susitna-flower

Have you ever thought what would happen if you sprung a leak!!! I can just see all those columns splashing out all their water, why you would have your own GREAT FLOOD OF THE UK! and all those little fry flipping and flopping all over the floor! It is such a sad thought, but I know this won't happen........

What I still think is so great IS the numbers of fry you are having in a home situation. You really have a talent, and could go into commercial fish raising the way you are headed.

Fish in the Frozen North

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Nice idea, but I bet if I tried it wouldn't work! This is one of those crazy situations where you don't plan for something and it just happens. If it was planned the little blighters wouldn't perform!

I am very happy with what I have achieved here so far, and I really think that I can do more, for the love of the hobby, not for commercial gain. Besides which, if something you love becomes a job, the love tends to disappear in favour of commerce. that would be a shame for me and for everyone, since the spark of inginuity and creativity would disappear with it.

I love my fish, and love looking after them. If they want to give somethig back, then I shall be grateful, but if they don't it really doesn't matter, because I never set out to make anything but enjoyment, and that I get in bucket loads! (or tankful's, if you prefer!)

COBettaCouple

yea, i want to enjoy it.. i'd like to at least break even at some point but it's relaxing and i love the fish and especially have a soft spot for breeding fish that are endangered or at-risk or even extinct in the wild. The mahachai bettas are our first project and maybe when we're in denver, we can 'borrow' her parents basement and turn the entire thing into a fish breeding area. Then you could come over and build to your hearts content, filling the basement with all manner of tanks.

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After recent arrivals, I thought it would be good to show you all some of them.
1. One of the new dwarf gouramis. this one is about four weeks old now, and looking very much like his father!
2. Two more of the dwarfs, these I have no idea how old, as they are all growing at different rates now! It gives you some idea of their size now, since the red object is the top of a cola bottle, where I raise the BBS.
3. 64 6 week old swordtail fry in the growing tank, along with a few 8 week old mollies that are a little slow at growing. there are also WCM minnows and neons in the tank, along with a young splenden and the two female dwarfs. Getting a little crowded in there now!
4. 10 days old and growing fast! These mollies and guppies were all born on the same day, so they all got thrown in together to save space. there are around 100 little fellas in there, and I have already opened the tank so that they can use the whole thing, instead of the half they started with.
5. same tank, just a closer shot. When I put my hand near the tank, they all congregate and follow it as it moves. they are very trusting, and when doing water changes I have to be careful that none of them hold onto the hairs as I take my hand from the tank!

armadillo

Oh Tim, I wonder if youd' mind adding these to my fry picture collection? Very much appreciated http://www.fishlore.com/Forum/index....1034#msg111034

COBettaCouple

i love that pic!

tan.b

You are a star timg! can i have some your luck with breeding fish please?! if only you lived closer you could borrow my galaxies and get them breeding!!
my guppies all follow me around when i;m nr the tank too! they are always hungry and almost beg for food! they havent realised they get their 2 feeds and thats it, regardless of begging!! :

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I have about 6 free-swimming angel fry! They started swimming today, and I really thought I'd lost them all again. (Not had a lot of luck so far, but we're getting there)

The next batch of eggs is due tomorrow and I already have the tank ready for them, so hopefully we'll be able to keep more next time.

susitna-flower

It is so much fun when things work our right! After setting up my 125 gal the other day, I moved all the larger fish from the 55 that I have my rainbow platties in. I was trying to breed them, then one preg. female, and my male were gobbled up by the filter This left me with just two females, and I moved my Black Ghost Knife, and Royal Pleco into that tank to try to relieve overcrowding in my other 55........so I never saw any fry........until yesterday. Now the tank has 3 very small neon rainbows, 4 otoes, 2 very small bristlenose plecoes, 3 small panda cories and TWO FRY! One is a little larger than the other like 2 weeks & 1 week. One has pink coloring, the other is just starting to have any color and of course those great big eyes! I am so happy. They may not be angels, but THEY LIVE

Fish in the Frozen North

Isabella

Tim, your tanks are so beautiful How do you find the time to manage so many tanks? Also, I like your stands very much. What kind are they? Any particular brand and model, or did you make them yourself (or had them customized)?

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They are all my own work. because of the space limitations, everything had to be built to suit the room, including the tanks themselves. My partner loves her ornaments, so the shelves were constructed with that in mind. It is all made from timber, which is easy to work with and very forgiving!

As for time, how much time does it take? I've never worked it out, but as with anything that you care for, you find the time when you have to. I start with feeding at around 7am and finish usually around 1 or 2am, making time in between to do the regular maintenance such as water changes. These are usually done on a Sunday morning, when I have no work to do elsewhere. The large tanks are for the most part, self sufficient, with their own nitrate filter as well, so these are very easy to maintain and don't need any water changes as a rule, just topping up each day. With the right combination of fish, cleaning of the tanks is easy, plecs do most of the work, I just vacuum the gravel once in a while and wipe the glass fronts once a week.

I spend more time looking after the babies than anything else now, since they are more demanding than the adults. With upwards of 200 at any time, it is becoming quite a task every day! (It will be very close to 400 by the end of this week!)

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You can now watch some of the fish in action on my live-feed camera which you can find at http://www.felenasoft.com/webcamuser...6/sources.html

Login is fish, password is lore and interval refresh should be set at 0.1 for close to real-time.

Isabella

LOL, live 24/7 picture of your tank! That's so cool How do you get it to work? How do you monitor it? How is it connected to you computer? (Sorry, I'm not a big computer whiz, heh ...)

As for the stands, once again, very nice You're a very good carpenter!

A nitrate filter? I've never used any other filters except for sponge, external power, and canister filters. What kind is a nitrate filter? How does it work and what does it look like? It must have some chemical medium that removes nitrate all the time? So, basically, you don't perform water changes in your large tanks, right? Only vacuuming the gravel to remove fish wastes, yes? But that leads me to make the following comment: Even though you have your nitrate removed by the filter, there are other elements/substances (other than the usual ammonia, nitrite, and nitrate that we always worry about) accumulating in the water over time. Some substances do not evaporate and they just keep accumulating. With no water changes ever, could they not accumulate to the point where they'd be lethal (and simply too toxic at such high concentrations) to fish? I think Calcium is one such element. With regular water changes, not only are you removing nitrate, but also those elements/substances that would otherwise increase in concentration in your tank. Just some thoughts.

Although I have to agree that there is much less maintenance to do when you have a large tank and a very small fish-load (as compared to the tank size). I didn't ask if you had live plants. Because if you do have live plants in your large tanks, and a light fish load in them, then the plants actually do help remove not only nitrate but also the other elements/substances that would otherwise accumulate over time. Plants help filter the water. It's rather a tank without live plants that I have meant in my above comment. Yet, I have a 75 gallon, rather largely planted, tank with a light stock and I still perform weekly water changes in it. Adding fresh water actually provides live plants with nutritional trace elements as well.

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ok, so you must have been away for a while! The nitrate filter that filters the main tanks is an aquaponics garden, real plants outside the tank in a separate tiered garden, where the water from the tank is run through at around 20 gallons an hour. This garden effectively holds the nitrates level to under 10 and takes care of a lot of the other elements that you mention.

The advantage with this is that the Co2 supply is not restricted as it is in an aquarium, the plants as safe from the fish that like to eat them, maintenance is very easy and they grow very rapidly, consuming a lot of nitrates and other chemicals doing so. It is responsible for maintaining nitrate levels on nearly 200 gallons of water with stocking levels which vary quite a lot. The rest of the filtration is done with UGF's and box air filters.

It is 4' long and has five tiers of plants, with 8 wells for water to dwell in. the whole thing is self sustaining, all I have to do is trim the plants back and replace if they need it. It is the result of a project I worked on in the early summer and has been running since then without any problem. It also produces a nice sideline..... Snails! The outflow pipes are designed to allow small plant debris and infusoria through but not snails, and the bala sharks are very adept at removing the snails from their shells as they try to climb back up the outflow pipe. I have to empty the collector at the bottom at least twice a week of snail shells!

You can see the tank live on the link posted Here and following the login instructions. The filter is just out of camera, above the tank.

If you fancy reading the thread about how it developed, it's Here

I do top the tank up at the rate of around 2 gallons per day, and I use the water for changing other tanks, which adds new water to the main tank as well. When I vacuum the gravel, that takes out around 8-10 gallons, which is replaced with fresh water, so I suppose it does get changed, just not as quickly as it would normally.

The water is ideal for use with fry in the growing tanks below, since it is chlorine free and already mature. The water I remove from these tanks tends to go down the drain and fresh water put into the main tanks. It is a continual cycle these days, with daily changes on the heavily overstocked growing tanks being essential. (They contain up to 120 fry in each, so require constant maintenance.)

I am planning on doing a major water change on the tanks soon, but keep putting it back since I don't want to disturb the balance too much.

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It's only a demo at the moment, just to show that it is possible. It is a standard webcam, running on software downloaded from the internet, unfortunately, a time-limited version, which also came with dynamic hosting to enable dns access to my pc at home.

When you view the cam, you are taking the feed directly from my pc, which is somewhat limiting on upload speed, so not many can watch at the same time! To make this successful long term, I have made inquiries of a friend for a more permanent solution.

In the mean time, I am also looking into the Yahoo Messenger method, which would enable anyone to put their cams live at any time for others to watch.

As I said, wood is very forgiving and mistakes are easy to hide!

Isabella

An "aquaponics" garden filtration system ... wow. Sounds so complicated! No, I've never heard of it before. I've been gone from Fish Lore for a while, but I haven't heard of it here. Anyway, all of it sounds very interesting. I can't comment on that since I know nothing about it. As long as it works and keeps the water clean, it's all OK How do you use this filtration system in the winter? Does it have an in-built thermometer(s)? What if the water overheats in the summer? Does it have some "coolers"? LOL, sorry for the questions - I really didn't know of this before. Gotta research it and learn about it.

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very few people have heard of it, since I sort of invented it! It's an inside garden, mounted over the tank and forms part of the lighting canopy, so weather has no effect on it. Being set up that way, the temperature is similar to the tank itself, but is helped by the lights below heating the water as it cascades downwards. It is a very slow filter, as I stated, it handles around 20 gallons an hour, slow enough for the water to dwell in each well, where the plant roots can extract the nasties. It has become an eco-system of it's own, supporting snails, water fleas, freshwater shrimps and other micro-organisms, which are washed into the tank through the outlet, feeding the fish and fry too.

The plants themselves came from the local pond, where there is a profusion of them and they are free. All are water plants, able to withstand water soaked root systems, and most of them are very rapid growing, so pruning is becoming a regular activity. It is a small price to pay for the savings it gives freely.

It has been running for three months now and in that time I have checked the parameters every week with similar results every time. When I first started it up, the tank had high nitrate readings, which I left that way purposely. Within one week, the nitrate readings dropped to under 10 and have stayed there ever since. It also started on just one 62 gallon tank and less than half the garden, since I was still waiting for the 8' tank to arrive.

When the new tank finally came onstream, it was pre-loaded with filter media which I had prepared ahead of time, and very quickly stocked with my devoted goldfish to complete the mini-cycle in record time. The whole startup to stable conditions took less than a week on a 100 gallon tank, which is filtered only by UGF and the aquaponics garden. It has remained stable ever since.

The two tanks have now been connected together with syphon pipes and the water volume has now reached 165 gallons imperial, with another 22 gallons still to be built in the form of a second water column, similar to the one on the 4' tank. (You have probably come across the images of this already, but just in case you missed it, there's one below.)

As for stocking of the tanks, this varies somewhat at the moment, since we are trialling the column as a breeding system for bettas and gouramis. So far the signs are very good and a good number of dwarf gouramis have joined the ranks of growing fry. The bettas are just starting to build in there now, so it will be interesting to see how they get on.

The 8' tank is home to several 6" goldfish, one 4" rainbow shark, 2 5" balas, 2 4" clown loaches, 3 3" cories, 1 7" leopard plec, 2 4" angels, and a selection of visitors, mainly males that needed to be separated from the females. This load is enough to maintain the balance on both tanks, allowing for the variations in the 4' according to which fish I am trial breeding.

That's an outline of the setup here. It's radical, different and definitely unique. Most of the work has been done by myself, including construction of the column tank and the garden itself. The threads are all over the DIY section if you have the time to sift through it all! It is not impossible for others to copy my ideas and I hope that someone will, just to prove that it does work like I say it does!

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Some of the other advances that we have made recently is trying to keep up with the breeding of grateful fish! There will be over 400 by the end of this week, and although I have outlets for them all, growing them out has presented it's own challenges, not least the demand for growing tanks, something that was never in the original plan when we built this display.

It has made massive changes to our lives too, with karen, my partner, starting to learn computing, just so she can join in with the fun we have on here! It has also taken over just about every waking hour we have and a few we borrow from the sleeping time. It's a good job that my work has flexibility otherwise this would be a very different story!

Karen is very supportive, and has come from knowing absolutely nothing about fish when the first tank arrived, to being able to feed, care for and do a lot of the routine maintenance work that all this demands. It has brought us together as a team and even our 7 year old daughter participates in spotting the new fry! She plays with them too, especially the growing fry, which she teases with her hand and lets them swim all over it and through her fingers. She adores them all! I noticed just how much she has taken in when she had some friends around last week, and took them on a tour of the tanks, naming many of the fish, both by pet names and species names!

I really shouldn't put any more in here, but perhaps it would be better to make a blog of all this and much more in the blog section!