Jenny:
Hey guys, it’s Jenny. Welcome back to Solid Gold. Welcome to day seven of vlog. This week is going to be crazy because I’ve got a lot to do out of my fish room that I’m going to take you guys along with me during the process as much as possible. Also on Friday, I’m heading up to Minnesota to visit my family for Christmas. I’m taking you guys along with me for that as well. Over the weekend, I started setting up my automatic water change system out here in the fish room which I have to do before I fully set up all the aquarium racks. Let’s take a look and I’ll show you guys what’s been done.
My fish room has been turned into a little bit of a construction zone once again. Here are the two aquarium racks from Custom Aquariums that showed up last week on Tuesday. They’re all assembled. Except for the doors and stuff. I still haven’t put the doors on. It just doesn’t make sense to do that yet. Here are the aquarium sumps. This whole system here is for unit one, which is the first rack and then this whole system here is for unit two which is the second rack. The filter is a sub filter, of course, seamless sump is what they call it from Custom Aquariums.
What I thought was really cute and a fun detail is everything has lids. They’re like tiny little glasses and there’s even a little indentation here in the molded tub. You can lift up the little glass piece and it’s beveled really nicely to– I don’t know how you can see that. That’s really cute and it will help cut down on evaporation from the sump quite a lot. It’s the details. They send me everything that I would need for the filtration except for the pumps, I still have to go online and purchase the pumps. I’ll probably do that later today.
Both of these two aquariums are both going to be filtered on this one sump system. There’s going to be two water feeds into the sock tub here, one here, one here. That one’s not hooked up on there yet. Then inside here you can see there are filter socks hanging so the water will go through those first. That’ll be the mechanical filtration. Once they go through the sock filter, they’ll come out on these outlets, both of these outlets here and there are little pieces that I have to put here to direct the water down into the next tub, which is the biological filtration.
This is C-Chem Pure Gen that the Custom Aquariums sent with this whole sump setup, which is really cool. This is like using activated carbon except this is really nice because you can actually recharge it. You don’t have to throw it away and keep buying new stuff, you can actually just recharge it and use it again.
All down here, there are a whole bunch of little trays that water can flow through. That’s where all the biological filter media will go. The water goes down here under this lip here, and then up into the next chamber here, which is where the pumps will go, the return pumps. Then the tubing for the return pumps comes out these holes, goes back up to the aquariums.
This little feature right here, another cool little detail is for the cords to stick out. It’s for the cords from the pumps or if you want to put an aquarium heater here in the sump filter as well. It’s not cluttering up the look of your aquarium. You can fit a heater in here and have the cord coming out there too. I’ve taken apart everything that was sent to me from Custom Aquariums and made sense of it a little bit figured out where exactly on the tank it’s going to go because this is my first time doing anything of this magnitude. This is pretty- this is a lot. It’s taken a lot just to unpack everything, get my head around it, see what goes where and formulate a plan. It’s looking really good and I’m really excited.
Over here are some more parts. Here we’ve got- these are the H2 overflows from Custom Aquariums. Really cool. They have bulkheads. Of course, the tanks are already pre-drilled for me. These are just going to go right in there like that, on that side and then they also sent me some of their siphon stopper returns. These were specially developed to prevent back siphoning of water if you have a power outage. Sometimes one of the dangers of having sump filter is that if you have a power outage, in some cases, the water can suck back up into this return pipe and overflow your sump and then cause a flood in your house. They developed this to help prevent that from happening, which is really cool.
It actually I don’t know if you can see it too well. There’s two channels up here on these things that are sticking out. Two little tiny channels where tiny jets of water come out of there. These sit at the water surface. They have the added benefit of helping to create more surface agitation. The real reason they’re there is, say you have a power outage and if these weren’t here water could suck back up into this and overflow your sump. However, these are here so there’s like holes up here and that breaks the suction power so water can’t be sucked back in. They really cool and I’m excited to get them all hooked up. They have bulkheads as well and they will go over here on this side of the aquarium.
Then we’ve got a third hole down here. There’s a bulkhead for this hole as well. That would be this bulkhead here and this hole is going to be for draining my aquariums. I had Custom Aquariums drill this drain hole as close to the bottom as they could. This is what I’m going to use to do my water changes. Since I’m going to have so many aquariums out here, I really want to do whatever I can to help automate the maintenance schedule a little bit better.
Rather than hooking up a Python hose, like this one to drain all of my aquariums, I’m just going to have them all drilled. I can turn a valve, a ball valve just like this one over here, picked this up at the hardware store last night. I can just turn this valve for each aquarium and then the water will start draining. That’s the part of this whole process that I’ve been focused on the most so far because that’s what I have to do first before I can set anything else up.
Here’s the idea so far, this is what I’ve done so far. This is the gutter. This is going to carry all of the wastewater from all of my water changes down this wall and then it’s going to be continued on this wall too. There’s going to be an elbow here, it’s going to continue down this wall, and then there’s going to be a hole punched in the wall going outside and it’s going to go into a drainage ditch outside. That’s how my water changes out here are going to be done. Since this has to be put behind the aquarium racks and mounted on the wall behind them, I have to do this part before I can really set up anything else. This has been what I’ve been preoccupied with so far this weekend.
This tubing here is three inch PVC. Everywhere that there’s going to be a rack of aquariums I have added a T and then a short length of tubing going vertically up and that’s how the water draining from the aquariums is going to tie in. This rigid PVC part is going to be mounted to the wall and it’s going to be a permanent fixture back behind all of the aquarium racks. I want to still be able to if I needed to pull the aquariums out and even the racking system out away from the wall. I don’t want the tubing coming from the drainage hole on the aquariums itself to be rigid PVC and to be glued in place and more permanent because I want to be able to move the aquariums out if I need to.
I’m using flexible tubing to tie into the gutter here. I have tapped out on the floor here where the other aquarium racks are going to go. This one in the corner is going to be the bigger one with two bigger tanks stacked on top of each other. This one here is going to have the exact same footprint as the two that I already have. Except the tank on top is going to be an amphibious tank and the tank on the bottom will be the exact same as these ones here and then, of course, I got those ones in place. Then I also am planning on having two stacked tubs, like the black one that I already have back there in that corner.
Everywhere that I have a rack of aquariums I need to have drainage tubes sticking up here for the flexible tubing to tie into. That’s what I have. At this point, this length of three-inch PVC is ready to be mounted up on the wall. I’m going to mount it at a slight diagonal to just really slight just enough to help the water travel down the length of the tube and not get stuck and be sitting water inside of there.
The way that all of this is happening is actually really crazy because I’ve been keeping aquariums for probably nine years now. I’m familiar with how to keep aquariums, how to maintain them and all that, but I have never set up anything on this level, on this insane magnitude. I’m so thrilled that I’m able to do this. But at the same time, it’s really nerve-wracking because I want to make sure you do it right. Especially because all of you guys are watching and you’re kind of learning along with me as this processes unfolding before our eyes.
Oh my gosh, yes, I’ve got my work cut out for me. I’m so happy with how things are turning out so far. I’m really excited for it to continue. I have to say, I have to give a big shout out to Ted Judy. Once again, he has really helped me out with giving me a lot of advice on how to set up like this drainage gutter system here. That was all his advice, which is really awesome and of course, super appreciate it. Of course, a big shout out to Ted Judy. He’s got a lot of actually really informational videos on his YouTube channel as well called Ted’s Fishroom. If you’re curious about how to go about setting up your own fish room.
As we’ve seen, I have a lot to do out here. I want to keep at it. I also want to get this video up for you guys today so I’m going to work on editing this video today. I also have a lot more calendar orders that I have to drop off at the post office. In case any of you guys haven’t seen yet, this is what I mean when I’m talking about my calendar orders. Every year I make a calendar. Here’s actually the one for 2017 hanging up here in my fish room. They just have really cute pictures on them of my animals, and mostly goldfish. This is the first year I’ve started to include some of my other pets as well like my Leopard Geckos. There’s Sylvia, she’s so cute. Anyway yes, if you guys haven’t seen this yet, definitely check them out. There’s a link down in the description section below. You can still get them, I still have plenty available. So check them out, just because I’m trying to do it all this month, three videos a week and taking care of this and packing and shipping out calendar orders and visiting my family. It’s going to be a little while until I get these fully set up. I’m hoping that by the end of January, fingers crossed. I can have all four of these tanks set up because the next tanks I think might be arriving sometime in February.
Now I have to head over to the specialty plumbing supply store. I got a lot of the things that were on my list yesterday at the hardware store, but they were missing a few key components that I definitely need. I’m going to try to find them here at the local specialty plumbing supply store, and if they don’t have it I’ll just have to order them online, but I’ve got my list here of things that I need complete with little drawings because I don’t necessarily know the correct terminology for everything. I have some parts that I need to get things to connect on to, to bring with me just to help explain to the people at the plumbing store exactly what it is I’m doing.
I would say like 80 % of the time that I go to a hardware store or a plumbing store or anything like that, it is for fish related projects. Whenever I try to explain what I’m trying to accomplish to the people that work there, I feel like they always look at me cross-eyed because this is so unusual, but hey, this is my life and I love it. So there. Here we are, found all the stuff I needed at the specialty plumbing store, sweet. Well, I’m back from the plumbing store and pleasant surprise they had everything I needed so that was good. I am sure that as I go I’ll find other things that I need too, but at least now I have enough stuff to make a good start on this.
I’ve just temporarily installed the bulkhead down here on the drain hole the bottom of the tank so you guys can see how this is all going fit together. Inside the bulkhead itself I’m going to put a short length of one inch PVC tubing just to extend it out as far as I need it to go, and then this will attach on to that. You can see the barbed hose fitting is threaded right into there. Then this is going to of course lead into the flexible tubing which leads into the drain gutter which I’ve already got a good start on over there.
That gives me plenty to work on over the next several days here out in the fish room, but I think I’m going to have to put the fish room stuff on hold at least for the rest of the night so I can get this video edited and uploaded so you guys can still see it yet today. Check this out we’ve got a climber. So cute, there’s another one over there too. All right I need to feed these guys. I am giving them a lot of flies today because for the past few days there’s been a bit of a fly shortage because I didn’t time my fly cultures right. I’m going to give them a little extra a little more than I normally would to make up for it.
Oh my gosh, they are so cute. I just love watching them eat. All right, guys, that’s going to be it for today’s vlog. I’m going to end it here, so I can quickly run inside and start editing. Thanks for watching guys. I hope you’re enjoying watching all of this come together with me and I’ll see you next time. Until then, stay gold.
