Building A Fish Room, Nothing Can Be Easy

Lots of progress happening in this new fish room that I'm building out, but there is a saying that I say to Lisa all the time and it absolutely fits when it comes to anything I do on this property, whatever project I'm working on. I say this to her over and over and over again. Nothing can be easy. Now I said nothing can be easy and I'm not being overly dramatic. This project has been a challenge already, but I was expecting that. I mean, building a fish room in a building that's almost 200 years old can be a bit of a challenge, but I'm working on it, made a lot of really good progress and I wanna go over with you everything that I've done up to this point. Now, if you're not familiar with what's going on here, I am building a fish room in this barn that's on our property that we're currently using as our warehouse where we sell plants and aquarium equipment and fish food and chemicals and all of that live snails. We sell a lot of stuff, but we're adding fish to the mix. And in order to do that, I'm adding 106 aquariums to what we already have. And when it's all said and done, we're gonna end up with 159 tanks in this building that we will be selling plants, snails and live fish out. Now, what I wanted to do with this project was kind of break it down into phases. The first phase that I wanted to work on was water. We've gotta get water in here to use in the aquariums and then we have to take water out of the building. Taking the water out is something that we're gonna talk about in future videos. I'm not quite there yet, but I had to focus on bringing water in. We already had water in the building, but I needed to treat that water and I needed it to be set up properly to feed the water changing system that I'm gonna be putting in here, which I've got a really good start on right now. But everything starts with this. We had in here before a 30 gallon, 30 year old water heater in this building. That wasn't gonna cut it. So I replaced it with a 50 gallon, which isn't all that much bigger, but it is pretty substantial. We can get a lot more warm water from it. Now, if you think about it, I'm not gonna be sending 110, 120 degree water out to the tanks. It's gonna be mixing with cold water to get to the desired temperature, which would be like 78 degrees. So it doesn't take as much hot water mixing with the cold water to achieve that temperature. I hope that all makes sense. So 50 gallons mixing in with that cold water to achieve 78 or 80 degrees, haven't figured that out yet. It doesn't take that much. So 50 gallons can go a long way. We're gonna talk about temperature as we go to the other side of this wall in a minute, but replacing this water heater was a challenge. Usually changing a water heater is not. It's very simple. You've got two pipes that go into it, a cold water and a hot water. This would be the supply from the county or from your well. We're on county water. And then it goes in here. It makes it hot. And then it comes out this side as hot water. All you do is unscrew those, put them, you know, swap them over to the new one, swap out the wiring, which is very easy. You can't really do it wrong. It's simple, not a big deal. Anybody can do it. The problem is the 30 gallon water heater that was here was full of water and I couldn't drain it. I couldn't drain it because you have a drain on the bottom of every water heater. Every single one of them has that drain there. And you use that drain to flush water heaters. And you really should do this, particularly if you live in an area like I do, where your water has a lot of sediment in it. The sediment builds up at the bottom of your water heater and it just builds and builds and builds and builds to where you've got after 30 years, probably six to eight inches worth of dirt sitting on the bottom of your water heater. Well, when that happens, it completely clogs up that drain down there on the bottom. So when I went to drain the original water heater out, you turn that valve and it would do nothing. Nothing came out of it at all. So I had to transport that 30 gallon water heater out of this building completely full of water. And it's not like you're gonna pick that up and walk out. No, these things weigh a lot. 30 gallons of water plus the weight of the water heater is probably 300 pounds. It was a lot of weight. So I pulled in my hand truck, strapped it onto it, and was able to muscle this thing out of the building. Now, putting this new water heater in was a breeze once that old one was out. But I did have another very minor complication. You see, this pipe here goes to this sink, the sink that's in the kitchen, and this toilet, which you can't see over here. And I didn't really feel it was necessary to have filtered and up-to-temperature water delivered to these pieces. So instead, what I did was when the hot water comes out of the water heater, I split it off. You can't really see it now, but I can show you in the footage. I teed it off and sent one line through the wall and then the other line down to, again, feed the sink, tub, no, there's no tub out here, sink, toilet, and faucet, kitchen sink. Anyway, I'm all over the place. So I had to do that, and I had to get the cold water popped through the wall. It's really not that big of a deal. I just put a T here. We're using PEX lines, which are great. I didn't choose this. This is what was already in here, and I love it because it's super easy to work with. And so I popped it through the wall there, and then you need to see all of the excitement that's going on on the other side of this wall. This is very cool, but everything starts here. This is where the water comes into the building. It's going to get heated, then it gets sent through, and that's where the real fun begins. Reacher got spayed on Thursday. She has to relax for a few days, and that's unlike her. She is usually 100 miles an hour. So she's not really liking that, or she's really loving it. I don't know, but she's not used to being lazy like that. All right, this is where all of the fun happens. This is the very cool part of all of this. Took me a while to get all of this planned out and get everything laid out and set up, but we're here, and it is set up. It's not functional. It's not running yet, but it is set up, and I wanted to talk about how this whole thing works, and why I'm doing it this way. I'm just not gonna be able to show it to you in action yet. I'll explain as we go on, but what we have here, this is the immediate opposite side of the wall from where we just were. This is that hot water line and cold water line that comes in from the water heater. It goes into this thermostatic mixing valve. Basically, what this valve is is a fancy shower valve where you turn it and adjust the temperature that you want. That's basically what that is, and what it does is I can dial it in and get the temperature coming out to this pipe right here at the exact temperature that I want. It mixes the water for me just like a shower valve will. From there, it goes into this monstrosity of a filtration unit here. This is a whole house three-stage water filter system. Now, again, I've seen these used in water systems all over YouTube. A lot of people use them, but these are much larger, and you gotta one-up everybody, right? But these are actually meant to facilitate water to a whole house. It can produce 15 gallons per minute of water out of here. That's a lot. It might not seem like a lot, but that's almost 1,000 gallons an hour, so that's a lot of water that it can process, and what it does is this first one here is sediment. I told you our water has a lot of sediment in it, so that's gonna collect that sediment. I'm gonna have to replace that a lot, and then this one is gonna house carbon. It already has it in there, but it's a carbon filter, so it's gonna remove that chlorine from the water my county uses chlorine, and it's gonna remove that out of there, which means we don't have to use water conditioners. Yay, the water basically comes right out, ready to be put into the aquariums. It's all ready to temperature, and it's already treated so that we don't have to put water conditioner in it, which is fantastic. This third one here is a bunch of other stuff that it collects. I don't even know what it is. This system is actually advertised as a seven-stage filtration unit. That removes a lot of other stuff, but if I'm being honest with you, I may change it out. I might change that third one to just another carbon filter just in case it picks up the last bit because this system says it removes 97% of chlorine, so that might pick up that last little 3% if there is anything detectable that comes out of it. I don't know if it will yet because I haven't even filled it up yet. It'll make sense why I haven't filled it up yet as we move forward, so anyway, that's what the filtration system does there. This was an expensive unit. It was like $450, but because it's larger, it processes a lot more water, and I'm gonna have to change the cartridges less frequently. It says 12 months. I don't think I'm gonna get 12 months out of it here because we're gonna be running so much water through here. It's gonna be quite a bit of water that's gonna be run through this system, so I'm gonna probably have to replace the cartridges a lot more frequently, but that's okay. Costs to do in business, but where the cool stuff really happens is when it leaves this filter, it goes up here to these solenoid valves. Now, I did not invent this system. In fact, I want to credit two people that inspired me to do this this way. One is Steve Poland, a friend of mine that left YouTube quite some time ago, but when he was making YouTube videos, that man made some bangers. He's got videos on his channel that have way more views than any other video on my channel. It's absolutely nuts. He knows what he's doing, but he had other priorities, and he stopped YouTube. Hey, listen, life gets in the way. I get it, but the other person that I want to credit is the person who Steve credited in his video, which is also a very good friend of mine, and I've actually been in this fish room. I'm talking about the legend himself, Ted Judy. Ted Judy had a really nice fish room out in Wisconsin, and this is what he did in his system, and so I was at his house in 2019, I think it was, and I saw his setup and all of that, but I already knew what I was expecting because he had done videos way back in the day about his system, and I was like, if I'm ever doing something like this, that's how I'm gonna do it, and so very, very cool resource. I will link both those guys' videos on doing their water systems in the description of this video because it's like a Bible if you're gonna be setting up a system like this, and so the reason why I'm bringing those guys up, and there's a whole lot of others, too, on YouTube that have done similar systems. I don't want to act like I invented this system. This is all me. Nobody else has ever done this. I don't want to act like that. I wouldn't care even if I was the inventor of this system. There's a lot of people that have done this before, and I think that they deserve the credit that they, or they should get the credit that they deserve, but particularly those two guys because, well, they're friends, so I'm biased, but what this is is irrigation solenoid valves. These are meant to be out in your yard, which you can control with a controller to control a sprinkler system to water your lawn. I've got four acres here, so I'm not trying to water four acres worth of grass, but what it can also be used for is a system like this, so each one of these controls a rack of tanks. We're gonna have five racks or five zones in this building, and each one of these will control it. There's no reason to tell you which one is which right now. It doesn't matter, but basically, one of them is gonna go to the rack of 40 breeders. One is gonna go to, or actually two, are gonna go to the center section because there's gonna be 64 plus the eight plant tanks there, so 72 tanks in one section. I broke that up into two, and then zone four is gonna be the other wall that's gonna have all of the low boys on it and 20 highs, and then there'll be one specifically for the snail room. 36 tanks in the snail room, so each zone will control or will provide water to each one of those racks, and so the reason why that's cool is because this one here, I happen to know, goes to the snail room. It will. It's not all the way there yet, but it will. Lisa is not gonna want as many water changes being done in her snail tanks as I wanna do for the fish. That's just how she does it. She has a schedule that she wants hers done on, which is different from the others, but the cool thing is because of that controller there, I can set this particular zone on a schedule that can do whatever size water changes, however often she wants in her snail room, which is very cool. The other four going to all the fish tanks, I can set up my own schedule for those, which I'm thinking I'm gonna end up doing 25% in every single tank every single day, 365 days a year. That might be overkill. I may adjust that slightly, drop down to 20% or maybe do 25% every other day. I don't know. We're gonna see how it goes, but that's my plan right now is to do 25% water changes in every single tank every single day. Now, what I have set up here is I just have the system in place, got the controller in. None of it's even wired up yet. I have to go buy more of this wire because for some reason they give you like foot and a half of wire and it won't even reach. So I'm gonna end up buying some of this, but I'm not ready to run this system yet anyway. So it doesn't really matter that it's not wired up yet, but all of these wires are gonna end up going to this. This will connect to wifi. And so I'll be able to control everything with my phone, which is awesome. I'm really looking forward to that. So that's how the water system works. Now, if you're wondering what these are, these are pressure regulators, I guess is what they're called. It takes the water pressure from being really high, which could just explode into the tanks and drops it down to 30 PSI, making it a little easier, flow a little easier out of all of the little valves that we're gonna use to go into each tank. It just, it's not gonna overpower it and end up shooting like a fire hose into every single tank. It's gonna be a little bit more flowy and not overpowering. So these pipes all run up to the ceiling and they run across. We're gonna talk about that big fellow right there next week, but these pipes end up running over to here and that's where they stop. Now there's a particular reason why I stopped them there. This barn is in horrible shape. It is a mess right now because we've got our entire life turned upside down, but basically you can see kind of how it's gonna lay out. This pipe right here is gonna end up going all the way across and going through the wall into the snail room. And then each end of the, you know, the second one will turn here and go down this wall. The third and fourth one will go down the center and so on and so on. And this one that's longer is the one that's actually gonna end up coming straight down into the 40 breeder wall. So that's how this is gonna work, but I stopped it there. And the reason why I stopped it where I stopped it is because I don't have the racks in yet. And I want the rack, I don't know. It just feels better to me to have the racks in place and then put that water supply through and not be off or, you know, I mean, I want it to be right lined up perfectly with the back of the tanks. I can't build the racks because I don't have the tanks yet. The tanks are coming this week. And I also can't build the racks until I put the drains in because I'm using three inch PVC for all of the drains going all the way through this building and then I have to run it out of the building. I don't have those in place yet. So it's like a game of Clash of Clans. You have to do this before you can do that. And then once you have that done, you can upgrade this and then you can do that. It all has to be done in order. So I just figured I will leave those where they are. And then once I have the racks in place, put the pipes in to each rack, drill them out for all of the valves. And that's gonna be a super tedious job. I've done it so many times, drilling 159 holes and then tapping every single hole and installing the valves to supply water to every single one. And then have to do it all over again for the air system. We're gonna talk about the air system next week. I'm actually supposed to be working on that as we speak, but the air system is a very simpler, simpler, what does simpler mean? A very similar situation where I've started it, but I stopped it before or until I get the tanks in. So I hope this will all make sense as the project moves forward. But today or this week, my focus was water. I wanted to get the water system in place, set up for the most part, and ready to go for when the tanks come in here. And then once that was done, I started focusing on air. And the air also includes the mini split system, which I'll be installing today as I'm filming this video. Hopefully I get it installed today. Nothing's ever easy, but that's the plan for that. And then I've got tanks coming in in five days and it's the first batch of tanks, basically what it is. I only have the ability to carry so many tanks. So we've got 36, 20 highs coming in that are gonna go in Lisa's snail room. And the snail room is gonna be completely done, completely independent from everything else. So with those new tanks, when they come in, I'm gonna drill them all, build the racks, build the drains, put everything in, run the water system, get that system fully operational, and then move out to here. So I've got those 36 coming in. And then I also have the 1840 breeders that are gonna go there. So snail room first, then that one, and then the rack that's gonna go here. It's like, like I said, a process and it has to be done in a certain order. So if you're interested in air, we all love that, right? That's gonna be on the next video. We're gonna talk about the air pump, which I ordered from Gemco. It's a beast and it was expensive. And we're gonna talk about the setup of that air pump and how the whole air system is gonna go. And then also on the topic of air, we're gonna talk about the mini split system. So after that next video, we're gonna have all of the utilities set up here so that we can actually start building racks, putting in tanks, drilling them, getting them filled up and make this thing a reality. It's very cool. Little things are happening now, but the little things are adding up to get us closer to that goal. So I'm really excited about it. I'm not necessarily excited about installing this mini split. I've done it before and it's, you know, it is what it is. It's not a horrible job, but it's not a fun job either. I don't know, but it'll be nice to have that done and get some heat out here. It's not that we've never had heat out here before. We use heaters throughout the building, but it'll be nice to have a more consistent heat out here from that mini split system. It's not cold here at all right now. I mean, we're only talking about, you know, the October weather here. It's not cold, but it's gonna start getting a lot colder. And so it's a perfect time to get that heat up and running. So anyway, the longer I stand here running my mouth about this, the longer it's gonna be before I get this mini split installed. So come back next week, if you wanna see that and the air system, and then this project is gonna really start shaping up. Thanks so much. Subscribe, like, whatever, do whatever you wanna do. I gotta get back to work. Bye.