Hello, my name is Jeff and heres what's up.
Years ago, I owned a pet store and we had fw and sw fish, reptiles, the occasional bird, the whole works. We shut down in 2000 and liquidated most things, but the show tank. We had a 240 gallon reef that was set up pretty nice and we moved that to my father's house. I maintained the tank frequently and fragged corals to trade to the lfs. There were several bangaii cardinals in the tank and a pair of maroon clowns. The clowns laid eggs like clockwork every two weeks and the bangaiis spit out babys about every month and a half. I attempted to retrieve the eggs out of the tank to no avail and would scoop up the bangaii babies the best I could before they would get sucked down an overflow or eaten by something. I set up a bangaii breeding operation and bred them pretty successfully, but found that the money spent was far outweighing the money coming back from the sale of babies. I shut down all the fish tanks when we moved and have been out of it until recently.
It all started when my son was given a 10 gallon fish tank and some guppies. HAHA. Thank you to his aunt for that. Soon Dad had to get involved and in no time we had 8- 10 gallon tanks with guppies flying everywhere. Once again I found that we weren't getting any return from our lfs for the guppy babies and I decided to seriously attempt a marine fish breeding program, with investors and the whole works. By the way, we're down to one regular old 10 gallon guppy tank for the boy.
I am going to use this thread to track the progress from start to finish on this project, explaining where I made and make mistakes and what I do to attempt to correct them. Hopefully by the end of this thing, there will be a positive successful continuation. I hope it is a value to someone if not just me. LOL .. Thank you in advance to those who read and comment.
I started on June 29th 2006, by building a stand in the garage. I wanted the stand to hold 16 - 20 gallon tall fishtanks across the top row and 16 on the bottom row. I built the stand mostly out of pressure treated 2X6 and some pressure treated 2X4. NOTE: freshly treated wood is very soft and I found that my screws were not holding as well as I thought they would. We almost had a serious accident with the enitre stand falling over with 4 tanks on it, but we were able to stop this from happening and added much more bracing, and so far, no more problems.
stand is 16 ft long by 2.5 feet wide by 7 feet tall.
Tank selection:
I was originally going to do 16- 20 gallon tall glass tanks on the top and bottom rows of the stand and make these tanks stand alone systems with a small sand bed, piece of LR and an anemone in each tank; with 2- "corner" or "box filters" in each as well. The purpose of this was to ensure that there wasn't any type of overflow or force that would endanger the fry in the larvae stage after hatching. I quickly found out that the 20 gallon stand alone tanks were just too unstable, due to the amount of evaporation each day and trying to keep all the levels the same was a nightmare. Here is a couple pics of my first tanks. This is july 3rd '06
I decided to do some shopping around, (I was on a terrible budget at the time) and I found a lady on craigslist who put me in touch with a tropical fish wholesaler, that had revamped their entire system. I ended up buying these old 40 gallon breeder tanks. They are short and wide like I wanted and each side was divided by a piece of glass and had it's own hole drilled in it for an outlet. Unfortunately the hole is only made for a 3/4 inch fitting. I personally would have liked at least an inch. I bought 20 of these tanks.
About the same time I was tearing everything down and changing over to the new tanks, I installed the vho lighting in the stand This was July 14th '06
On July 17th I broke down the last of the 2- 20 gallon talls and plumbed in the last of the breeder tanks. I used a 100 gallon agrilculture livestock watering container for the main sump and used the outlets on each side of the breeder tank as a return line to the sump. At this point I was temporarily using submersible pumps to run two feeder lines of 3/4 inch pvc that i drilled holes into to make a makeshift spraybar that would fill the tanks.
The water is supposed to go down through the sand by the stand pipe, fill the over pipe and then go down the stand pipe inside the overpipe. This has been up since July 17th and I have noticed that I get a collection of debris at the top of the tank because there is no overflow. I am considering putting hang on the back filters on each tank to alleviate this problem and then just shut them down on the days close to larvae hatching. Any ideas here would be appreciated.
On July 19th I programmed the Aqua Controller III to control the lights and have them follow the sunrise sunset patterns of the days in sync with the true seasons. This is the light schedule as of the 19th with about a few minutes of light loss per day:
about 5:00 am - white actinic VHOs come on
about 9:00 am - super actinic VHOs come on
about 10:00 am - 400 watt metal hallides come on
about 5:00 pm - 400 watt metal hallide go out
about 6:00 pm - white actinic VHOs go out
about 10:00 pm- super actinic VHOs go out
Does this sound good to you guys? And is there something that I am missing? I have been hearing a lot about moon lights as of late and am wondering if this is just a fad or a necessity. I am trying to duplicate as much of nature as I can to trigger whatever mating responses that I can. Thanks
On July 20th I made up a quick flyer and folder for my investors. I thought I would just throw up a picture of the flyer. It's a quick temporary thing that I'll spruce up at a later date when I'm a little futher along.
Here is my attempt at a sand filter: I took a plastic container that is as deep as the garbage can you can see there, and I drilled a bunch of holes down at the bottom, on the side of the container all the way around. I then lined the container with that cloth mesh stuff and filled the container with sand. The garbage can has an outlet that returns to the sump. The container of sand is set inside of the garbage can and a feeder line taken off of my main input pipe flows water into the sand bed. In the sand I have some mangroves planted and I have a couple nassarius (spelling?) snails, sand sifting star and cleaner clams. Right now I am lighting the plants with my track lighting overhead, but I am trying to figure out a better lighting scenario for the mangroves.
I changed out the 100 gallon to a 300 gallon sump just in hopes to make the water chemistry more stable.
A Breeding program in progress..... 
Good to be in management, huh 
