40” isles.



There are several other small improvements I’ve done. To make it easier to get to all the top row tanks I put my stepladder on wheels.



Because there are three isles that are 18’ long with tanks on the third row it would be too difficult to drag the ladder around (without the wheels) the room every day. I also have a small refrigerator in the room so all of the fish food and brine shrimp eggs are right there.



I’ve placed the water hose in a central location so the hose can access all of the tanks without having 100’ of hose or having to move it to different outlets around the room.



I have a cart that is real handy in the fish room. Right now it is mostly a tool cart but it is real good at moving tanks around and it is also a portable table that I use when stripping fry from the tropheus.



I’m only 70% done setting up the room. I have at the moment 83 of the planed 142 tanks running and still have to install the drain system. A couple of other improvements I have planned are to install an air exchanger to avoid mildew and a water filter system that will remove the chloramines without the need to add chemicals to the water to neutralize them (ED: they do exist . . . I have one!).

So far I am very happy with how the room is turning out and the only thing I would like to have in the room is a sink but I did not have access to the sewer lines in that area and would have been a major project to connect to the lines of the house. I still have a lot of work to do but I guess a fish room is never done; there are always some improvement and changes to be made.