Automatic Water Change System for My Fish Room!

Welcome back to the channel everyone. Today we are in my fish store and I'm gonna be talking about how we change water on all of these aquariums. So we have about, I think, I haven't actually counted them up before, but I think we've got over 200 fish tanks here in store and this is our main wall of aquariums and you can see there's a lot of things to take care of. Changing water on these tanks would be an absolute nightmare if it wasn't for our automatic water change system. So today, a lot of people have asked me, how does this work? I'm gonna go in depth, explain the whole process of how the water changes, how we built it, kind of like show you. So if you wanted to do the same thing as us, you could do it. Basically, you can see here on the wall, if you come down the end and you have a look behind, we've got a service area. So this is something we built into our new store. Okay, I'll go turn the light on. We've also got a service area light. This is something we built into our new store just to make cleaning the tanks and keeping them easier. So I'll come over here and we'll turn these on and turn on the lights in the back here. I'll give you guys a better look. So we'll come on behind and you can see, this is what the back of the wall looks like. Now each tank is drilled and has a drain on it. So you can see we've got a bulkhead here. This is like a normal tank outlet fitting, which goes into an elbow and then a coupling and then it has a barbed end on it. And this is 19 mil hose, which goes down to a drain. Now this drain has a hole in it on the top, like you can see, and this drain goes into the sewer. So it's very important that it goes into the sewer because if it goes into rain water, you can obviously fish can get over and get out. So, and then this water is our wastewater line. Then we have a secondary line here of this is our water in. So the way the water change system works, I'll come around the front. The way the water change system works is each tank has a water inlet and an overflow and they work through a system of dilution. So water comes in fresh, clean water, which we've got a water tank downstairs that I'll show you. That water comes in and then dilutes the old water, which overflows out the back. And it's not like replacing the water. It just kind of tops it up. So it's really good for as well, like if we get in here and we cleaned a bunch of tanks, we can just easily turn them on. So the way we did this with the water inlet is we've got 13 millimeter pipe with a tap here and I've just used all irrigation pieces to jockey this up. So you can do the same thing. We've got like all sorts of things here. You can take a screenshot and see. The tap controls how much water we put in and you come down here. I've created a master tap valve back here to control all the water. I've got a plumber to link this up, but there's a pump downstairs, which is connected to the water tank where we treat the water first. Now this is always on. Now each one of these taps does a different part of the room. So for instance, this one does all of the tanks on this part of the wall. Then this one does the bottom row down here. This one does the middle row and this one does the top one. So say I wanted to do like a water change on the top row, what I'd come do is turn this on and I've got a timer here. Now the reason I've got a timer, this is just like a yard timer, super simple setup. The reason I've got this is because when we're working in store, it's really easy for us to forget while we're serving customers that we have the water change system on. So we just turn the timer on and that'll go on for 15 minutes now. And we are now pumping fresh water into the top line of the water change system of all the aquariums. So you come back and have a look and there should be water coming into all these tanks. Let's have a look. Yeah, see, you can see at the back here. So it's not jetting out like super quick, but it is topping it up. And when you have this run for 30 minutes to 40 minutes, it does change a substantial amount of water. And then, yeah, like I said, it overflows out the top and goes into the drain. So that's basically how this works. Now, the thing is, a lot of people don't know that obviously like our town water isn't always safe, which is why we add like products like Safe or add like Fritz to the water because these chemicals neutralize the chlorine and chloramine that are in the water and make it safe for fish. So we can't just pump town water into the tanks because it would kill the fish. And we used to have, our old fish store used to have a water change system that would just pump town water into the tanks. And we'd have to go around and manually treat every single tank. And every now and then we'd forget to treat one and lose all the fish. So we changed it up in this fish room. So I'm gonna take you guys down to the warehouse and show you kind of the bones of how the rest of the system works. So I wanna say as well, before we get downstairs, that every single tank here in the shop is linked up to the automatic water change system. We can see here, we've got the huge plant tank as well. And this is also linked up. This one's a little bit different. Jason jockeyed up the underneath here with a flow valve. And what happens is when this tank is empties for like if people grab stuff or if someone takes water out or if it evaporates, this float valve turns on automatically and tops it up. So it never runs out of water. It always stays at the same level. And that's really good. So I'll close that up and we'll go downstairs and I'll show you guys the rest of the system. Okay, so we're now in the warehouse underneath the fish room. And you can see it's a little bit messy. We've just moved in here. So we've got to organize it and tidy it all up and clean it up. But the reason this water change system works so well is because we did build our shop upstairs. So the reason that was such a benefit was that it gave us extra room for fall for the pipes. So obviously all the pipes need to have like a slight lean to make sure the water goes where we want. And because we had the tanks upstairs, it meant that underneath we could build whatever we wanted. So these are all the drainage pipes that we put up. You can see in our videos of building the fish room, us putting these up. These are the drains that connect to all of the different spots in the fish room where we need drainage for the tanks. So that one does like the middle row, which we were right near. We've got drains even out the front because it's built all the way out. And these all link up. They all link up by a plumber and go here where they connect to the sewage and out they go. So any fish that flow over the top, adios. But down here, this is our water tank. So this is a 5,000 liter water tank. And this is a Slimline water tank. And basically what we do is I got a plumber to link this up as well. We've got water that comes in from the mains. So this is water in from the town right here. And this is the water that goes up to the fish room. So right now you can see we've got the water change system on. The pump, you can kind of hear it's actually pumping. I can't tell you what exact type of pump this is. You can see here, it's a good pump. People use this for their rainwater tanks and stuff to supply their showers and house. So this pumps the water upstairs for the water change system. But the way this works is when the tank is empty, it'll turn off because there's no water for the pump to use. And the lines upstairs won't work anymore. What we'll do is we'll come down and we'll start off by first turning this off. Now this has a lock on it. So no one can turn this on and off without sliding this up. And that's gonna turn off the water to upstairs. So now none of the tanks upstairs are getting water. Then what we're gonna do is we'll turn on our town water and flick that on. And you can hear, you can hear firstly the pumps turned off, but now there's water going into the water tank. I don't know if I can easily show you that, but yeah, you can hear it. Now a lot of people, I'll turn that off and just I can go back on. There was only a little bit of chlorine in there, but a lot of people like don't know, you're probably gonna need a plumber to help you out with the little parts of your water change system because we've got a float valve installed here. So when this tank fills up completely, the float valve turns it off and it is then full and ready to go. But what we do to make sure the water's safe is we add two scoops of Seachem Safe. Down here we get it bulk and we just do two full tablespoons in here and that completely neutralizes all the 5,000 liters of water. It makes it safe to send it back upstairs and use it in our automatic water change system. A lot of people would say, oh, you can add an aerator or you can add some kind of circulation to keep the water good. We're gonna consider adding maybe an air pump up there soon and then just keeping the water oxygenated and safe. But we have not run into any issues with this and we've been using it for the last month and a half and it's been working really well. So that's like the bones of our automatic water change system right there. You can see out the front here too, the extra drains that we got put in. So that one over here, that one there does the cichlids. Then that one does the back sink. That one does the future plant tank. That one does the middle plant tank and then yeah, they all connect. So we'll go back upstairs and I'll show you the rest of it. Yeah, you can see, still filling up, still working. So this is definitely the best water change system we've ever built. Super easy to use and basically means that we don't have any more buckets or anything like that. Makes it a lot easier for everyone who works here and just makes keeping our fish a lot more automated. So the other cool thing about having the water tank is we were able to link up our sinks to it. The pressure is not amazing because we've got no pump going on another spot but this water here is technically fish safe because it's been treated. So when we need to fill up a bag with fish, like when we're bagging fish here and we don't have enough in there, we don't have to go back to the tank. We can just add fresh dechlorinated tap water to the bag. So that was another little benefit but we'll wrap it up here. That's the automatic water change system. Thanks for watching the video guys and I'll see you in the next one.