Questions about possible new fish room.

[divemaster99]

Well there's a 50/50 chance that I will be getting our old computer room as my new fish room since we just cleaned it up and the computer is a piece of trash that hasn't been used in 6 (literally) years so we'll be getting rid of it soon. I do have a few concerns though. For one thing it's on the 2nd floor of my house so I'm really nervous about putting anything over a 100 in it. It is a corner room though so if I do any moderately sized tanks I'll be sure to put them in the corner. I am however planning on many small tanks (2-20 gallons) with the max tank being a 55 instead of a few big ones, maybe start breeding some more fish and get into nano tanks. The main reason I made this though was to ask how many cumulative gallons and pounds could a second floor corner room hold without the risk of collapsing? Like I said I'll be doing a lot of smaller tanks so I could always just cut back by a few of them but I'd still like to know. If it helps at all my house is a 13 year old Miranda house so it's not an extremely well built house but it's not like a live in a 10th floor apartment or anything like that. Thanks for the help guys and here's hoping I finally get a fish room!

 

[Adamrhh]

It's hard to say as many houses are different in terms of what they can hold. In my experience with houses though.. older houses are built with stronger floors then the new houses.

 

[divemaster99]

It's hard to say as many houses are different in terms of what they can hold. In my experience with houses though.. older houses are built with stronger floors then the new houses.

Thats good. So approximately how much weight would you say since you could tell me 500 or you could tell me 5000 and I'd believe you.

 

[Karl K]

I wouldnt be afraid of it falling through the floor. I've lived in 2 different apartments with my tanks on second floor. I've had uptoo a 140g with a 29g untop.
Before you do anything like that, you should get your floor tested, how much it can hold. You could probaly get bigger tanks that 100g.
Again, i think theres a test that can be done, so you know how much the floor can hold !

 

[apertoolfectcircle]

So, I ran into this question myself when planning on putting a 125 gallon in my upstairs bedroom. Some questions I had were what amount of weight can each joist in the floor support and are there certain areas that can hold more weight. My brother is finishing his degree this year in construction management, so I had his help as well. You are not really going to know what your floor can support unless you know what type of joists were used in your floor and what the span is that they are reaching across. It was a scary idea to start with when deciding to try such a large tank upstairs.

After thinking about it a lot the best solution I found was to put the tank against the wall where the joists begin/end at. Basically, the joists are running perpendicular to the way the tank sits. So, the tank spans across three to four joists. Beyond that, I put 2x8 (about 8' long) boards beneath the tank and stand running with the tank so that the weight was more evenly distributed across the area under the tank. This is probably the best way to do it without supporting your floor. I'm not sure how much your floor can handle but I definitely wouldn't put many tanks in the middle of the room. Put them against an exterior wall and try to make sure the joist run perpendicular to that wall

 

[fuzzlebug]

Well when you think about it that floor has to be able to support the weight of people and furniture, it may be a corner room but it's support beams will be connected to the test of the beams on that floor. The way I see ut is that if you had 10 people in the room at once would the floor collapse? Probably not, you could probably have 20 people no problem, so if that's 20 people of average weight then that's like over 2000 ponds of weigh, now obviously a tank isnt spread across the entire floor but you would be ok with around a 100g, my friend had a 125g in his second floor bedroom no problem, and that house wasn't particularly strong built.

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[divemaster99]

I wasn't even planning on a 100. I was thinking more along the lines of a 55, maybe a 30, a few 20s, one or two 10s, and a bunch of 5-0.5 gallons (anything under 2 is for plants or shrimp).

 

[SpinalFan]

A general rule of thumb to remain safe is 300 pounds per 15" you travel across the room.

And keep in mind, 3 little 20g tanks is 60g, yielding approx 700 pounds.

Divided longer shallow tanks are your way to go.

Fishkeeping is my cocaine.

 

[divemaster99]

A general rule of thumb to remain safe is 300 pounds per 15" you travel across the room.

And keep in mind, 3 little 20g tanks is 60g, yielding approx 700 pounds.

Divided longer shallow tanks are your way to go.

Fishkeeping is my cocaine.

Well the shortest length in the room on a 2D surface is 124" wall-wall. So that means it can hold approximately 2,480 pounds. Technically I guess the room is third flow since my first floor is above ground level so I don't know if it can hold that much weight, I'd say 2,000 is the most if feel comfortable with so what would be some good combos of tanks ranging from 2-55 gallons? Give me some options people. Thanks for the help so far guys!

 

[SpinalFan]

Well the shortest length in the room on a 2D surface is 124" wall-wall. So that means it can hold approximately 2,480 pounds. Technically I guess the room is third flow since my first floor is above ground level so I don't know if it can hold that much weight, I'd say 2,000 is the most if feel comfortable with so what would be some good combos of tanks ranging from 2-55 gallons? Give me some options people. Thanks for the help so far guys!

I'm to the understanding that joists are built to accomodate FAR more than I quoted. Over double, actually. I lowered it substantially to "cover my ass".

Tank layout to me would depend on the fish you desire to keep. You could do 13+ 15 gallon tanks. Decent footprint per tank. Or you could do 5x40g breeders (36x18 footprint) if you want to do larger fish.

I'd likely go with 3x40g and 6x15g. Stack the 15s '2' high. In total that'd be about 2100lbs of water in total, but very spread out.

Fishkeeping is my cocaine.