Air quality is something you don't usually see associated with fishrooms, Humidity and cooling issues are. My fish room has 14 tanks, 2-180g w/ 90g sumps, 120g w/20g sump, 9-15g central system w/65g sump, 75g, and a 55g in a 14X14 room. My big concern is keeping humidity below 50% and the air temp at 70F so that the tanks run between 76F-80F depending on the humididty level and temp outside. I am near 1,000 gallons and am looking to drop down to the 180 reef and the 180 cichlid tank with maybe a 5g and 10g grow out tank for small fry. The cost to run a system like this currently is close to $200 a month in electric and really isn't worth it.
The HRV keeps the humidity below 45%.
I saw your skimmer and I am wondering if the reaction chamber is a 2" pipe. If so you may want to increase everything below the top one foot to 8" and then make the top 12-18"'s out of 3" pipe. This will increase dwell time with the larger volume of water and will skim more because of the longer contact time.
The skimmers are all 4" diameter all the way up, are counter current with the water going in at about the 6 ft height and going out at the 1 1/2 inch level, so basically 6 feet by 4" diameter continuous contact time.
The box you see is one foot by fourteen inches, and I've never seen any skimmer short of those in old waste treatment plants, that could turn out more skimmate. The 2X2" 7" long airstone dispenses approximately one litre of air per second the way they function normally and I can crank up the flow from the Thomas linear compressors to do a lot more than that. I don't really think I'll be rebuilding all my skimmers to improve on their output as no skimmer sold for the hobby can put out what each of these can.
Look into dumping the 802 powerheads and upgrading to Tunze Nano streams in there place. Flow will quadruple and you will use less electric in the process.
First, the cost for me to replace the 802's is prohibitive as I use over 40 of them, and I just don't have that kind of money. Also, the flow rated on the Nano Stream boxes at the LFS specify 660g/min and the 802's are rated I believe at 400g/min. Irregardless, cost is the factor.
If this room is in a basement, I would look into a 1,000 cfm fan unit to vent thru the side of the house. If it is in a room with access to an attic I would vent it thru the roof so that you are not pumping the humidity into the attic where mold could be formed. 1,000 cfm on a timer set by a temp controller would draw in small amounts of fresh air to the area without sacrificng too much heat loss during the winter.
Here we would have a difference of opinion. Before the HRV, I had a 450cfm fan blowing out one of the basement windows where the HRV is now hooked up. It didn't take care of humidity and the gas bill for heat went up tremendously for the 2 winters it was set up. It also caused a negative pressure inside the house that also caused furnace problems.
The HRV brings in 265cfm of fresh air warmed by the outgoing air which exits at the same rate of the incoming air so it is balanced and it's rated efficiency is a maximum 90% depending on temperatures outside, and the speed setting it runs on but it will be a minimum of 75% recovery of heat. Now my humidity sits most of the winter around 38 to 40% in my basement, even with all that open water.
You could also run a vent pipe for intake from the outside to a blower system for your air pumps. Sweetwater makes nice blowers that can run several dozen airstones. This might help also.
I use Thomas linear silent compressors, each one would probably run perhaps at least a hundred tanks in a fish store. The regenerative blowers are louder and don't have as much pressure as I want, but they do move a heck of a lot of air, with ones I know of capable of supplying more than several dozen airstones each.
The Thomas compressors are fed air from the HRV.
Lastly, an ionazation unit could possibly help by eliminating airbourne particles and odors from the room.
Yes, they work great don't they. It was installed when I bought the new furnace and central air.
There is one more thing, if these tanks are not display tanks you can run rigid 1/4" pipe into the aquariums and bubble the tanks vigourously to expel CO2. This can be done in a sump much like the systems you see bubbling fiercely in live bait storage containers.
The tanks are display, even the propagation tank.
As for the production room, the air flow is determined by the flow that the brine shrimp can take. Too much flow literally blows them apart.
The mysids I grow can't take high air bubble turbulence for some reason. When I crank the air up more they die off and I don't know why.
Actually, I'm replacing them with Palaemonetes Vulgaris shrimp which are like a salt water version of a ghost shrimp. Mysids are low demand critters but the PV's are great to gut load and feed to lion fish and many others, especially ones that only eat live food.
I hate to seem so negative when you have thought to help with these suggestions, but sooner or later something might click that will be in the cost range and work. Too expensive and the business would operate at a loss instead of very small profits.
An engineer from LIFEBREATH, manufactures of HRV's for most of the name brands in North America, came to the house and other than going to a commercial HRV, couldn't think of anything that would help and still be economically viable. Even the commercial HRV he said might not improve that much for the added cost.
In the meantime, I add a lot of baked baking soda to keep things going proper in the brine room, and the tanks seem to do ok at the low pH with nothing showing problems due to it. It's better like a week or so ago when we were able to open up the house in the warm weather, but now we're back to the deep freeze again. Summers coming! I'm keeping a watch for it.:look:
p.s. Sure wish this forum had spell check.
..u just made my life a little better with that post
hosphorous ratio is out of wack it too can drive pH down. There are many reasons for low pH. Are you testing with a probe?
