Reefs.org Forums

[JustPhish]

I'm curious for those of you that have freshwater fish in your stores how you run those systems. Is each tank an individual? Are they plumbed altogether? Do you run bio balls in a central filtration chamber or simply have a air driven sponge filter in each tank?

[swsaltwater]

I was running mine on Sponges and air filters. The maintanence is a bit more as far as algae wipes but the parasites dont kill you like a central system. If you plumb one get lots of UV and Diatom filter as freshwater spreads disease like the plague. I took my FW down as the FW market just fell out in Tucson. Saltwater doing so dang good I doubled the coral and will double fish within a few months assuming I still own it. I am selling the store to spend more time with the kids, and go scuba diving more. Tired of 80 hour weeks but am having second thoughts since we are doing awesome in spite of the economy. Can't imagine how well we would be had the economy kept going.

[Raskal311]

We run both and I perfer the sponge + airpump.

[swsaltwater]

If you go Sponge you can get em in bulk from Ginger INC.....

[seamaiden]

No longer running anything, but... way back when, I had an opportunity to work with both types of systems. Hands down I prefer individual tanks. MUCH much easier to keep disease under control, and if you run out of room for QT you can set up a display tank as a QT, if absolutely necessary I'd tape up paper and darken the lights. Centralized systems I could never be free of ick.

[mwp]

Realize this is a very old post, but since I spent a LOT of time on the FW side of things way back in the day, I thought I'd chime in.

First retailer I worked in ran UG filters on a blower, with heaters in each. Worked "so so".

Second retailer I worked at had all the fish systems on central filtration. This worked better. Regarding disease, all systems had UV sterilizers on them. Just as important on a FW central filtration system with loads of fish coming in and out. If a UV went out or went without a change though, forget it, disease spread (just like all the other comments). There was some "stability" and "ease" of working with the systems this way. Tanks did have gravel on the bottom, which was cleaned regularly as part of the water changes.

Third retailer I worked with had the old DAS retail systems with shared internal power filters. Despite all the headaches of maintenance (largely pumps going out) they actually worked pretty well.

When I went to the wholesale / hatchery side of things to do the Cichlids, it was a return to individual tanks all running with sponge filters off blowers. Some of the really large tanks or tanks with large fish would have supplemental power filtration. It took half a day to do 50% water changes weekly, but man did stuff GROW and do well. Still, it was a lot of work, and in such a large scale setup, it's arguable that central filtration would've made life much easier. But I think this was a much more economical route to go.

I'm planning to keep a few FW tanks again in the near future if I can, and while I could probably put them on a central system, I'll probably just keep them separate.

[condiman]

I am so glad I found this post I was going to ask a similar question. I finally got an official office opened up for my service company and I wanted to know what would be best for filtrations in my holding tanks. I want to keep individual for everything and I know air is best when it comes to economical running. But I wasnt all to sure about the sponges.