Father Fish Florida Shop Water System

Kelly Fish here. I'm trying to decide what to do for my next video and I've decided what I really need to do in terms of basics is show you my fish room plumbing system. Now this is a bank of 18 15 gallon tanks and they all run on one pump. The pump is in back I'll show you that in a bit but for now the idea is we have delivery like so flowing into every tank and then we have overflows flowing back out down into the vat. Each level of the three levels as an overflow and this is the overflow. The The water comes. Down here and up here to this T, the water level in the tank rises to the level of the bottom of the T, where it spills over and falls down, and then goes all the way down into the vat, which we're going to get to. Now, see the pipe going up? That bike is going all the way up to the top. Row where there's similarly an overflow, the water comes out a siphon, siphons down this U-tube and then up to the level of the bottom of the T and drops down. You saw where it drops to. I'm going to explain the valves a little later. We have valves of each one. Here's the middle one. The middle one is An overflow, a siphon overflow, that runs down and then comes up to the bottom of the T. You can see water down in there maybe. Overflows and drops down to the pipe going into the sump. Now, while I'm here, let's walk over to the sump and show you how that works. Showing around, this is our holding vat, and here is the sump. The sump has six inches of sand, and it has a filter bag. So the water is coming from the tanks through that overflow pipe, dropping into the filter bag, and then into here. And if you'll see, if you look in here, you'll see a pump. There's the pump. We've got some fish in here as well. There's a pair of Malfurter Severums in here. They've got a couple of populations of fish. This is a heater in that pipe. Okay, so that's about a 125 vat. Now this, there's a little siphon here, and this siphon goes over to another vat that has turtles in it. And the same kind of system except this has an external pump that pumps water back up to our African system. And you can see the flow coming back. It's pretty good flow coming out of about, oh, 20, really, systems that tank. See those later, maybe. And we keep some turtles in here as well as a few fish. Back to the Merlin. The Merlin is an RO system. It's no longer, sorry about the background noise, I should show you what that is. That's our half-horsepower blower, which is delivering air to all of the tanks. It runs 24-7, has been running uninterrupted for about five years. Very dependable. They'll get away from that sound pretty quick. The Merlin does about 400 gallons a day. It used to be very cheap. Now it's very expensive. The cartridges are almost 200 bucks a piece. And they got to be changed every six months or so. So that's a bit of a bite. Other than that, it cranks out RO water whenever, wherever, and however much I need. I've got it hooked up so that it delivers. RO water to this tub. This is a 225 gallon tub that's currently about two-thirds full. Now the waste water, let's see, let me switch the lines around. This is the water delivery line for RO. That's the waste line. Now the waste water goes into a barrel way over there, I'll show you in a minute, and I'll explain that. So we fill this up and it's done manually. It's not set up. We have been able to figure out how to set it up on an automatic because they use the wastewater. So we'd have to have a kind of a double cut off to make it work and that would make it not work. Coming around here to this black barrel. This black barrel is the key to our salt water. We fill it up through this valve. Right there. It comes out of the RO. We dump one bag, 150 gallon bag of salt in it, mix it up good, usually by letting the water go in, mixes it up, and then we flip a switch over here and pump it up to the 100 gallon barrel on the top. The 100 gallon tub then delivers salt water Gravity fed. The RO system has a pump in it. The pump is always on, continuously running, delivering water to some systems like my saltwater systems that are on auto top off. Okay, so there's that part of the complex. In back of me is one of three tubs. I think I showed these once before. This has some fish in it, a couple of turtles. It's delivering water to a bank of tanks that I'll have to show you from the other side Well, that are... where I keep small oddballs and African cichlids, that sort of stuff. So an overflow flows in, pumps back out. The pump is down there in the corner. It's a quarter-horse power. Let me go over here is a another tub 150 gallon tub with a top off and this fills the three bank system as well as the Blackwater, the Central and South American and the 500 gallon keeps them cycling and circulating. So this is doing pretty heavy duty. There's a pump in it so it's a circulating system. I showed how that works in an earlier video. I'll go back over it again a little bit for those of you who may have missed it but there's a fair amount of detail there you might want to go back and check that out. The the ever valuable wet vac Can't run this place without a wet vac. We usually have water on the floor back here because something is always leaking. I don't recommend this system for home use unless it's in a concrete floor fish room. This is a 250 tub that's a holding tank for fresh water. All of the RO weights goes into this. And we use that. Very hard alkaline water for virtually all of our fresh water systems. And over here is one more tub that's used to deliver water to this bank of tanks containing Tanganyika cichlids and South Americans and breeders and other stuff like that. So again, it's an overflow system. Water flows into it. And it's pumped back out into the tanks. Just a quick, I don't know if I can do it from here. I cannot show you the overflow from this side. These are a bank of 10 tanks. These are all, well, let's see, it's 5 and 6, 11 tanks. These are all tanks duplicated on the other side. This is a pyramid that are run by the vac we just showed you. And here's Bill. Bill's their bird man. Hi Bill. Hi there. Bill's looking at the tank of superworms. We keep superworms for a variety of purposes. So there's the system. There's one real quickie. Again, get this out of the way. This is the overflow. So the water comes through this pipe Which is ganged all the way down to the end on each row. We have three sets of these. It's in a U-tube that comes up to this T. Overflows into a down spout down there and goes into the back. Each one running each row. So, that's the system. Pyramid of tanks. 20s on the top, 29s on the bottom. On the other side are 55s and 20s, and that's all flowing into the third vat and being pumped back up. Okay, so back to this three-tier system. So we adjust the water height in here based on where this overflow is and the volume of water going in. You can see going down, there's pretty good volume. So there's more water going in than is able to flow out at the same rate. If I cut all of those off, the water level would drop to here, about two inches down. So with that amount of flow, we could actually have more, and it would raise it up even a little higher. We have on the bottom of each of these intakes A red strainer, and the reason we do that is to keep fish out of the pipes, because a lot of fish like to go up into the pipes, and it also keeps them from clogging up. Now, occasionally, we'll get a mud buildup. When that happens, we go all the way over to the vat, hook up a wet vac, and suck it all out. And that, that pulls all the mud out. We do that about once every three or four months, two or three times a year. So we, the flow is adjusted. We can cut it down to zero or crank it, crank it up pretty high. And each of these has a separate flow. Now, what this means is if we want to take a tank off the system, All we have to do is cut the water off and the water stops flowing through. If we want the water level to be lower, then we simply put a cap on the end of the PVC and that allows us to empty the tank, service it. If it's leaking or broken, we can pull it out and replace it with a new one without the whole system going down. This is the intake. and you can see it's just a plumbed three-quarter inch pipe with valves that control flow to each and every tank so that's basically the system it's designed designed the basic design is Thank you. 1800s boiler systems they were created with overflows this overflow is a very very old concept that the engineers have been using for 150 years. We got it from Henry Hall, so this is a system that works extremely well in the fish room. The only caveat is you do occasionally wind up with water on the floor because a tank, an intake, will get clogged up. Water will keep going in, it'll overflow and you wind up with water on the floor. The way to avoid that of course is to only do this kind of a system on a concrete floor and keep pretty good pretty good tabs on it. We have an incident maybe two or three times a year where something will overflow and we'll have to mop up water. But as you can see, we have a concrete floor in here, so it's not a terrible issue. Well, that's the basic idea. If you've got any questions, post them at the bottom. I'll be happy to talk anybody through this who wants to try to set something up that will allow no water Order changes. Continuous water flow, common temperature, and just everything else to make life easy. The only real caveat that people seem to have about this kind of system is a concern about disease. If you spot something, you just shut the valve off, and that isolates that tank from the rest of the system. I never treat the whole system. In the 15 years I've had this set up, I've never needed to treat the whole system. So there you have it. If you want to do it, contact me. I'll walk you through it, teach you the little tricks. I've covered most of them. I'm sure I've left a few out. Thanks for tuning in. Let me know if you're interested. wonderful day. Be sure to subscribe so you can get more of this vast and vital knowledge for your hobby and hit the like button because we know you loved it. And don't forget to share. Sharing is caring. The more you share, the more we are able to reach out. Reach out to the world beyond. And touch many lives with the great and powerful wisdom of fish. Bye for now.