Your shrimp food defines what type of person you are. Join the organic elite at Shrimp nv.com and shop with superiority. Shrimp food has never been this self satisfying. Featuring organic, natural, fair trade, macrobiotics, sustainably harvested, farm to table, spirulina infused, antioxidant rich, seven grain, maybe twelve grain, nah, whole grain, gluten free, cruelty free, vegan vagina, non genetically modified, zero trans, fat free range shrimp food at prices you simply won't believe. It's that or are you more of the factory farmed, genetically altered, hormone infused, horse meat infected, slave labor harvested, agribusiness supporting, shell, rot inducing, common shrimp keeper? Yeah, we didn't think so. You're just like us. You belong. Shop with people just like you. People that drive hybrids and listen to Fish podcasts and argue about feeder guppies. It's unscalable elitism for the sustainable crowd. Open up your tank and look down at people. It's nutritious. It's the shrimp envy food line. Go to Shrimpnv.com and use promo code aquariumguys at checkout to save 10% off your entire order. Shrimpnv.com. It's only natural. This week's shoutout is Aquatics Unlimited in Greenfield, Wisconsin. I went there for a convention this last week, and let me tell you, elite, amazing store. It's like I should have paid admission. Check it out. Aquatics Unlimited. Thank you. Welcome to the aquarium, guys. Podcast. Jimmy, we're back.

What?

Back again?

Where we been?

Well, we we said here, we said Cyanora to the MCRIB. That was the that was the last.

Time we got together was during the MCRIB phase.

That was it was during the MCRIB phase.

My God, I haven't had diarrhea in so long.

It's been a hot minute.

Gave up McRib's.

What's that, madam?

McRib's were back.

Oh, they were. The last time we did a podcast six months ago.

They finally got rid of them for permanently. That's what at least they say for marketing.

Now they're not.

Thank God. I hope they did.

Oh, you people.

They'll be back next winter.

I am your host, Rob Zolson.

I'm Jim Colby.

And I'm Adam El Nashar.

Today we are privileged to have Michael from all things Fish. That's his YouTube channel. Michael, thank you for coming, man.

Yeah, great. It's a pleasure. How's it going, guys?

Well, great, now that you're here.

Longtime listener, first time caller. I've tuned into the podcast, and you guys kind of inspired me a little bit to start doing YouTube crap and spew my own information across the inner web.

Oh, no, we're responsible, jimmy, you hear that?

Look at that. We're responsible for that one birth here not too long ago.

Oh, yeah. Someone in Chat said that they had a three week old baby listening to our voice during sound check and the baby fell asleep. Yeah, just dead to the world.

But my thought was we probably helped them conceive it nine months ago when they were listening to our podcast, because sometimes we're pretty sexy.

Because you're a smooth criminal. That's right. Michael, thanks for coming on. But you're a fan of mine, I'm a fan of yours. That's how we got together. I started searching YouTube scouring, if you will, for good content, for people's, recommendations on how to build budget fish rooms and majority of the content out there. And I don't know if they're good people out there, but I don't know what they're realizing, what they're doing. They're just showing off their cool fish rooms. They're not actually helpful. I hate to use the term, but measuring they're on YouTube, they'll be like, oh, look at my cool. It's like pimp my ride for fish nerds. That's basically the context. Is that on YouTube, pimp my ride? Or I thought you said rank measuring metaphorical. Rank measuring. Like my fish room is cooler than your fish room. And they don't actually give details on how they did it, the thought process behind it, and most of them won't admit what went wrong. I mean, let's be real. Even like the show tanked, half of those tanks never lasted past six months because you couldn't maintenance them.

Yeah, we know people who own some of those tanks we've seen on TV that are in private hands now because the businesses have taken them down because they're cool tanks. You just can't maintain them.

Well, that's where it's different. So I found Michael's YouTube channel and now I'm a subscriber big fan. I reached out saying, hey, your videos actually show some of the processes, the good, the bad, the ugly of how you build a fish room. Actually moving your fish room from one house to another, it's just golden material you're not getting anywhere else. And I'm here to pick your brain. Michael, are you ready?

Yeah, well, you asked me if I was ready earlier and I'm always ready to talk fish. I don't know if people are always ready to listen to me talk fish. Yeah, definitely ready. And one of the reasons that I started the whole YouTube channel is exactly that. Because you said it took you a while to search the internet for good content. And in the age of the Internet, it's so easy to put content all over the place, right? And it doesn't matter if the content that you're producing is quality or accurate or not. If you can offer some entertainment value, you will gain a viewership and eventually you'll realize that, hey, I can make a couple of bucks and then you're going to make more content. But the content just gets worse and worse and worse as you go. So one of the things that inspired me to actually start on YouTube is to kind of put the kibosh on some of the garbage information that's being spread around and produce some quality content. You said you were looking for fish room builds. There's a million fish room build videos out there because people realize that it gets views on YouTube. And that's the downfall of YouTube is it turns into a popularity contest, and I'll tell you right away, I have a small shot. I have a small channel. I stream randomly on occasion. I produce videos randomly on occasion. And I'm not here as some sort of popularity contest. I'm going to tell you how I feel, and we're going to dig into the facts and reasons behind why things do or don't work. And you see, a lot of these people, it's easy to throw money at fish tanks or throw money at a fish room, be like, oh, look what I did. But people never follow up on it, right? So especially one of the things that drives me insane and I'm going off on a little bit of a tangent here, so pardon me, but one of the things that drives me insane is freaking stupid product reviews and unboxing crap. Just because you took it out of a box and turned it on for five minutes does not make that the best freaking light in the world, right?

Hold on, hold on. Did they sniff it because they have a requirement they have to touch it. They had to sniff it to measure it, and then that throw it down a set of stairs, and then suddenly it's the best light of their life, right?

It was packaged really well, and it says that it's kind of waterproof and it has 400 LM, which nobody actually knows what a lumen really is, but.

They got paid for those ads, you know what I'm saying?

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah. If only we were paid, then we wouldn't have this biased opinion.

That's right.

And that's one of the things I've had several we'll say foreign, more budget type companies contact me. Like, hey, will you make a video of this product if we send it to you? I was like, sure, but if it sucks, I'm going to tell you it sucks. Like, oh, well, hey, we want you to promote it. I was like, I'm not going to promote a piece of garbage. I said I'll test it, but if it sucks, I'm not making a video.

Treat it like tinder. That's right.

If you're a foreign manufacturer and you're listening to this, send us your shit. We'll have a lot of fun with it, I promise you. In fact, we're working on a wish.com episode right now. Jimmy and I got to get a lot of junk together. But before we go too far in Michael, normally we do a couple of recaps of the things we found over the week. But I also want to introduce we have my friend and fan live in the in person audience today. Zach from King Aquatics is the is the name.

He's here in here live with the studio with us.

Hi, friend.

Yeah, I'm right here live in studio B.

Studio B. You stopped at D's Fishco. You bought some good stuff. You got to at least share that.

Oh, yeah. Stopped at these fish on the way through and grabbed a couple of beta opiate. Super cool fish, brand new to the US. Actually. And then I got a pair of beta hendra.

That's what we call the fish Nerd flex right there. When you get a new species of the hobby and you're one of the first people in your area, much less state, to get them, do you do what I do?

You buy something really cool fish, and then on the way home, you go, I'm going to be up all night trying to make room for these.

Yes, exactly.

That's what I do. Because why would you pre plan and go, I'll come back tomorrow for those. After I get my tank ready, I'll go home and stay up till freaking 02:00 in the morning and put them away. I still have fish to put away when I get home today.

I like how you guys are all, oh. When you get a new fish to the hobby, it's the first time it's ever been in the United States. When I get a new fish, it's usually, Adam, you need to talk to.

Fish and Wildlife or the federal government, because it's probably illegal.

Just stop knowing a guy.

Exactly.

If I'm not mistaken, the beta opie opie, that's, like, one of the smallest betas out there, right?

It is.

It's so cool. And it's, like, pretty brilliant red.

Yeah, it's like a bright red.

He sent you home with a cup of I'm assuming that's almond leaf water. So it's nice and yeah, nice and tan, but you can still see the red really bleed through. So I am pulling up for news this week before we get into the deep dive with Michael. We got the Minnesota DNR, now that it's January, have amended and added banned fish to the Minnesota DNR no. No list.

Oh, so you got Frank joy. So? So. Adam, pay attention.

Hey, we we only got so many bleeps to use.

Adam.

We have to pay for those.

Will we bleep them now?

We have been for a while. The ducks have been far surpassed.

I'm sorry.

No, you're not. Okay.

You turd monkeys.

So any guesses to what the list would be?

Probably dolphins and sperm whales.

Dolphins and sperm whales are goldfish on that list.

All right, so here's they got to be here's the email. So we're on The Insider. Mandy from the DNR has been on the podcast twice now.

She loves us.

When this list was announced as a proposition, I reached out back to the DNR and said, hey, you should come on the podcast. And of course, the PR representative for the DNR told you to ask was very scared of coming on the podcast. She says, thank you for the offer, but I know where this goes normally.

I've heard that, too. Outside the school.

Know that only Adams that here. And I feel like this list is kind of fair.

Why am I don't even know what's.

On the list yet.

Well, because most of it isn't your house.

Because that's the point. You had a comment before you knew it was on the list.

Well, because they usually put something stupid on the list that isn't even going to okay, let's listen to the list.

All right, stop.

So here's a list. Mitten crabs. There's going to be a bit of redundancy here because there's things on this list that are federally banned, but Minnesota is adding just for double downing, I don't know why. So they have jurisdiction to say we can take those instead of the feds. But anyways, mitten crabs, Nile perch, snakehead, and any type of the walking catfish family, which I feel is all fair. I agree, niall perch would not walking.

Catfish aren't going to survive. Nile perch aren't going to survive, but I understand, I'm perfectly okay with this right now.

They can wreck some havoc during the summer.

So the walking catfish and Nile perch, they've done research on this and apparently this is unofficial, unreleased information. The rumor is that they've actually seen in another state. Someone released Nile perch into a winter rising state that actually gets not as cold as Minnesota, but enough to kill the Nile perch. And in the small period of time that the monster of the Nile perch was there, destroyed an ecosystem, I could believe it. The things on here, some of the.

Walking is that your scientific interpretation there, Adam?

Yeah, they're evil. They're just evil. And the walking catfish, they're concerned that they will adapt to the climates.

They will they'll walk into your house and turn up the thermostat and wait till spring and then walk out the door and say, see, they aren't walking. By Felicia.

Yeah, okay, keep going. I'll listen.

By Felicia.

All right, then, let's see here. They have conference of the Great Lakes. I'm trying to see where they got these. Least wanted. Invasive species is the next category. And I'm not sure what yellow floating heart is, but apparently that's now on the band list.

Is that a plant?

According to this, it's not a plant.

Oh, okay.

So we'll just see tensch, golden mussels and then of course, they finally added and this was expected, the marble crayfish, right? Marble crayfish is the one that self clones that every single crayfish out there is identical and just self clones. This has been a massive problem in Michigan and other states.

Marma crabs, right?

Yes, that is one and the same. So this not shocked that that's on the list. In fact, I feel like this took too long to get on the list.

So I need to get rid of them is what you're saying.

Or shut up about it, or yeah, just keep quiet. If you purchase them, keep the receipt. For instance, I always talk about the.

Not a receipt from me either.

Not a receipt from Jimmy. I got the golden penis fish the Dojo loach penis fish. The dojo loach. And I still have one old man left, and I have the receipt from when I purchased them, right before the law changed. So any time you would get audited, you'd be like, here's the papers, and then that's the last one I can have. Now, will that keep you out of a court of law? I don't know, but keep your papers, people.

Actually, what do you say if you have a receipt for said banned species and you're grandfathered in, if you go buy another one after that one happens to pass, you still have the receipt, right? That's right. This fish should be twelve inches by now, and it's clearly only six, so it's not the same one.

I only feed it every other day.

See, the DNR aren't dumb people. They'll look at the receipt and go, this was twelve years ago. The fish only have a five year lifespan at best. All right, do your homework.

It had one baby.

It had one baby. Tough baby's, not grandfathered in.

Kill it.

Anyways. Golden clams actually already been established in Minnesota, and they've had impacts much like the zebra mussels, but not to the near extent. Tube nose golbies. I have no idea why they're on the list other than I know that they're aggressive to other gobi species and they're just a little aggressive fish. The only one that really shocks me here is the eastern mosquito fish. Eastern and western mosquito fish stocked for mosquito control have been invasive places. When they are introduced, two species were considered a subspecies of a single species. Western mosquito fish are listed as prohibited species in Minnesota. Adding eastern mosquito fish will help reduce the risk that will be relative of the one that's bad in Minnesota. So again, western mosquito fish already banned because they can live in Minnesota climate. The Eastern mosquito fish is added because that's what people were probably just faking and be like, bro, no, these aren't Western, they're East Coast yo.

So it's kind of like when you have a tiger problem, then you just get some lions to eat the tiger.

Makes sense. Bro, these aren't tigers. And you're just like, there's paint on your cat. I don't know what's going on either way.

I can find both.

I'm looking at this and stuff, and the golden clams. I just looked at one of my lists this afternoon. Golden clams that you could import and you only have to buy 300 of them.

Yeah, nice easy numbers. Now, I don't know why this is on the list, but jumping worms, this is not necessarily an aquatic species. And then of course, they do have some plant species that they've added, but we're here for a fish podcast, so I feel like that is a more.

Than plant on there.

Whoa, we can't talk about plants here.

Your plant is I mean, we only have so much time.

Oh, shut up, Robbie. Let us talk about plants.

I'm here to talk to you, Michael. Come on, now.

Michael wants to talk about plants. We'll talk about plants all freaking night.

Well, I don't have that list prepared, so flu queue.

I mean, we did already talk about one plant. That yellow floating heart is a plant.

It is, is it? Why would they put that on the list for actual and is it pretty?

And would I want one?

No wonder I don't know it all right. That's beautiful. Zach's got pictures I want to see.

Yeah, that's a nice looking plant.

It's not a bad looking plant.

Looks almost like a lily.

Perennials. It's a terrestrial plant that can go completely submerged the more you know.

And speaking of that, I sent out to you guys the other day about the kid. Now that is putting house plants under glass bowls in his aquarium. Have you seen that?

I did see that, actually.

Yeah. I sent it to these guys, and they don't ever look at anything I send them, to be fair.

Do you know how many reddit posts Tom has sent us in 2022? Thousands. Thousands.

That's because Adam doesn't have any friends.

We're his best friends.

Only friends.

Only friends. No, that's you're. Only fans, Robbie.

There we go.

Fans where you spend all your money.

You have to pay for that pornhub.

No.

Well, try to get back on track. Since you guys mentioned pornhub, we are beginning to get a few submissions in from people of videos of their fish breeding. And if we could send those in aquariumguyspodcast.com, bottom of the website, you'll find some of our information, send it to us in discord, preferably, but we have an email. I'll check. Maybe send us those videos because we still want to do an aquarium guys pornhub channel.

Do you think they'll let us put it on pornhub?

Oh, sure they would. For sure.

There's people that play video games on pornhub nowadays.

I've never been on pornhub, so I don't know.

So help us out.

Have you ever seen Bridget the Midget on pornhub?

I have not.

Okay, we'll talk about that later. Okay.

So, Jimmy, you wanted to bring up a post from our aquarium guys community on Facebook?

Yeah, I just thought it was really cute. I don't have Facebook. My wife does. And somebody wrote on made a TikTok saying that his niece called an aquarium a water zoo. And I just thought that was really cute. It was a water zoo. But let's look at the rest of them, too that they had.

All right, so these are all responses in the comments section to what my daughter calls that water zoo. So then, of course, everybody has to tell what their kids say. So my daughter calls it would call churches Jesus stores. Churches the Jesus store.

That's cool.

My daughter calls quesadillas a Spanish grilled cheese. There you go.

It makes sense.

Yeah, it does. My kid calls robes pajama jackets.

That makes sense. Total sense.

We'll do a couple more here. My son calls this one here bottom one. My daughter didn't know what the word for thirsty is, so she says she was water hungry.

I love that.

That one I don't really believe, really.

I mean, if I want a beer, I'm beer hungry, I'll tell you that much.

I've actually heard you try to do that one. My eight year old calls the Waffle house. Hibachi. Breakfast.

It's kind of cute stuff.

There's a lot of memes on the aquarium guys Facebook page. Certainly. Check it out.

Yeah.

So we were going to talk about.

Water zoos today, right, Adam? You got some news. He wasn't prepared.

He wasn't.

Really? No news at all?

No. Because you basically told me I can't have anything now in the state of Minnesota.

Oh, okay. Well, yeah, that's true.

I know a guy.

I will get things.

Speaking of knowing a guy, so our last podcast that we did, I mentioned I had a couple of books that I was willing to let go. And Adam is one that said, I bet you people are interested in these books. And so now we have a new friend, Joe out in St. Louis who purchased the books for me, and I sent him out. He just received them on Saturday. So shout out to Joe in St. Louis. Thanks for purchasing the books for me and stuff. And thanks to Adam for pointing out that people probably be interested. I thought I was the only person left in the world that still read books.

I have them.

I have a ton of books.

I just don't read them.

Books all the time.

Yeah, see, here the young guys here at the table. I've got books. I just use them to prop up the table.

Well, there's literally we're in the podcast studio in Studio B, and there's, I don't know, four piles of books right behind our monitors. Using it to prop up my monitor.

Yeah, pretty much.

And how many of them have you read?

Less than 20%.

Yeah, absolutely.

That sounds about right.

One tops.

Hey, I at least read through my porn magazines. Amazonus Magazine. Oh, yeah, that's my dirty book. You know what I'm saying?

I still love the information that we get from Amazonus Magazine, from tropical fish hobbyists and stuff. And a lot of it gets recycled over the years. I mean, I remember reading some of this stuff back, but I love that people are still putting out stuff out there for us fish nerds to continue trying to expand the horizons of young people here and keep them interested in the hobby.

God bless you, Matthew Pederson.

I've got a copy at Sunken Gardens by Karen Randall right next to me. But we said we can't talk about plants.

Sure we can. It's just Robbie that thinks he's we.

Can'T talk about Minnesota banned plants because I don't have the list so you're.

In South Dakota, technically, Iowa, but South.

Dakota is home, technically, Iowa. You know what? Robbie will get your address, and I'll send you some of my plants.

I'm pretty sure those plants, Adam, can't go across state lines.

We call it the weed.

I mean, I've shipped plants across state lines that maybe shouldn't be shipped across state lines.

Excellent.

As long as no one knows, it doesn't matter.

Apparently, I found it in a ditch. I didn't know what it was.

That's the guy with a kilo of cocaine in his pocket. There you go. Well, I didn't it's my friend's drugs.

It's what we call it in there.

Yeah.

All right. Any other news, Jimmy?

Oh, no, not much. We're still expanding fish rooms. Robbie's working on his fish room. I'm working on my fish room. I just added another 30 tanks, and Robbie's just added a bunch of tanks here over the weekend.

It's been pretty fantastic. I'm rebuilding from helping Dee's fishco, because I basically wiped my tanks and set up the fish store. Now I finally get to rebuild my fish room, and I've decided, instead of using the space for cool things that Robbie wants, we're going to just take a moment, take a breath, and see if I can't find some species that need help propagating. It doesn't matter if they're muted colors or whatever else, if they're something maybe endangered in the natural habitats, if they're something lost to the aquarium hobby, those are the fish that I'm looking for. And I got right now somewhere around 16 to 20 tanks. I want to double that and use most of those tanks for a propagation of that type. I've had a taste of most fish. That's what I'm looking for. So if you're listening to this podcast and you'd be like, man, I got this really old set of, like, goudiads. How does you pronounce that?

I have no idea.

Guday the official pronunciation.

So, yeah, if you're a guy that's got, like, an old set of those that literally no one's heard about, that need some love to be kept alive in the hobby, send us a message.

No. I turned you on to something the other day. You called and asked me about something that I saw a while back. Did you ever hear back from that gentleman yet?

Yes, I got a message back.

He had some crazy stuff, too.

He has a lot of different.

Subspecies and species.

Well, yeah, a lot of different projects just like that. So I'm messaging back and forth to see what he'll get me.

Okay, well, so, Robbie, the fish that you are looking for, do you care about legality?

The Minnesota DNR cares about it, so.

I have to I'm saying we're just talking might be under certain things that you aren't supposed to have.

Also a smaller size. Let's put some criteria on this, okay? I don't want any guppy. I want no guppy. I don't care if your guppy is cool. I don't care if it's a cool swamp guppy. I don't care if it's some rare ENDLER. I already have Adam's endlers. That's enough propagation in my life. No guppy or guppy like thing. It can be a live bearer, but no guppies. Two, no monster fish. Right? My max size that I want is like a four, maybe five inch creature. Those are hard restrictions for me.

Okay, I have some crypto heroes and Eludius Fry coming out my ears right now. If you want some, I'll send them your way. I mean, they're technically they're keras fish. I don't know why because they're super easy to spawn.

They look beautiful too. So I actually don't know the history on how rare they are, but that sounds like something up my alley. I saw those videos.

I wouldn't say that they're rare. I mean, you can find them, they're just not super common. Like I said, they're on the cares list there's. That wonderful. I've kept them a few different times now, and I'll breed them up and share them around the area until the area is saturated and then I'll move on. And then I'll get a wild hair and start picking them up again and spawn them. I actually got mine from Tristan. From Tristan's. Tropical fish over in Wisconsin.

Shout out. Well, that's exactly what I want to do. Saturate an area, expand that area, and maybe find something else I can help out. Last piece before we start the podcast of my news, Alexander Williamson, which is on the Secret History. Living in your aquarium. Yes. That's a long name for YouTube. Great YouTube channel. He's been on the podcast multiple times. Wealth of knowledge. If you want someone that knows fish history, that's your man. He contacted me and we've been working for a while now and he actually started his own podcast. That's part of the aquarium guys family called Fishery. F-I-S-T-O-R-Y. It's I believe now on all major platforms. And he's going to be unloading some of more his hidden lecture content talking about fish history, sciences and other news. So if you want a lecture based super informational fascinating stuff.

Fascinating.

It's great if you got like an hour and a half drive back and forth to work to really deep dive into some topics, check it out. Fishery. And that's I believe Fisherypodcast.com is the website. Otherwise you can find on Spotify, Apple Music, all Amazon whatever platform you play.

And we'll put a link on our website also.

All for sure, dearbot. It'll be in the show notes. All right, well, should we get the party started?

Yes.

So Jimmy, I think I'm going to start with just our problems before we get in.

We don't have 4 hours for this.

Well, any good dense it down, any good fish room builder has wanted to do some sort of overflow and they've drilled tanks. Now this gentleman that. We're talking to Michael on his video, didn't talk about the drilling, so I'm going to ask questions. Michael, please. How do you drill tanks? I have a rack of 910 gallon tanks. It took 18 total tanks before we got the holes and the ones we.

Needed, and two boxes of bandaids.

Well, I've got eight, plus a few that aren't filled up. Anyway, eight Acrylic tanks that are drilled.

Acrylic cheated.

Here's the deal on that. So I got those from a research project up at the U of M. Nice. They were more or less giving them away, so I stole them. But if you want my honest opinion and I know this is unpopular and contradicts a lot of stuff, I'm not really a fan of automated water changes and drilling tanks and stuff. And I'll tell you why, okay? Because if you had a store or something, I could get on board with that because you're bringing in fish. You're moving fish. Myself as a breeder and somebody that just does it for fun. Right. I'm not super serious about it. My fish room is maybe I think I've got 20 tanks with water and maybe 35 set up total. If you automate things, does it create a better environment for the fish? Potentially. Right? Because you're getting clean, fresh water in there on a regular basis. But as soon as you automate things, you no longer have to get your hands in that fish tank. You're not in that fish tank looking at things and seeing what's going on. You're not paying attention to the little nuances and subtle changes that happen because you understand whether I do anything to this tank or not, it's going to get a water change. So you may not notice things are changing in a positive or negative direction.

Right.

So what you're telling people is that's listening, that they need to get wet and stay wet. Stop this automation, get your hands dirty. See, the reason that I'm using drilled tanks is I want a recirculating system. I don't want something easy, water change me. I have 910 gallon tanks all drilled that have water flowing into them and then all flowing out to one singular sump. And I have that so I can have more equilibrium. So if one tank crashes out, it has the enough water to be that 150 gallons that I get to be spoiled on just a better water system. I have a really high end UV filter to stop the spread of Ick or any other diseases. And so far, and this is the moment that it changes. I have been disease free for many years with that system as long as.

I have the UV. Or are you talking about yourself?

The system very clear on that, and.

You hit the nail on the head with the caveat to a central system like that is you need to have something in place, such as a UV sterilizer to prevent pathogens from traveling from one tank to the next, and you better have a quality quarantine process in place.

Oh, yeah. You add one thing and they're all going to get it, potentially, for sure.

Things go south in one tank. I mean, it's not one tank. It's not one group of fish that's affected it's everybody, everything.

Go ahead.

And then additionally, I keep a wide variety of species. I overcomplicate things for myself and make a little more work for myself because I keep fish anywhere from I have some Rift Lake Cichlids. It's a pseudocrino labyrinth. Well, it's not really a rift lake, I guess, but pseudocrine labyrinth. It's officially undescribed species, so it's SP dark eventual is what they're called. But they're from Lakewiru. That's MW E-R-U. Oliver Lucanis brought the species in, and they prefer pretty hard water, so I usually use tap water for them. That's tap water here is about 500 to 550 TDs. And then on the other end of the spectrum, I have got a variety of rainbow fish that I usually keep under 100 TDs, and I've got everything in between. So on a central system, if you have a lot of fish that enjoy the same water parameters, or if you have fish that are flexible to water parameters, sure, that works. But having isolated tanks not only helps prevent the spread of pathogens, but you can have different temperatures, different water parameters, et cetera.

I'll throw this out there because I'm on the fence. I've had both. And anyway, the one thing that I enjoyed got to go drinking Coke. Excuse me. Had a fur ball. But I tell you, I've had it both ways. The one thing that I did enjoy when I had all my angel fish pairs plumbed together is as soon as a couple of pairs would start spawning, the pheromones would go into the other tanks. Yes.

And that's exactly what's happening.

There's so many, and it would figure it would just turn into a big angel fish orgy. And what sucked about it, all of a sudden, I had 50 pairs in one system.

They all drop in the same night.

You'd have 18 spawns in one night, and then you're up till 03:00 in a freaking morning.

That's one long night.

Yeah, and that worked spectacular. But if you're importing and you got new stuff constantly coming in, it doesn't matter how good your sterilizer is, always somebody's going to come in with a new form of AIDS or Syphilis or Gonorrhea, and they're going to tell you to take down your whole system.

I've been using it, and we use this at the fish store, and I'm a firm believer in this. What you do is if you have a recirculating system and you've set this up, get yourself an industrial pond, UV sterilizer, the thing will blow anything out of the water. And we use it as a quarantine rack at these fish. It's kind of like people normally look at them as a salt water display. We use this recirculating system to put into quarantine because people continually will walk in the store saying, hey, I'm done with aquarium. I want to dump my convict cichlids on you. And then we put them back in the quarantine rack because the industrial UV filter gets out all the gun herpacylates in the tank, and we really don't have to worry much about stuff spreading. And then we use that as the quarantine basis for three weeks, me and mine. Again, knock on wood. I have not spread diseases through that tank because of the industrial UV filter. But there's still some diseases out there, few and far between, that cannot get sterilized by that UV filter. And it's still a risk. But my particular use case for that rack is the benefit. But here nor there, we can talk about that. We're here about more fish room builds.

I'll just tell you it's a case.

By case thing with regards to a fish room, right? So if you are mass producing a single type of fish, such as angels, and you have a very healthy strain of fish and you're comfortable with it and you have faith in it, then it works great because like I said, the pheromones are released and you get benefits from it. And all the fish need fairly similar water parameters. I said it's not a one size fits all thing. Well, I don't know.

Yeah, there's use cases for everybody's types of fish keeping. I mean, there's pros and cons. It depends on what you want to do.

So I have 130 2nd story here. I knew somebody down in the southern United States.

You knew a guy?

Knew a guy. And this guy happened to cheat on his wife. He owned a huge freaking building full of fish. And when you have everything linked together like that and you pour five or six gallons of bleach in one tank, he lost about $200,000 worth of fish. Okay? She was mad.

I didn't take a minute. So, Michael, what you haven't heard, you said you're a listener and fan of the podcast. There's a storytime episode that we had, and you told us about a certain fish store owner in a mall that they cut all the tops and released all of the animals released into the mall. Now you're telling us a story of another person that got pissed off because of some other relationship issue and then bleached out all their tanks, five gallons of bleach.

And like I said, killed. It was a wholesale operation place, and I used to buy it.

It was a wholesale store.

Okay, right. And he was cheating on his wife. She walked in after finding out about it, and his whole life was this fish business, clearly. And she bought a case of bleach, which would be, I guess it would be six gallons of bleach, poured them all in one tank, and it just went down the line circulating through. Yeah.

You deserve the award of the Jerry Springer of the fish world.

Oh, there's so many freaking whacked up people. Because when you tell your wife that you love the fish more than her, probably not good.

Well, why is he cheating on his.

Thing in the first place?

I don't know, Adam. Maybe he found her sister is more attractive. I don't know.

Well, it's still entertaining. You don't piss off a woman when you tell them that you have something more important than them, because they will find a way to wreck it.

See? And that is tonight's episode. We all learned something.

All right, back to the topic at hand.

Michael, to sum up what you just said, though, women ruin everything. Is that what I heard?

No, I'm just saying don't piss them off.

Yeah.

Mother of your four children.

We already get caught. Called misogynistic enough. All right? We can tone it down.

Oh, women love our podcast. Not even a little bit.

Michael, I want to point out one of the YouTube videos. The YouTube video should be in our show notes if you want to refer to this, listeners. But you have this wonderful YouTube video showing how you've built a fish room. And then actually, I believe other videos tag onto this, picked that up, moved it to a new location where you moved to number one. Why? The location looks like you have an extra large closet. You built it in.

As far as the location goes, still in the same building. My house.

Oh, nice. You just upgraded it.

I moved it from one room to the next. And you don't need to have a lot of space to accomplish a lot of goals in this hobby. That's one of the benefits of this hobby. As long as you're not into ridiculously large fish, you can have everything from pseudomogil rainbow fish up to angel fish in a variety of different South American or even African cichlids in a very small room. And if you watch that video, the initial video is my old fish room build. It was roughly about seven or eight foot by maybe ten or eleven foot room. I can't remember the exact dimension, what.

We call an ice house up north here.

Right? So it'd be a shanty. By all means. It's a shanty sized space, but I ran 25 plus tanks in it, plus I stored most of my equipment in there. And when I took the room down, I was breeding one species of Chalathar allen chalatharina rainbow fish, two species of melanotania rainbow fish, four species of pseudomogills, maybe half a dozen endlers, two or three different rice fish, a couple of killies feeder guppies.

I get it. I got to correct you. Pinky out.

That's not what I said.

He said killy fish.

No, the endlers.

You don't need to spend a lot of money or you have a lot of space to be productive and accomplish a lot depending on your goals, right? And that goes back to the case by case thing, of course. What are your goals and what's your exact situation? Well, I don't mean don't get me wrong when I say it doesn't take a lot of money. I'm not saying go be cheap on stuff, right? Because cheap equipment just results in you buying more equipment down the road and spending more money. Be reasonable about the money that you spend and what you can expect to get out of it.

Michael, help us map out for listeners, because we got people that don't have fish room that are thinking about doing a fish room. That's probably why they're clicking on this podcast and they want to hear and try to build a fish room. So you're saying it starts with make a plan, what do you want to do with your fish room? So me, I explain what I want to do. Jimmy uses his as a project for essentially two main fish. He has angel fish that he collects, and he has different guppies that he collects. So, Jimmy, what was your thought process.

Behind yours on mine this last time? Now, after how many years, I decided that I just wanted to get high end guppies and kind of go back to the Steve Rubicky thought process. Steve Rubiki has been on this podcast from Angels Plus, wonderful guy, and he said, I would rather raise 200 high end fish than 2000 regular fish. He said, it's less work, it's less space, and it's more money. And so with that thought process now, right now, my whole thing is I've been working with Crowntail Guppies, finding out that out of my six suppliers, I can only get them from one person. And every time I bring them in, I usually will they'll come in pregnant. I'll get some babies and I'll end up losing them within six or eight weeks no matter what I do to them. But now that I'm on my F three with my Crowntail Guppies, I'm having great success, and I can get a premium price for them. So what I did much last time is I went to our local hardware store, which is menards up here in the northland, and I bought a eight foot rack, and I've got 910 gallon tanks per layer. I got four layers on here, and so I've got 36 ten gallon tanks, and I can put in my room, which is only 14 foot square. I can do three of those racks, and I can have everybody all these different flavors. Robbie was nice enough the other day to get me some green Moscow guppies, and so it was easy. Now I got green Moscow guppies and nine different other flavors of guppies, and I'm just kind of collecting these different flavors of guppies. I just want to sell these high end guppies at shows and to my local friends.

So michael, what was your purpose behind your fish room? What was your goal that you wanted to do?

Like we were saying, when you decide that you want to step into a fish room, do so with intention and have a goal. Initially, like I said, I've been into fish keeping for about a little over 15 years now. But over the course of time, you just start accumulating tanks and you start putting them in random places. And what happens is you may have 30 tanks, but generally, if you don't have a plan, they're scattered about, which makes maintenance a headache, right? And then if maintenance is a headache, you're not going to want to maintain your tanks and take care of them. And then you end up in this loop where you get frustrated. So you want all this stuff, you acquire all this stuff. It's super cool. And then it's a headache to work on the tanks, and things just start to degrade, and then you get frustrated with it, and then you don't enjoy it anymore, and it completely defeats the purpose. So my goal going into it, because I played that exact same thing as I progressed through the hobby. I started with one tank. I went up to about six, I went down to two, I went up to 15, I went down to one, and then I went up to 25. And now I have a room that's large enough and offers me a variety of options as far as tank sizes and what I need. Just because I have 40 tanks in my fish room, I only have about 20 to 25 of them full of water right now, because that's what I can manage based on my lifestyle, my work schedule, my family right now. So my goal going into the video that you linked was the old fish closet, more or less. It was a very small room. Like I said, it was about eight by ten. My goal for that was to give myself a variety of options on the smaller side of things. So looking at smaller fish, anywhere from an inch to two and a half, that would be easy to maintain and that I could keep consolidated in one space with the goal of breeding a variety of fish. Not breeding a lot of one fish or breeding a lot of fish in general, just breeding a variety of fish. Like I said, I bred everything from a couple of different plecos to rainbows to rice fish, to endlers to a variety of things. And then I kind of experimented with the fish closet a little bit. And then if you get into some of my more recent videos, you'll slowly see the actual fish room build where I have about a 14 x 16 space. Now things are kind of spread out. I decided, well, I don't have to cram everything together, but I still want to keep things fairly consolidated because it does make them easy to maintain. And I keep everything except my 125 is a display tank in the living room. Everything else stays downstairs. And for the most part, everything else is set up to breed fish. And I know we were talking earlier and we talked about, well, my goal is to breed fish and make money. And there is a lot of we were talking about quality content out there, the lack of quality content. YouTube content creators have figured out that if you make videos geared towards profiting money off of aquariums, whether that's fish, plants, shrimp, et cetera, that you will get a lot of views and you will gain popularity. However, I think this is a detrimental trend to the hobby because people are trying to breed fish for the wrong reasons and then they're getting frustrated with the hobby. And not only are they frustrated, but if they're semi successful, they expect to make all this money and they're pumping out a lot of really poor quality livestock into the hobby, which just degrades the hobby in general. Don't go out and sell your junk mutt guppies that have jacked up backs and torn fins because then somebody else is going to buy them. And whether they know it or not, because most people that go to swap meets are generally fairly uneducated about the exact details of the fish and the fish health. They're going to buy that fish, they're going to take it, they're going to throw it in their tank at home. Their fish that they already had are going to get sick and like, wow, this sucks. I bought these fish at the swap meat, so that swap meat must suck because they're selling me junk fish that killed all my other stuff, you know what I'm saying? Right. So we get into this and I don't promote it. Like I said, obviously I think it's a bad trend. But you see these breeding for profit videos and it's clickbait a lot of the times and you don't see the details. They're like, oh, well, and I'm not going to throw names around.

There's an everything for profit video. I mean, right now, if you look at TikTok, half of the tiktoks out there are how to be a pressure wash salesman. Everybody's concerned about how to make a buck, right?

There's a particular video that comes to mind and it's with regards to a fairly respectable person in the planet tank world. And it's about plants for profit. And they said, oh, I made 800 or $1,000 in two days doing plants for profit. And that's completely doable. I go to swap meet in between fish and plants. I'll make 1000 $502,000. And it's very doable. But what they don't tell you is that the $800 they made in two days is the work of six to nine months.

Correct?

In two days between electricity, water, fertilizers equipment, sure, they may have made money to pay for their hobby but they didn't make $800 in two days. They made $800 in six months.

Let's go to scenario here. Let's take because I have someone messaging us and I want to cater this more towards we've done some advanced work, but I really want to do beginners in budget. We have a gentleman that messaged me. Let's just say hypothetically, it's a ten x 15 shed that has electricity and he has water. All he has is a utility sink. He wants to know what are the elements that you need for the fish room and how would you recommend doing it on a budget?

The biggest concern with a shed, I would say that is largely heating the shed. Where are you located? Because if you're somewhere further south where you have moderate temperatures that stay in the for the most of the part of the year, your expenses won't be too bad. If you live in Iowa, South Dakota, Minnesota, and you have a ten x 15 shed, you better be prepared to insulate that bad boy and throw some heat at it because it's going to.

Be an expense for conversation pieces. Let's do someplace moderate. Let's pretend that we are in northern Georgia or we have mild winters and I don't have to worry about it except for consistent heat.

Sure. So you have fairly consistent temperatures, reasonable cost of utilities. Right. That includes your water, your electric. So a ten x 15 shed, the life of that fish shed, a ten x 15 can support in a ten x 15 space, depending on your goals, you can easily set up 60 to 100 tanks in there. Right. Hot rank the heartbeat of that fish shed. Like I said, part of it is going to be temperature. The other part of it will be a linear piston pump that is going to drive all those tanks. So that is a linear piston pump will supply airflow that will run your sponge filters, that will filter all those tanks and keep things moving for not a whole lot of money, to be honest. And if I was looking at a ten x 15 shed, honestly, I'd look at something like a GEMCO, like the LPH 60 or even a little bit bigger. So that's where I would start.

Let's talk just a few minutes about linear piston pumps because I get a lot of questions. So how the linear piston pumps market themselves is by was it liters per hour?

Yes.

Looking it up, yeah. Liters per lpm. I'm not actually sure what liters per minute.

It's technically minutes, I think.

Got you. So the standard sizes that you'll see is generally the intro for a mid grade linear piston pump is the 40 Lpm. And I run a 40 in my basement. And right now I'm counting some of the taps. It'll do, I'd say closer to 40, 50 taps consistently at max. Now, when I say taps, that's each airline valve that you would put onto your system. So if you have one tank that might not be one tap, that'd probably be two sponge filters, maybe something else air driven. So let's say two to three taps per larger tank, and then the smaller tanks, one to two taps.

One other thing to keep in mind with that is that the deeper the tank is, the harder it is to push the water down.

Absolutely. I was just going to bring that up, too. If you're running some deep tanks, it's going to take away so much. So that's why I like using even like if you're using grow tanks, like 110 gallon plastic fish pond or something, you could take that and throw a cement block in there and put the sponge filter up six or eight inches and stuff, and it will take so much pressure off of your air pump, it's just incredible.

So to give you another balance, the higher end, because that's 40 Lpm, the higher ends that you get on these gemcos different brands, alitas is you get 160 Lpm. We have 160 Lpm running these fishco in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. One pump runs the whole store. I can't paint how what a drastic savings that is. Adam, you owned a fish store. What was your power bills just getting rid of your heaters?

Oh, I did this. So I got rid of the heaters and I got rid of the back. Every tank had a back filter.

Hang on the back.

Yeah, hang on the back filter. It went from $800 a month to 250.

Mad Savings. Mad Mad savings.

It was kind of ridiculous.

Absolutely. And I think when you think of a fish room, you're starting to build a fish room, you can slowly add tanks and racks to hold them as you go, but you want to think about how big do you really plan on going? And initially so if I have a ten x 15 shed, maybe I only have ten tanks right now, but eventually I'm like, well, maybe I want 50 tanks. Buy the appropriate pump for 50 tanks. And I usually say, buy the appropriate equipment for what you want and then step it up one size. Nobody's ever been upset that they had extra air blowing off their pump. No one you can exhaust extra air blown off your pump and relieve some back pressure, and your pump will appreciate you because it doesn't have to fight so much back pressure. And two, it's silence. You don't even know that it's there. And buy a quality equipment, for God's sake. Spend the money and buy good equipment.

Yeah, it's silent unless you get the piston pump I gave Jimmy.

Oh, my God. That thing sounded like a 1946 studio baker coming down the road with four flat tires.

This is like those metal piston pumps that use for ponds.

You couldn't talk in the same room. You couldn't talk in the house.

You feel your teeth vibrating.

It gave off so much heat you could fry an egg on it. Seriously.

So Jimmy and I use this pump. We call it sparky.

It's our backup.

Anytime that our diaphragm wore out after years, it's our backup pump. So we really have to pay for rush shipping because no one wants to be able to have to use Sparky.

So back to these linear pumps. They are wonderful, but when they go out, they go out now. And so you have to just spend the $40 or whatever it is for a new diaphragm and have it hanging on the wall right next to your piston pump. Don't put it in a drawer, don't put it in your garage, don't put it somewhere else. Hang it right next to your pump. Because I can't tell you how many times I've had my linear pump go out. It was fine today. Tomorrow it quit. It's making noise, but it's not pumping any air. And all of a sudden you walk in, you've got 40 tanks, and all the fish are gasping for air and stuff, and you can put one of those replacement diaphragms in there and probably in about 15 minutes. And so I keep one on hand all the time, and as soon as I use one, I've had them last as long as four years. I've had them last as long as six months. If you get a bad one and so have one on hand, I can't say it enough to have one of those on hand.

It's cheap insurance. I mean, just like running an ink bird on a heater, it's cheap insurance, right?

And the thing is, if it's going to go out, it's going to go out when you're gone for the weekend. I guarantee it.

So let's recap. Where are we at on what we need for the fish room right now?

We have an air pump. I'll be honest. We have an air pump.

We got pretty far, didn't we?

How about shelving? What kind of shelving should we have?

I'm pretty handy. Lumber used to be cheap and very easy to work with. I build my racks. Most of them are two x fours and two x sixes. And that's something that you can build to accommodate your specific needs. There's a lot of the what do they call it? Like the Hercules rack or whatever, the metal shelving that's out there. But it comes in very specific sizes. It's not hard to build a wooden rack, and it's easy to learn based off YouTube or whatever, if you're not familiar with common hand tools and various techniques. And there's a million I think I've got one video on built and racks out there. There's a million of them out there. But if you have a saw and a drill, you can easily build a rack to accommodate your specific needs. So we talked about the air pump, the air pump itself. You got to get the air to the. Rest of your tanks somehow. So you set up the air pump, you acquire the air pump, and then an air loop is the appropriate way to go if you're going to run a Lint air pump instead of a single run. So instead of taking PVC pipe and running it straight from your pump down the wall and just putting a bunch of taps off to all your tanks, loop is going to equalize the pressure so that you get even pressure and flow to all those tanks. So if you look at I've got a build video on my airloop, it doesn't take a lot of money. A few sticks of PVC and some nickel taps that thread right into the PVC, and you can have 5100 drops in a couple of hours. But the air loop itself is going to simply be from your linear piston pump. Or if you run a blower, which I don't recommend for most people, but a linear piston pump is what I suggest for most fish rooms, blowers, that's a completely different topic that we can dig into some other time. So you run from your pump, use PVC to build a loop around the entire room. And then I put a bleed valve or an exhaust valve opposite the pump, more or less, and then you use the taps to create your drops for each tank itself, and that'll be your air loop. So that'll provide air, which is more or less the life support for all your aquariums. So that's kind of where I generally like to start when I build my fish rooms. And then I go in and I build the actual racks and shelving themselves. Like I said, I use two x fours, two x sixes. If you want to use a metal rack, if that fits the tanks that you want to use, great. If you can, weld more power to you.

Quick hobo build, right? Let's say that one, you're not handy enough to do wood, right? You just can't do it. Me, I can't do wood to save my life.

Yeah, you suck.

I suck?

That sounds about right.

Yeah. You'd want to build yourself maybe a metal shelving rack, you can go to your local menards, Lowe's, whatever, home improvement place, find yourself really high end pallet racking. But that can be expensive. You're talking like two $300 for one section. Instead, take it from Hobo Robs. You can have yourself some fun. Go to these same menards places, get yourself cinder blocks. They're nice and cheap.

They're a buck.

And get yourself two x fours. All you got to learn is cut them. You don't have to cut them straight. And you can use cinder blocks. Stacking two x fours and create yourself a really solid fish rack the absolute cheapest way, in my opinion.

You see that a lot in Florida. They'll do that in a greenhouse and.

Do that the biggest problem I see with that. And one of the big reasons that I do not use that is largely because of space, losing a lot of space just with blocks. And if you're confined, like the example that we're talking about here, if you have a ten x 15 space, taking up 18 inches on one wall just with block is going to I mean, that's two tanks easy that you're missing out on now just because you have blocks there.

Yeah, it's by far the most hobo, but there's big dumps.

That's been always been the case with me that I want to see how many tanks I can put in one rack.

Does it work? Yes. I'm personally of the mentality to do it right the first time. If you are building a fish room for the long term, build it right the first time. Obviously, if you're on a budget, sure you can do the center blocks and two x fours. And will it get you by? Yes, there's a million people that do it. I personally, I'm not a fan of it because of the reasons that I talked about. But will it get you by? Yes.

We did get a question from the audience listening and they asked why a bleed valve? So pretty simple question. If you have, let's say that 40 Lpm piston pump, but you're only using a few taps, you're going to have a lot of extra pressure in that system and it's going to eventually put strain on your pump and blow up the diaphragm. So what you want to do is you want to have a valve to let off excess air that you're not using just in case.

Me.

In my system, there'll be times where I go down to half the amount of tanks, either because I'm resetting or whatever else, and I will just use excess taps, multiple of them, as essentially their own bleed valve. So you come in my basement and when I'm not running full capacity, you'll just hear a couple of hissings in.

The corner like your snake.

Because I have a big section of excess valves that I'm using as a bleed valve.

I'm going to read this really quick here because I know people are asking about how many can I use. I'm just going to read this really quick. This is off of if you go onto Steve's Angels Plus website, under his pumps, he's got this. I'm just going to read it really quick. It says, please realize it will vary in each situation. The depth of the outlet greatly influences the output, and one person may prefer to use two or three times the amount of air per outlet than what is needed by another aquarium. Airstones require much more air than an open airline. That said, most people will be happy with one liter of air per minute per outlet at one PSI. You can use the air pressure charts to estimate this for each pump. If you run airstones deeper aquariums, you'll want more air coming out of each because of the depth. But anyway, he broke it down. The Al 15 runs 18 outlets at twelve to 50. These are all twelve to 15 inches deep. The 40 will run about 60 outlets. The Al 80 will run 100 outlets. The Al 120 will run 170 outlets.

So these are alita pumps, and the numbers match the amount of liter Lpm.

Pretty close. Yeah. And so what Steve is saying, and he said the exact same thing that we had said earlier, is that buy one a little bit bigger than you want and bleed off. He said the exact same thing right here, but that gives you an idea. It will run at twelve to 15 inches deep. Of course, if you're running much bigger tanks, deeper and stuff, it's going to really reduce the amount.

So, Michael, where did we leave off?

So now we built our air loop, right? We used a linear piston pump, and not to double back, but we use a linear piston, it's much more efficient than a diaphragm pump. It's going to last longer, have a lot more output. So we built our air loop, right, and then we built our rack. Whether you use center blocks and two X fours, whether you use two X fours, two x sixes, whether you use metal racking, you have some sort of racking that is sufficient, and that's the keyword, sufficient to easily hold the weight of your tanks. Because if you look at some of the commercially available options, it might be a metal rack, but it has cheap beaver puke or MDF type shelves that might hold a five gallon tank. You're not going to put 410 gallon tanks on it, and as soon as it gets wet, it's going to fall through and you're going to end up with a mess on the floor. Are and with regards to racking, or shelving or whatever you'd like to call it, spend the money for the peace of mind, would you rather save your pennies and spend an extra $100 on a rack that you know will hold 200 gallons of water? Or would you rather wake up to 200 gallons of water on your floor? It seems like a pretty straightforward decision to me, but for those of you that want to cheap out on it, let me know how that works out for you in the long run. So we got it for X. We're starting to put tanks on them. Now. We talked about living in a fairly moderate climate, so temperature is a big deal as well. Before you get so you have air, so you have the lifeline of your tanks, you have the shelves, you have the tanks themselves, you obviously have this shed or this room, but you need to maintain a temperature of some sort. And I'm not saying an exact temperature, because I do think that temperature fluctuations over time are good for fish in general. But we need to be able to control the temperature. So heating the tanks and this comes down to it's far more efficient to heat the space or the room itself than to heat individual tanks. If you spend $25 to $30 for a heater for each tank and you're running 40 tanks, the bill starts to add up pretty quick versus buying a heater that will heat your shed or your room for maybe 200 $300. Not only that, but that room heater is going to be far more consistent over time, and it will last longer. Aquarium heaters by default, regardless of your favorite brand, whether you're an EHEIM, jaeger, co op, whatever, they're going to fail. And there's a lot of misconceptions regarding heaters, and that's a discussion for another time as to why they fail sooner or later or whatever. But I generally recommend if you're going to run a heater in a tank, you should run it on a dedicated controller. But like I said, heaters in themselves are a different beast, and that's a conversation that could be had for hours. So I recommend heating the entire room. And this will allow you a temperature gradient from the floor to the ceiling. In my fish room, the way that I have it heated right now, the upper tanks are about 78, the lower tanks are about 70 to 72. And that's just over the course of about 7ft from the floor up to the ceiling. Keep in mind, this is in my basement. I live in south Dakota, so things are going to be a little bit cooler, generally speaking. But maintaining or having some sort of control over the temperature in the room is a big deal. I personally recommend heating the room itself, and in order to more effectively heat that room, you want to buy a fairly efficient heater, and then you want to insulate that room as best as possible. And I saw a few people in the chat, they were talking about insulating the shed or the room. And that is going to save you a lot of money and establish a lot of consistency in the long run.

Yeah, get those big pink sheets at menards, put it on the walls, and then if you want to paint it, you can. But if this is strictly on a budget, paint's expensive, roll with it. You're now having a pink wall. All you got to do is post your favorite stickers of your fish keepers. Or we can send you a printable image of Jimmy just to stare at you creepily.

I just did mine, and my room is 14 x 14. I put up a four mil plastic vapor barrier. I put on the inch pink styrofoam, and on top of that, I put on fiberglass. And then I put plywood over it, and it cost me $1,500. And everybody goes, oh, that's a lot of freaking money. Last month, I saved about $80 in heating because I unplugged all my heaters. So 80 times twelve, $720. I mean, it's going to pay for itself in two years, easy.

It doesn't take long, especially generally speaking. I'd consider myself the exception because I either move my fish room from one area to the house to the next, or I move from one house to the next based because of my profession. But if you are building a fish room, first of all, determine, is this going to be a long term deal? Because if you're going to be in your house for only one or two years, it's probably not worth your effort and money to build a fish room, to be honest, to do it in a reasonable fashion. But think long term. You spend the money up front to set yourself up for success and see those savings in the long run. So there's a variety of options. So if you look at somebody like Dan from Dan's Fish, he's over in Wyoming, he gets some brutally cold winters. When he had his fish room in his basement, he used the spray and insulation in the walls and the ceiling, the whole works. Myself, for a temporary solution. While I continued to build my fish room, I simply used four mil plastic and created an air barrier. So I had these false walls that were two x fours that were uninsulated and had more or less like the Wayne's coating the cheap real thin board. It didn't go all the way up to the ceiling, though. So I took four mil plastic, I put it on each side and created an air barrier there. And so long as that air is not freely moving from one side to the other, it's actually insulating that quite well. Think of it like a twin walled thermos. The heat can't transfer there through there very well. And that is a temporary solution until I complete the build. And when I say complete the build, that means I determine that I'm staying in this house long term, meaning five to ten years versus the two to three years that I've been here. So heating the room and insulating the room is definitely a big spending point and something that you want to plan out when you get into this just.

For the target deal. I always like the oil based heaters. If you're going to do something different than a furnace, they're cheap, they radiate longer, they're not necessarily the most efficient, but they do a really great job of heat dispersal. If you're not dealing with a fan.

I use a simple oil radiator. Like I said when I had the little closet, a single oil radiator in there works just fine. It was a small room. You don't have to spend big bucks to have a successful fish room. You just have to understand the limitations and the appropriate measures you need to take for your specific space.

And also a $15 box fan goes a long ways to circulate the air. If you have a space where it's hotter on one side of the room or even a ceiling fan, you can buy generic ceiling fans for $30 and get that 80 degree off the ceiling and down towards the floor. And I find that I like that a lot better, having the circulation. And also, it's not so stale when I'm in there working because it can get pretty hot.

Yeah, that's definitely a great point, Jim. And again, I built my fish room based off other fish rooms I've seen, and Dan from Dan's Fish has obviously been extremely successful. His business is growing rapidly. But that's where I kind of was initially exposed to the idea of using fans to circulate that warm air down to the bottom of the room, because he just used a couple of little Vornado fans and he put them throughout his basement to get that air circulating. And it does make a huge difference. So just having that airflow and not being stagnant in there makes a huge difference as far as effectively heating all of the aquariums.

I'm just going to throw this out there really quick. And we had this conversation a long time ago, but quit throwing stuff, Jimmy.

We had a calm calm down.

Yeah, we had a breeder one time that talked about how the air was so stagnant and stuff, and when they would open up the window and get fresh air in there, periodically their production went way up.

Well, that's because he was passing gas eating beef jerky.

You think so?

100%, dude. When you sit in a fish room, people think it's like, oh, it's just going to sit in your basement. You go live upstairs. No, you live down there. You set yourself up with a little TV, you get yourself an easy rocker. You get yourself a bag of Cheetos, and then you just gas that up. So, yeah, crack a window.

I don't know why this is. Have you zach, have you ever heard about this, where people say, get fresh air in there. If it's your blower or the first.

It'S also alcohol because you're drinking down there as well.

I do a lot of drinking down there. Right. My wife just bought a new 50 inch TV for downstairs in my fish room.

That's where you get the tequila virus.

Yes, I have often got the tequila virus downstairs.

Yeah, you have two places you can party with the foosball table, or you can go hang in the fish room. And most of the time, it's the fish room.

The fish room. A lot of stuff happens.

Fish room is more interesting anyways.

Yeah, but have you heard of that at all before, about getting the fresh air in there? I just thought that was interesting. And I don't know if there's any truth to it, but it does seem to make sense, because I'm talking about people who have big buildings. They'll talk about in the spring, they'll open up one end and the other and just flush that thing out and stuff and how things just kick in right away.

Oh, yeah, I definitely see how having fresh air would help. I haven't heard anything about that, though.

Yeah, it was something that was told here on the podcast by one of the breeders and stuff, and I was just interested to see if anybody else had ever heard that.

All right, so to recap, we have racks that we've come up with. We have airline that's circulating the entire fish room. We have talked about how to heat them, and then we've also talked about just vaguely tanks. I think one point that you bring up in your YouTube video, and I think people need to just underline is that other people are doing fish rooms. You mentioned this before the podcast. Other people are doing fish rooms. Watch for deals, keep your club. I think you said that you got your entire tank array from someone that tore down their fish room, is that right, Michael?

Yeah, that's accurate. So join a club. If you don't have a local club, get some minds together and make one. Otherwise there's probably one nearby for most people. But there's a lot of unfortunately, we're losing a lot of the older, experienced folks in our hobby as they age out and whether they pass on or they simply can't keep up with the hobby like they used to anymore. But I had two good friends that were really into the hobby. One of them decided he just wanted to spend more time with his grandkids, and the other just didn't have the time anymore because of work. So you can get a great deal from people getting out of the hobby. Sadly, aquarium equipment doesn't hold its value worth crap. No, fortunately.

And it doesn't add your home value either. No. If you tell your realtor, yeah, you got a ten x 15 in your basement, it's just be like, well, it's unfinished basement listing.

Right. Fortunately, aquarium equipment doesn't hold its value worth crap. Be patient. I got all the tanks that I have in my basement. So in my fish room, like I said, I've got about 45, 50 tanks, anywhere from two and a half gallons to 180 gallons. And as far as the tanks themselves, the wood that I used to build the racks and the air pump, including plus sponge filters, I have less than $1,000 into that actual setup. So be patient. Let it be known to people around you that you're interested, get out there and meet people, and deals will fall into your lap more often than not. And it may be a deal where, okay, well, I don't need all these 20 highs because I'm not breeding angel fish. I want to use something with a different footprint. If it's a good deal, flip it. Don't be afraid to try to flip something. I mean, glass is glass. It's always going to hold some value. It just won't hold a lot of.

Value you pay attention to. Now with the big box stores, right now, they're running the half price sale.

Well, that's what Jimmy always says is glass.

That's right. Today I stopped by my local petco store and picked up another ten tanks, because ten gallon tanks are twelve and a half dollars. And it's always the same thing. I don't know what it is with petco, but I don't think they think I'm cooking meth or something. Every time I go in there. Well, I tell you, Adam would know.

They actually question this.

They question me every time I go in there, because right now I need another 39 tanks for my other rack. And so 39 tanks plus my rack cost me $700. And I have 39 ten gallon tanks on this rack. And they go, what are you doing with all these tanks? And my wife always tells them something just freaking bizarre.

She comes up with a lot of.

Great one and she goes, oh, we're raising chameleons. What kind? She goes, the green ones.

I think it was one time she said that you're harboring troll dolls.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

That was my favorite.

She lies to them a lot, but they always want to know what you're doing, all these tanks, and it's always the same thing. We call them up and say, how many tanks you got? And they go, help 18 okay, we'll take them all. Oh, no, we can't put them off to the side. Well, we're driving up 80 miles, and I'd like them to be there when I get there and stuff. We can't do that. And you go up there and you'll say, I'll take all 18 tanks. And then they'll say to you, we have some guy coming up to buy them. That was me. I called you and you told me no. So don't tell me that you're holding them for somebody, you jerk, because customer service is so great over there. They push me out a cart and they go, There you go. And then I load them all up myself, and I take them all out to my car and then I just leave their damn cart out in the parking lot. I'm not taking it back in.

They still hold the policy of rain checks. So if you show up and Jimmy was there and he just emptied all the tens and you're pissed, do they do rain checks? They do rain checks.

That's good to know, because I've gone there a few times, and Jimmy must have gone there before me, and they're all out.

Jimmy will rent. Good sale up for others.

Yeah, it used to be, for sure. It was a dollar gallon sale all the way up to 55 gallons. And I'd go in there and kill them on 40 gallon breeders. 40 gallon breeders for $40 back in the day. And right now, they're 9100 and $10 for a 40 gallon breeder, which is one of my favorite tanks. But, yeah, my wife likes everything the same. She wants all new tanks all clean, all the racks have to match, all the lighting has to match. It drives me insane, because before, I just hodgepodge. If it held water, I didn't give a crap. I'd put whatever I had in there. And you see people on the Internet and they're raising stuff in freaking Tupperware containers, and you're going, wow, good for you. And even Crazier when you start watching over in the Orient. And they take two liter bottles of Coke or Fanta or whatever it is, and they lay them on their side and then they cut a hole on the top and they're breeding Bettas and they've got a rack with 202 liter bottles in a grass hut and they're breeding Bettas in there and stuff. It's just incredible what people come up with and how well they can do it.

All right, so best case scenario, you.

Cut two liter bottles and you cut the tops off. That's what you put baby chameleons in.

The green ones. The green ones. So, step one, if you can afford a dollar a gallon sale, step two, try to find someone that's offloading his own fish room. Step three, if not coat containers, apparently, I don't recommend it, but it is. We're doing Hobo budget based. There you go.

So what do you do for lighting, then? How do you do lighting on a budget?

Right? So, certain lighter tanks, and I actually just released a video on this, so I use the Linkable little Led strips, and you can get them in like two foot, three foot, four foot. You usually get like six to eight of them for $50 shipped. I don't like to shop on Amazon a lot, but there's some stuff that I do buy on Amazon, and lighting is one of them. And find something that will work for your racking type setup. And I don't grow a lot of plants in most of my tanks. I have my 125 display upstairs for plants, so I use fancy lighting for that. But for the most part, you just need enough light to be able to see your fish. So for $50, I put LEDs over 25 tanks the other day. And I usually say, don't cheap out on equipment. Lights are something that you can get by with fairly cheap. I've used these lights before. You can check out my videos if you're super interested in the specific lighting and how I mounted them and stuff. But you can spend $50 and you can light 25 tanks with LEDs well enough to see and grow some lower light plants just fine. And then I use the Casa timers to turn them on and off at the same time, and they don't pull a lot of electricity, so you're not using a lot of juice. They're not super bright so you don't run into a ton of algae problems. They give you enough light to see your fish. And they're easy. They're super easy. So that's how I light my fish room.

What I've done. Oh, go ahead, Jimmy.

Adam, do you have them on a timer? Are they dimmable like the LEDs? Are they dimmable?

So the ones I use, they're not dimmable. They are on a timer. Like I said, I use the Casa strips, so I control it on my phone. I just recently switched over to the actual WiFi timers, as opposed to I used to use the old analog timers. I always found that I'd go in downstairs to work on the fish room at like 10:00 at night. So I'd turn them on and then I'd forget to turn it back to the timer setting and they'd just be on all the freaking time.

Is there a dimmable Led light anywhere?

There is. They're a little more expensive.

Okay? I'm sure there is. I don't personally see the need for a dimmable light if you're just trying to light a ton of tanks for a reasonable amount of money.

Come on, now. You need a dimmable light because you need to get in the mood when you're in the fish room. When you put on some Marvin Gay, you sit down with Jimmy's beverage of choice tequila that he sips, like in a wine glass. He wants to listen to some smooth music with the lights down it's ambiance.

I thought the tequila was straight up no.

And I listened to who lists the dogs out?

So it's out.

The only reason why I brought that up is because when I was breeding ram cichlids and I would shut the lights off, the babies would just get scared and scatter all over the tank. Yeah, they were in the ten gallon, and I had a back filter on the back, but then they'd get sucked up by the back filter is what happened. So I started slowly dimming it a little bit at a time, and then that worked a little better. That's why I brought it up.

Simulated sunrise. Sunset.

A trick I learned from an old timer specifically regarding epistles, because I had a buddy of mine and he had some epistogramma. I can't remember the exact species, irrelevant. But the pair kept eating the fry over and over and over again. He had like six spawns and they just kept eating the fry in this old head. He's like, hey. He's like, do you have any sort of light in the room at night? And they're like, no, I don't. He's like, put some sort of dim, just like a night light in the room. Just a small light. If you put a night light in the room, the spawning pair, they'll be able to keep track of their fish and they won't get spooked and they won't eat them. And sure enough. As soon as he put like a simple just one of those little plug in night lights in that room. Just enough there was a dim light in the room overnight. Just all of a sudden, just success after success after success. Serious.

That is the best thing I've heard. That's a good one, because I didn't know about that trick.

That's life hack of the month, bud.

Yes, that is. That's a good one. And that's one of those. We need to get a bunch of old timers on here.

Just shut up.

No, we're working on the old podcast.

Don't worry, I'll run that.

This tip came from he's kind of a killy guy at heart. He's bred I think he's up to 350 species of killyfish, so I pick his brain pretty regularly. But I said put a night light in the room with the advent of the advent of LEDs comes with a lot of cool bells and whistles that we don't necessarily need to be successful, and sometimes they can be more problematic than they're worth or just lead you to spend more money. So, yeah, do my lights themselves. I stagger them so each rack comes on and goes off about an hour apart from the next one in line, and then I have just a small dim light that just is on in the fish room all the time.

I actually used old school shop lights with the fluorescent tube lights in them out of a dumpster. I went dumpster diving, grabbed them out, and I changed the ballast in them and put an Led bulb. And now I have three of those making my ten gallon rack with the nine tanks. And it looks horrible. It works effective. It was the cheapest way I could get lights taken care of. The electric bill is nice and low. I got them on a timer and just ignore the rust and bubble gum.

See, I just went to my local, bought two pack for $10 during Black Friday.

Two pack? Two pack for $10.

Bo.

The ballasts were cheap.

When you set up your fish room, that's part of it. Like, do I want this to be a working fish room, or do I want it to be for looks, and do we want to do some measuring with it, and do I have the money to spend on making it look nice versus being effective?

Now, did you use just traditional sponge filters for filtration? Because, again, the only source we have in the fish room is air. So used everything air powered filtration to save money and make it work better.

I do. So I prefer the ATI. Hydro pros is what I use in my fish room.

I got to give this a goo.

Now.

You said ATI HYDROpro.

Yes.

And where are you buying those at?

I usually get them through either Kens or Gemco. I buy like, a case at a time, and I'm actually due to replace them do you notice over time when your sponges get to be like, 510 years old, they start to shrink and turn into funny shapes, kind of like other things.

Yeah, I know what you meant there.

But no, I mean, for five, $6 apiece, it's tough to beat. They're effective. So I do usually do about 50% water changes once a week on all my tanks. It takes me in my fish room. We'll get to this in a little bit. Usually I can do water changes. I can do 50% manually on all the tanks in my room in 2 hours.

So the sponge filters I use is I go the Alibaba wish, ebay. And literally, you can look up different sizes because all these sponges have, no matter the brand, have a size scaling because they come from all the same manufacturers. So the preferred sponge, depending on size, would be X-Y-I think it's 380. If you give that a goo on.

Ebay, that's a spore size.

That's the spore size. That is the size of sponge. That would be the traditional for the same ones that you mentioned, the Hydropros, that's the same size as XY 380. And as long as I can't pronounce the brand, that's what I'm getting. The more Chinese symbols on the box, the better, and I can get those brands for $5 apiece or less.

And the longer it takes to get here.

Yeah, exactly. If it takes me 28 days, that's above average to get a case of these brands, that's fine. It's the same mold as some of the brands. And when I'm going bulk and going wide, that's what I'm looking at. But Jimmy's, Cadillac seat cushion sponge filters, I still use those. I hope I always have one for.

The rest of my life. I just gave you one the other day. Yeah.

And you see it's right there, Jimmy. You can see it from here. It's right next to Scuba Steve.

Yeah.

So we set up the Fisher and we got our air loop set up, we got our racks, we got our tanks, and now we're starting to think about filtration. I see a question in the chat about types of air driven filtration. Obviously, if you're old school, you have the underground filters, which sweet. I would not recommend running by air. If I was going to run an underground filter, I would find them anymore.

I run mine by air. We run, actually, the entire fish store at these fish by air. But you have to be really generous with the amount of air that goes through it to make them work.

Right. So if I was going to run it on a gravel filter, this is just my personal opinion, so take it for what it's worth. Instead of running them on air, I would use a power head and run it reverse flow with a small sponge pre filter so that the water is actually coming up through the gravel. Instead of going down through the gravel. That way you get all the benefits of that biological colonization on all that surface area using the substrate. But you have a sponge pre filter, so you're not just accumulating a bunch of debris down in the gravel to sit there and rot over time.

I have never once thought of the absolutely.

I've never heard that.

Taking a big old sponge filter on the tip. Interesting. But yeah. So undergrowth filter sponge filters, you have matten filters. Those are more of a German product that you put a big, flat, big sponge in the back and essentially you're just using a tube to flow over the top, so all the water goes from one side of the tank to the other and through this giant curtain sponge.

I have great luck with those.

Those work great for shrimp, but they do have downsides.

I like the matin filters. They're a little bit tougher to maintain because you can't just pull the sponge filter out of the tank. You're literally pulling one of the walls out of the tank is what's happening. Yeah, it's a big they're extremely effective box filters. Like we're mentioned in the chat, you can load whatever media you want into a little box filter and then moving media. So now we're talking about like a fluidized bed filter and a fluidized bed. It seems like a buzzword, like every four or five years, people start talking about like, fluidized bed filters or K One media filters. But it's old school technology and it just takes up a lot of space. Is it effective? Sure, but it takes up a lot of space and I think it's not necessary. I personally wouldn't recommend running them, I guess. But if you want to mess with something, you can build a fluidized bed filter. I have one downstairs sitting in a tub somewhere that's literally a 20 ounce soda bottle with some K One media inside it and an airline in the bottom and some holes drilled to the top.

So what I did is I did some homework on these and they finally they're not real known about, but they have pre done in a can fluidized moving bed filters. I just sent you a link, Michael, and I also sent it to Adam. This is an example of the canisterized moving bed filter. So it's the same profile as a sponge filter, but all the moving parts are inside the can. This is nice because it's a sponge filter and all of that in one, but again, that still in and of itself still takes real estate. Whereas some of the sponge filters can be much smaller.

Right. I'm not saying it's an effective form of filtration for the money you're spending in the real estate you're utilizing, I think you're better off going a different direction. Yeah, they're not that cheap, especially if you're talking about running 30, 40, 50 tanks. And instead of a $5 sponge filter. You're going to run a $15 or $20, like a little fluidized reactor. I mean, it's basically a reactor, I guess.

I think that's the brand, yeah, reactor.

You're going to burn up a lot of your funds doing that. But then we have our tanks and everything they're set up. We've got our filtration, whatever filtration, filtration method you utilized. Now we're starting to talk about filling our tanks up with water. And if you are on a budget, particularly, or if you just like to make things easy, cater your fish selection to your tap water or your source water. Whether that's a well, whether that's a municipal water, whatever it is, cater your fish selection to that. So you don't have to worry about altering your water using something like rodi, because that's going to increase your cost. You're going to burn through more water. Obviously, you have more equipment to buy, and then you have filtered media that you have to burn through. But if you have hard water naturally, as your city water or well water, then pick fish that can adapt to hard water. Probably don't pick something like a pistagrama. I'd lean towards more, something like your riverine cichlids, your main lake rift cichlids, your live bearers are generally fine, adapting to a little bit harder water. This is going to help you get started on the right foot. And now that you have water in your tank, you can start looking into your fish. And not that I recommend setting up your fish room with the idea that you are going to make money off it. Yes, it's possible. No, don't expect to do it anytime soon. You can start with your fish selection and maybe start recuperating a couple of bucks to start enhancing your fish room. You don't need to go straight to 150 gallon per day rodi set up from day one. Use what works with your source water, whatever that is. If it's soft, then go with soft water fish. If it's hard, go with hardwater fish. And then you can start moving in the right direction. You may find that you get so caught up in whatever fish that you try out that you have no interest in going to rodi like myself. So I had the funding, I had the space, I had the equipment to utilize rodi in some of my tanks. So I have 255 gallon drums that are plumbed together that I do my water changes out of. So I store straight rodi in there. So those of you that are not familiar that are listening right now, rodi water, usually you'll run it through a four or five or six stage filter, and it'll strip chlorine, chloramines, heavy metals, any contaminants in your water, and you will literally end up with pure water at the end of it. So, whereas I have fairly hard and fairly dirty tap water, if I check the TDs or toto dissolved solids of that water, it is usually around four to 500 TDs. After I run it through my reverse osmosis deionization system, or Rodi, I usually get two to three TDs out of it. So you're purifying the water, which is going to soften it and make it more ideal for some of those fish that come out of something like the Central or South American water where things are a little bit softer. You don't have the mineral content as something like your Rift lakes out of Africa where you'd get like your tanganikans, your shell dwellers, your frontosas, your peacocks. So cater your initial fish selection to your source water, and that is going to make your life a lot easier. It'll be a lot less energy, time and money that you have to put into setting up your tanks and then maintaining them through water changes.

And that's why I collect reject goldfish from these fish when he gets in, these big old fantail goldfish. Jimmy and I have a theory that when these big, the big softball size, softball size, fantail style goldfish, whether orandas a Ryukin, all of those, we have a theory that when they fly 30,000ft, their swim bladder distorts and maybe can even rupture a bit, and then when they land, they'll never swim correct again. I have fish that I've had for years that will not 100% be right up. So that's what I collect because I know that my water parameters, however good, I know that goldfish will at least hold it without having to worry about rodi, without having to check. And I don't have chlorine up the tap, luckily, so it just goes straight from tube to tank. But I know my reject goldfish will.

Take it every time. I bring in every time I import large, large goldfish. And they're packed either eight or ten to a bag, and they're baseball to softball size every time. There's always one or two that don't.

Swim correctly forever, no matter what.

You right.

It just bothers me.

And we've talked to people, talk about burping them or sticking needles in them or what. Good.

He's happy.

I skim the Robbie and he's got a Special Olympics pool over here he puts them in.

I have a 60 gallon tank right here in my fish room where the podcast studio is. And there's two goldfish there's, Jeff and Bubbles. Jeff can't stay up, Bubbles can't stay down.

They've never met each other.

They make quite the retarded pair. Pretty great.

Can you say retarded anymore?

This is my podcast. Jimmy, your podcast too. Retarded up. All right, so where does that leave us? I think we're pretty well at least covering the basics, right?

So we've got into the filtration. We've actually started putting water in the tanks. We've selected our fish. Whichever route you go now, you got to take care of those fish, right? And when it comes to taking care of a large number of fish, one of the bills that we don't often think about, or the expenses that we don't think about is food, right? So food is one of those things that can sneak up on you really fast as far as costs go. And generally speaking, I feel that feeding a variety of foods is in the best interest of the health of the fish. I personally feed a mix of some different flavors of flakes from Kensfish.com. It's not the best food out there, obviously, but it is a budget minded food. And when combined with a variety of other foods, it does quite well. But one of the most overlooked food sources, especially on a budget, is live foods. And if you talk to any killy fish keeper, I bet they have three to four different live foods that they feed, because they kind of figured out that not only are live foods more nutrition, they have higher nutrition content. But once you start a culture of live food, you can get a starter culture of anything from paramecium to walter worms to white worms, vinegar eels for four or $5. And you put maybe four or $5 in material and you can run a culture for what, six months, eight months, a year, and feed thousands and thousands of fish just utilizing that one culture. And something like that is going to provide higher nutrition content because you're getting all the proteins, the carbohydrates, the various enzymes that come along with live foods that haven't been prepared, they haven't been dehydrated, dried out, processed at all. But you're also triggering natural feeding responses. So a lot of the times in fish, especially wild caught fish or young fish, you may have a hard time getting them to eat prepared foods. Sometimes you get them to take after frozen foods, but a lot of times you'll have a tough time getting them to eat prepared foods. But the live food itself, just the movement of that food triggers a natural feeding instinct. So when you have freshly hatched fry, whether that's angel fish or rainbow fish of whichever species, something like a vinegar eel or baby brine shrimp, just the natural movement to that fish and the fact that that's a natural food source for those fish is going to trigger those fry to eat initially and then they'll also eat more, which is going to result in putting more size on and growing faster. So that if your goal is to raise and sell fish, the faster you can put size on them, the faster you can get them to a sellable size and get your return on the investment.

Well, Adam, how long did a can of brine shrimp last you on average, when you're even doing a whole fish.

Store of brine shrimp flake or of.

Hatching brine shrimp, like a can of.

16 ounce can will last me about 90 days.

I was going to say, yeah, it lasts a while.

But you're feeding literally thousands of fish and $50 is getting you three months worth of food?

Yeah. Adam, you use a lot of frozen food, correct?

I did, yeah.

And frozen food has gone through the freaking roof. I can't hardly froze. I'm buying the 16 ounce bloodworms to get my angel fish to breed and stuff, but I find, like he was just saying, the live cultures. I'm hatching three jars of brine shrimp a day, and I'm putting in two of the little scoops in each jar every day. And on the guppies, I'll feed them three times a day and then do a water change. And a day after I do a water change, seem like they've doubled in size. I don't quite get how the water change, but they absorb all the calcium out of the water and stuff, and they need that for bone development. But a quick water change and then the live food is just amazing how much better they do. And it's inexpensive, like you said, I'm picking up 16 ounce can for like $45 right now.

They don't have the big 32 ounce flat packs anymore.

No, the only ones I've seen are 16 lately. So doesn't mean they're not out there, but cheaper. They're costing $1012 apiece, and I can feed one of those in an afternoon.

Well, I think we covered at least the basics. Any other last minute tips, recommendations you got for the audience? Michael?

Take it slowly. Nothing good happens, and nothing good in this hobby happens fast, right? So be patient with it. There's no rush. Like I said, if you are setting up a fish room, set it up for the long term. And if you are not looking at setting up for the long term, then maybe reconsider or reassess your goals, right? It's not going to be cheap. It's not going to be easy. It can be relatively cheap and relatively easy compared to some of the bells and whistles that some people put into their fish rooms for the sake of experimentation or measuring or whatever you'd like to call it. But it doesn't have to be super expensive. It doesn't have to be super fancy. You don't need auto water change and all this and all that to set up a successful fish room. And at the end of the day, a successful fish room is simply, does it meet the goals of what you had in mind? What is your goal, and were you able to accomplish that with your fish room? And generally speaking, if you talk to somebody that has a successful fish room, whether that's somebody that sells a lot of fish as a breeder, if you're looking at, like if you're familiar with Tom from TM Aquatics over in Minnesota. Dan from Dan's fish. He does things a little bit differently, but he has a fish room that is effective for his goals. If you look at someone like Jason from Primetime, if you're into the big YouTube scene, or Chris Nelson, if you guys might be familiar with Shooter. If you're up in Minnesota, he attends a lot of the Quad Cities type meets and stuff. Build a fish room that is going to suit your goals. Don't just copycat somebody on the Internet, or you're going to end up spending a lot of money unless your goals are identical to theirs, which they very may will be. But be prepared to spend the money and do it right, have the time and allow things to develop. The only thing that I've talked about today in our discussion here on the podcast that you need to spend all the money right up front on is your air pump. Because it just doesn't make sense to buy one air pump and then just buy another air pump later. Everything else, the racks, the tanks, the filters, you can buy as you grow. And I would say start small. Start with maybe a fish room with six to nine tanks. Like, okay, this is definitely doable. I enjoy it. I have the time to properly manage and take advantage of this number of tanks. Then add maybe one or two and slowly build your fish room. Like I said, I currently have about 25 tanks with fish and water in my fish room, but I have 45 or 50 tanks. That's because my current lifestyle, my current job, my current family situation does not make it easy for me to maintain 50 tanks and 100 species of fish. So start slow and add a couple of tanks at a time and figure out where your breaking point is, right, is to, okay, I can take care of this and enjoy it, versus, I can take care of this, and it feels like work. If it feels like work, you're not going to enjoy it. It's not going to be fun. Versus, okay, I just added too much crap at one time and I can't even take care of this crap. And then it's a disaster. You get frustrated, you lose money, and then you end up getting out of the hobby. Because at the end of the day, my goal as a content creator, I guess, or somebody that speaks on podcasts or somebody that creates videos on YouTube, is to help people be successful. Helping each other be successful helps grow the hobby. And there's nothing beneficial to discouraging somebody in the hobby or causing them any stress or frustration, because then they get out of the hobby, and then their cash flow and their interests are not going to the hobby, and the hobby just doesn't develop and proceed in a beneficial direction.

Don't cheat on your wife and tell her that your fish room is more important than her.

There you go, Adam. That's perfect.

You beat me on that point.

Actually. I'll just say that exact thing.

Hide the bleach.

Yeah, hide the bleach.

I'm going to throw out one more thing there. I'm being totally serious here, and you guys are probably just going to giggle a little bit. But one of the most important things in my fish room, seriously, honestly, is my TV, my refrigerator, my pizza oven, and my music, because those are things that okay, so your wife is gone. Seriously, your wife has gone out of town and you're downstairs working in your fish room. What happens? Well, at noon, you're kind of hungry and want a pizza. So you go upstairs, put it in pizza, then all of a sudden, you start watching football. Then you don't go back down there with a pizza oven. You'll throw a pizza in. You'll stay down there with the TV. I go down there at night and I'm watching the local news, which my wife hates. I watch local news, I feed my fish. I do my little thing. I've got music down there blaring. And you need to make this enjoyable. And you need to I mean, like, multitask. You don't need to sit on your butt to watch the local TV news. You could do that while you're feeding your fish, while you're doing your water changes. And if your water changes are probably the biggest thing that people that's why they quit, because they're not doing their water changes and things crap out. But if you're doing your water changes and it's not so monotonous and so boring because you've got the local news on or you're watching the football game, those are things that can make your fish room real personal and a lot easier to work in. For Christmas, my wife bought me a new 50 inch TV for my fish room. I don't know put it, but I'm going to put it up.

You're going to find a spot?

Yeah, for sure. And then we've got the sono system downstairs where we got music blaring all the time. And the refrigerator is important, too, because all of a sudden, you have to go. Most people's fish rooms are in the basement and you need a soda or you need something to drink. And you go upstairs, you get distracted, and all of a sudden you don't come back down.

So if you want the best high quality guppies and angel fish that are completely deaf, contact Jim Colby. His contact angels are in.

They are deaf.

They don't need to hear, though.

Adam, our house rocks.

Adam, when are we starting your podcast? I'm ready to go down to Southern Minnesota Podcast when we start in your fish room. Excuse me, I've been drinking too much.

I don't know.

I have to get the garage insulated.

Yeah, I'm coming down. We're insulating your garage, Adam.

I'm pretty good at it now after doing it. Trial by fire.

Hey, Michael, come join us. We'll have a party.

Or watch Michael do it.

Yeah, he's not that far away from Adam.

There you go.

Well, then I can give him some of the plants, right?

It's the weed at this point.

And then about six months from now, we can go, Why is Michael in jail? And then we'll go, okay, there you go.

Well, Michael, again, thanks so much for coming on, buddy. Really appreciate it. Hopefully we can have you on again. For those that are listening, the YouTube channel is all things fish. It'll be in the show notes, click the subscribe button. That does matter, especially the folks that are doing it for the passion and not the money. It motivates them over any monetary functions. Michael, thank you.

Definitely. For sure. Thanks for having me. And you mentioned the motivation. I have a career that I get my money from. I'm not in a big enough channel on YouTube, and it's not my goal to be a big enough channel to actually be a source of revenue or a source of income. So, believe it or not, there's a few of us that are not just driven by the fame and money of YouTube. So it does mean a lot when people do leave comments on videos or they do subscribe, because that lets me know that not only did they watch and pay attention, but they found some sort of value in it. And that's what, at the end of the day, if I can teach one person one thing with every video, regardless of how many people watch it, then that video is a success to me. Whether that video took me 1 minute or whether that video took me 3 hours to produce, absolutely.

I'm telling you right now. Go ahead.

If I can teach one person one thing, then it was a success, and it's worth my time.

I'm telling you right now. Zach, Jamie, and I are buying night lights right after this podcast.

I'm putting a nightlight in my bedroom tonight and sneaking up on my wife, for sure. Chicken, chicken, boing boing.

Well, no, seriously, guys, it's been a pleasure chatting with you, and I hope we can make it happen again more often. And eventually, I'm going to end up driving north, whether it's over at Adams Place or further north, and we'll meet up and have a beverage and get to see everybody, for sure.

And if you ever want to return the favor, we can enjoy join a live stream. We're not that ugly.

We have faces for radio, that's for sure. I'll tell you that much.

All right, well, last thing is, Zach, thank you for coming and being part of the debauchery. It's nice to have friends join us when they can. I know we're not exactly an easy drive.

Oh, no. It's a distance, but that's all right.

This is a shout out for yourself for someone else. You have a moment?

Well, all I have right now is just an Instagram at King Aquatics. You can just see some pictures of my fish room there.

There you go.

And how big is your fish room?

It's a nine by eight. Currently got about 20. Tanks in it, but room for 50.

Bigger pump.

I'd like that.

He bought the bigger pump.

Got room for 50 and I'll put in 72.

Wink wink.

Exactly.

I don't know if I can fit 72 in there.

I'll help.

Yeah, we'll be there. All right. Got any last minute notes, Adam? No. Well, guys, we'll catch you on the next podcast. Fishery is the podcast alexander Williamson does go our Facebook page, aquarium Guys podcast Community. Leave some memes. Find us live on Discord Aquariumguyspodcast.com. Bottom the website, click that button, join us. We had, like, 26 people in the Chat peak tonight listening live. That's far too many that I would expect, but you're still welcome. There's more spots for you also. Last one, we're doing a patreon. We have our patreon page.

I'm not paying you for this.

No, people pay for this podcast uncensored and unedited before it airs so we.

Can sell Kite brand.

So if you want to be a part of the VIP club and not listen to it with bleeps, then it's all there for you. All right, well, until next time. Bye, TV.

Thanks, everybody.

Thanks, guys. Have a great night.

Thanks, guys, for listening to the podcast. Please go to your favorite place where podcasts are found, whether it be Spotify, itunes, Stitcher, wherever they can be found, like subscribe. And make sure you get push notifications directly to your phone so you don't miss great content. Like this no no list.

Oh, so you got Frank Joe way. Adam, pay attention.

Hey, we only got so many bleeps to use, Adam. We have to pay for those.

We bleep them now.

We have been for a while. The ducks have been far surpassed. I'm sorry. No, you're not. Okay.

You turd monkeys.