The Fish Room
If you have more than one or two aquarium tanks and you have plans to expand or add tanks maybe you should consider setting up a small or large fish room depending on your aspiration.
You will need a proper space one with floors that can bear weight, a right lighting system and good strong stands you also need to think carefully about filtering whether you want a central filtering system which is low maintenance but It forces all your tanks to have the same water chemistry, and it means that diseases can spread to all your tanks very quickly or you can choose a distributed filtering system. With regard to heating it depends on the filter system that you choose, If you choose not to have a central filter you can either heat the room, or heat each tank with its own heater. From a cost point of view, heating each tank will always be cheaper.
Here you have more information about setting up a small fish room.
I came to thinking about a fish room after reading a post on Northern Lights Aquatics Fish Blog, she describes how her fish tanks are in the laundry room and how it is back breaking to try and have quality time with the fish.
Most aquarium shops seem to have a central filtering system. It saves time but is far from ideal if the aquariums have a wide variety of fish and plant species.
If you have the money and time, that would be awesome. each fish species and plants like different water conditions so a central filtration system wouldn’t work.
You can divide the aquariums to several groups, by the fish/plants origin, and have 2-3 big filtration systems. Of course if you’ve got a disease on one aquarium, it will spread to the rest on the group…
I had a central filtration system in my fish room for about a year. Maintenance is much easier this way. Just like you said, diseases can spread quite fast. After a year, I bought some new guppys, one was sick and I did not notice it. I have lost many fish with that. Since then, I have a filter per tank. It’s a little more work but I feel my fish are much safer this way. Regards, Patrice from www.aquariumslife.com
Yeah, I’m fixing to start a fish room in the very near future. I’ll have central air, but I’m not even considering having a central filtration system. There’s no way. I only have 14 tanks up and running right now… but there’s absolutely no way that I can afford to loose 14 tanks because of some kind of freaky thing. And I’m buying and selling all the time and I don’t care how long you QT… 9 times out of 10 if something’s going to show up, it’s after you’ve introduced the fish to your more expensive fish. 3 weeks ago I took a little vacation and had a friend feeding for me… I came back to a $300 loss of fish. I just can’t have that happen. I don’t know if something happened… Or she overfed… Ususally she does a good job… but something happened. There won’t be a central filtration system for my room… I can’t afford it. But that’s just my opinion, and I look at my fish breeding as a business more than a hobby… Although it started out as a hobby… LOL!
Angela: I hope you can send pictures of the fish room project. A fish room is the ultimate for those of us who have terminal MTS.
LOL! No kidding! If the temperature was most stable here… I’ve already contemplated a separate building… with concrete ponds… Oh man… My hubby would kill me! I’ll document the whole thing with pictures.