Any Breeders Out There?

heat the entire room if you can will be easier that way and probably more efficient if you have a lot of tanks.

i would go sponge filters with bare bottoms. the sponges will provide really good bio filtration and will be easiest to clean and the barebottom will make maintence easy too. every little bit helps when you dealing with that many tanks. you will need a lot for show quality fish. tanks for breeding, a lot more tanks for fry growout and you will have to separate the sexes to control the fishes bloodlines. basically you are going to be dealing with a lot of fish unless you are just starying off with 2-3 trios. so just keep it simple.

I bread Tetras fish for 4 of my LFS. I have 5 55 gallon tanks using a 75 gallon sump for my fish that I will bread. I use 20 longs for the breading. I move them to 55 gallon grow out tanks (20 of them) that has a 100 gallon sump. All my sumps do use UV on a portion of the water going through the sumps. For the final Q tanks I use 20 highs that use sponge filters and the owners come and get them on Fridays, they buy the fish by the tank. I don’t make but about $500 a month by the time I pay the power bill (I have well water) and get new stuff.

I would go with canisters on the large tanks and sponges on the smaller tanks. I think that heating the room is the best but can be hard to keep a room from 78 to 80.* I guess you’re not looking at about 10 to 15 tanks to start with so heating each tank will be the best. I would try to find a large water holding tank around ½ as much water you are planning to use in a week. This way you can “air off” your water. Most of the time this will stop the use of some chemicals be added to your water.

Good luck with your Guppies and remember you will have top do something with all that aren’t up to your likeing and I guess send them to your LFS. I would get to be good friends with them.

I don’t count any of these tanks as my pet fish, but there part of my living now and with all the tanks I have it’s going to be too hard to stop.

I heat my tanks. My basement is to big to heat and I was talking to a few people and they couldn’t tell me how to keep it with in 5* without running up the power bill so I went with each tank. There is a room heater that will come on if the room gets to cold but it’s set about 5* below the tank temp.

Ok this is just a brain storm, so read with caution.
If you heated a 55 gallon trash can of water to 81*. Use a pump to run water thought hoses to the tanks where the hose would dip into each tank and heat the tank. The water would end up back into the trash can where it would go again.

Hmm that though needs a lot of work.

edit
Well I have done more thinking on this.

If you have a 55 gallon can that’s heated and you pump the heated water through tubing. If you put a loop of tubing in each tank, depending on how thick the tubing is and the difference of water temp it could raise the temp of the tanks but I think it would not be efficient.

What would you use for heat that dose not cycle with a large temp fluctuation? I’m thinking more than 3* would play with the tank temp.

If you get the room temp to stay in the 70’s use some cheap 50 watt heaters for the 10 gallon tanks. I don’t know but if you find something that works god let me know.