Marc's fish room build

[MarcW]

Thanks Victor, I'm hoping it's a good sign, they didn't come out for food tonight, although they did during a water change at lunch!

[MarcW]

We have just had our power restored after an outage of 4 hours, although that's very unusual for us, I'm very glad I had a backup.

I hadn't got around to charging the battery, but luckily it was charged to somewhere between 50 and 75% of its capacity already. It ran my linear piston air pump drawing around 60 watts for the whole outage and the inverter still showed ~50% remaining after that.

It seems that air driven filtration is a good option if you suffer from power outages, just one thing needs to be powered rather than multiple filters or pumps.

Now I don't have anything in my big tank yet which does use a pump in the sump, I'm thinking I'll get an additional battery so I can power the sump pump and air pump for about 8 hours in total.

Needless to say the battery is being charged as we speak!

[Jools]

Good work, I remain amazed at how many fishrooms with zillions of pounds/dollars/euros of fishes in them have no resilience especially when it comes to power.

Jools

[bekateen]

Your fish room is looking great, Marc! Keep the updates coming.

Cheers, Eric

[kvnbyl]

i lived in cambridge ma (USA) for about 10 years and was forced to buy an inverter and a couple of deep cycle marine batteries for my tanks. the inverter was a good one, tripp lite i believe and the batteries were good and i lost count of how many times that setup saved me from disaster, in the hot weather whenever the temp went over 85 the power would go out, might be 45 min but was often 4,5,6 hours. after a couple of years they finally fixed the issue, my house was at the end of the line and we were getting really low voltage, i measured it as low as 88 volts ac. and made them come out to the house and see it. threatened to sue them and they replaced about a dozen high end ($25.00 each) 48' lights that would flicker and burn off it i didn't happen to be home to turn them off and 3 window a/c units. i was using fluval 404s then and they would rattle and bang and i would have to turn them off to. short of it is: i felt it was my responsibility to do right by my charges and eventually moved and i had the chance to put in a backup standby generator and have never regretted it. still have the batteries and the inverter too, you can never be too careful

[MarcW]

Just thought I'd share a short video of the Jaguars. They are doing really well, and seem to have a good sense of the timing of the lights. If I put food in about 30 minutes before the lights go out they come out and scoff the lot!

[be4morgan]

It seems like the other fish is way playful than the other one that has decided to hide and tends to be shy. They are both lovely.

[bekateen]

Marc, I like your jaguars. Lovely fish!

Cheers, Eric

[MarcW]

Thanks Belle and Eric.

I'm really pleased with them, they seem to be thriving, still come out with the lights on to feed.

Also they seem to get on well with each other, hopefully that continues as they grow.

[MarcW]

I've got around to setting up my battery backup properly, we've had a fair bit of snow for the area I live in, 7.5 inches was the number from the MET office measured a few miles away. So I thought I'd better be ready, it turns out 1500 houses were without power most of last night nearby, but luckily we were OK.

Here it is, two 12v 50ah batteries connected in parallel, and the inverter, which is cabled through the wall to the fish room. The inverter uses an ethernet cable to allow you to remotely control it from a small panel the size of a beer mat, this is located in the fish room. So, although not perfect, it is now down to pushing a button and putting the air pump plug in the next socket along if there is an outage.

My next step is to see if this can all be automatically switched in the event of an outage for a reasonable cost.

[Fundulopanchax76]

You use technology of future to build your fishroom ! You raise fish keeping support in the next level !

[Jools]

Having some experience of this from an IT perspective, the other thing to do is run a test about once every six months, annually at least. Agreed, automatic load switching is imperative because, unlike zombie attack, bad weather outages can happen when you're not at home.

In my fishroom, I found that some filters did not restart on restoration of power after an outage, so this would help avoid that.

This might do the trick?

Jools

[MarcW]

Thanks for the link Jools something like that looks like it's worth a try, if it works a very good price too. I'll take a closer look at them and buy one to test out.

Agreed, my main concern is something happening when I'm not at home, I'll need to stick a note in my calendar to remind me to test it every so often too.

[MarcW]

So, thanks to Jools I've been investigating relays, automatic transfer switches, and reading a lot about solar and marine power systems!

From the research I've done, the cheap automatic switches on ebay/amazon seem to rely on a motor/servo to turn a lever, that in turn flicks off one breaker and opens another. The breakers are much like you would have in a fuse box/consumer unit at home. So although in principle that should work, it's far from ideal, as the breakers aren't designed to be used as a switch and could prematurely fail, there is also a slim chance that the motor/servo mechanism performing the switching could leave both supplies on or off, or just fail completely.

Given the investment and attachment to my fish, I decided to get a seemingly more advanced solution and bought one of these: https://www.victronenergy.com/transfer-switches/filax-2 it seems to do everything I want, once it arrives I'll let you know how it works and take a few pictures of the installation.

Thanks for setting me off in the right direction Jools!

As a side note, there are more local power cuts tonight although not impacting us, I suspect due to the snow melt and rain overflowing a small stream which has a few small sub stations along it. Once I have this switch installed I'm sure all the power issues will disappear forever!

[kvnbyl]

too bad you are not in the states, there is a company called Tripp Lite that makes 120 volt inverters (someone else might be interested)that keep the batteries charged and then automatically switch over when the power goes out and then when it comes back on the go into charge mode, top the batteries up and wait for the next time. when you add up the cost of fish and then the sentimental value it's not such a bad investment. I bought two deep cycle marine batteries and they can keep a 60 watt pump going for 36 (haven't gone past that i'm happy to say) our outages tend to be in the summer so heat is not an issue. (one advantage of living in les etats unis i guess). bet you could find the same there, maybe even a computer UPS.

[kvnbyl]

yeah, i posted this already, just had surgery and the pain meds are fuzzing things up :)

[Lycosid]

Hi Mark,
I think the device you bought will probably work better than fine, but I wanted to point out that transistors will also solve this problem. You want a transistor that is "off" (does not allow current through) when the biasing voltage is on (i.e., there is power in the house) and switches to "on" when the power drops, allowing current to flow from the battery to the fish room supplies.

If you have issues with the device you got, or if someone else is looking for something, I'd imagine that there's a pre-built transistor-based switcher out there.

[MarcW]

Thanks for everyone's responses, kvnbyl, I did find something like you describe available here, but as I already had the inverter and charger I thought I'd just try out the stand alone switch first. Sometime in future I'd consider moving to an all in one device, they did seem to be really good.

Lycosid, I believe the device I have gone for works on a similar principle, admittedly much more expensive than a transistor and a few other components, but my electrical knowledge has faded since college and I wanted to go for something which would just work out of the box. With a quick search I couldn't find something like you describe, I might have a look later on and see what I can find.

[MarcW]

Just feeding the fish tonight and caught a glimpse of one of the Jaguars. It has grown significantly in the short time I've had them, probably twice the length and about four times the weight! They also, unfortunately seem to be more shy as they have grown.

[MarcW]

I have now installed the power transfer switch. There are a few pictures below.

I have tested it and it seems to perform well so far, there is no interruption in power when switching between the mains (which I cut off at the fused spur into my water room) and the battery/inverter system, then once mains power is restored, it is checked for stability and power switches back over to mains after 30 seconds.

Now I need to run a few tests to see how the batteries cope with the inverter being in standby constantly, it draws up to 0.8 amps when in standby/no load, the charger delivers up to 3.5 amps although this is likely only early in the charging cycle, later in the cycle the voltage ramps up and the amps drop, so it will be interesting to see where things settle, I'm hopeful that the batteries will remain 90 to 95% charged while the inverter is on standby. I then plan to turn off the inverter once a month or so to allow the batteries to fully charge.

[bekateen]

Keep the thread going Marc. I enjoy learning from your progress.

Cheers, Eric

[Jobro]

Yes keep it up.

I was so close to buying a Vectron Energy MultiPlus (Inverter+Charger+Auto/On/Off) before and might now just go for it. Had a devastating 8hours power outage some years ago and am still very afraid of it happening again.

[MarcW]

Thanks Eric, I'll keep things updated as they progress, I think the next major update will be after the CSG convention, I'm hoping to add a few more fish over that weekend !

Jobro, I was very close to buying that exact unit, the multiplus looks really good, but as I already had the charger and inverter, I thought I'd just get the transfer switch. Eventually I'd like to get the multiplus, I'll see how things go for now, if you do get one let me know how you find it.

[Ruud109]

Do you have any pictures of your L260's in your tanks Marc?

[MarcW]

The lights have just gone off, I'll try to remember to get some pictures tomorrow. Don't get too excited though, normally it's just tails sticking out of caves!

[MarcW]

@Ruud109

Here are some pictures of the

L260

in their tank, the small one at the back by the sponge filter is one from their most recent spawn about 4 months ago.

[MarcW]

While I was away recently my inverter purchased from amazon, managed to drain my batteries completely in just over a week, just from being in standby. The charger couldn't overcome the parasitic drain from the inverter.

As I need this to be reliable and protect the investment I've made in the fish, I've ordered a Victron multiplus inverter/charger/transfer switch (https://www.victronenergy.com/inverters ... lti-500-va).

The manufacturer and reseller have assured me I won't get the same issues from this unit. There doesn't seem to be anything particularly wrong with the devices that I have now, but I guess the way I have put them together isn't the way they are intended to be used!

It arrives tomorrow, when I get some time to set it up I'll add some pictures. They'll also be pictures soon of the fish I'm picking up this weekend when I'm at the CSG convention.

[HenryCyday]

Thanks for sharing It will be really interesting to see the progression of the fish room youre building and the all plans you have, and how you do things, is there insulation behind the wood panels on the walls? Im only just getting prepared to start mine, clearing out the room, then painting it, then building all the racks. I started a new job at an LFS last week, and they are clearing the shop of some of their unwanted tanks, so far i have 3 3Г—1,5Г—1 and a 4Г—1Г—1, and obviously other tanks at home, more to follow, its seems the job came at the right time, also with an opportunity to learn even more and gain experience , I will obviously have a display tank also. Have you any particular fish in mind yet.

Good luck

[MarcW]

Hi Henry,

Welcome to Planet Catfish!

The wooden (ply) walls you see is a small room I built in the back of my garage to store and produce RO water, my battery backup system is also in there. It's a studwork wall with 75mm/3inches of foil covered foam board insulation, similar to Celotex.

In the fish room itself I use the same insulation in the walls, under the concrete slab floor and in the ceiling is 100mm or 4 inches of the same foil backed foam insulation. The walls and ceiling in the fish are plasterboard (or sheet rock depending on where you are from) over the insulation painted with a mould resistant wipe clean paint. Although as I run a dehumidifier in there it's actually much lower humidity than anywhere else in the house!

Good luck with your fish room, do as much research as you can before you start spending money, it really helped me to avoid some mistakes I surely would have made if I hadn't done the research!

The fish I have currently are listed in My Cats, you can see it if you click on my username I believe.

There will be some more after this weekend, I'll add pictures of them next week!

[MarcW]

Thought I'd leave a picture of some of the fish coming home from the CSG convention with me!