Discus Breeding System

[gmaniac]

For Mixture RO Water TDS
Breeding 1/2 tsp 50 gal ~40 ppm
Fry 1 tsp 50 gal ~80 ppm
Growout/Adult 1-1/2 tsp 50 gal ~120 ppm

This did not format how I wanted it to, so I am going to restate it here:

**********************
Stage: Breeding
Mixture: 1/2 tsp
RO Water: 50 gal
TDS: ~40ppm
**********************
Stage: Fry
Mixture: 1 tsp
RO Water: 50 gal
TDS: ~80ppm
**********************
Stage: Growout/Adult
Mixture: 1-1/2 tsp
RO Water: 50 gal
TDS: ~120ppm
**********************

 

[gmaniac]

Here is an update on the rack construction.

Since my incident with tempered glass I start marking the panels that were good to be drilled.






Next I used my 3d printer to make overflow screens.

 

[gmaniac]

construction continued:

I put most of the tanks in place but only the ones with the lights are drilled



Here are the tanks getting drilled.







Made a trip to the hardware store, I think this is all I will need for the rack.



The following is where my algae scrubber will go once it is all sealed.



preparing the rack filtration system



here in the lower portion of the picture you can see I've started sealing the algae scrubber and the sieve I am going to be using.



there is one of the cages I am going to be holding my staging water. I will be storing it elevated so I can drain it right into the sump of the rack.

 

[gmaniac]

So this next post is solely on my heating for the rack. I went with water heater elements used in your house water heater. The cost of one of these is a fraction of what I would have spent on an aquarium specific heater.

I bought 3 heating elements, 4500w 240 volt. I will be using 1 on the water staging tank and then 2 on the rack itself.

 

[Yulli]

How do you plan on controlling the 240v heaters?

 

[gmaniac]

Y Yulli I was planning on using an arduino for managing the temperature of both my water staging tank and the main rack. I will have to take some pictures of how I end up doing the wiring, but here are links to the items I am going to use and the heating elements. I found this in an aquaponics forum, here is that link.

arduino uno - https://store.arduino.cc/usa/arduino-uno-rev3

relay - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MKWACVI


wire - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BQS5TG


temp sensor - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00QGN0LKY


heating element - https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0006IX89G


Once I have written some code for the arduino i will put it in a repo on github.com so anyone else can use it.

 

[gmaniac]

### Question ###
What are the smallest size people have had discus pair off and breed at?

Reason being I have some 3 inch (the ones I raised from dime sized - my Joe Gargas purchase) that have paired off, they laid and fertilized a couple eggs. Now they do not have quantity and they of course started eating them almost immediately (I know they are fertilized because I was able to cover some of them and I do have wigglers). I am just surprised at their size and already breeding.

Here are pictures of the pair and then of their eggs and wigglers





To give some comparison here is the other confirmed pair I have.

 

[gmaniac]

Sorry for the long delay on my updates. We recently had an addition to the family, my son was born in February. So progress has slowed in the last year.

***** UPDATE PORTION *****

I had quite a few set backs, the setup I was using was not meant to hold that many fish in such a small space for so long. I had built the 100 gallon plywood tanks in the bottom, but they never could pass the leak test. So to get space fast I ended up finding a great deal on facebook marketplace of a guy getting rid of some 8 foot tanks, some 6 foot and some 5 foot. The tanks also came with fish a whole bunch of loaches (red tail botia, tiger loaches, zebra loaches, couple threadfin catfish, some plecos, and then an assortment of one offs), a lot of driftwood, rocks, 2x 100 gallon ponds, bio media (k1), pvc, and a swimming pool pump (pentair superflo single speed). I am going to be fiberglassing my plywood tanks, but in the meantime I have setup one of the 8 foot tanks and moved all of the discus and some of the other fish in there to let them grow out. Needless to say though I have had quite a few die just from being in too small of space and extreme bullying.

On top of everything above with the space issue, I ran into electrical issues as well. I was running the temporary setup and trying to run half the rack on the same breaker, that ended up with blowing the breaker every time I tried to add heaters. I had half the rack running with water, but could not heat the water. So I had to put a hold on that (this was in conjunction with the larger plywood tank leak issue). To solve this issue I have added two new breakers each at 30 amps. One for each system I am running; the grow out and the breeding rack.

So where I stand right now I have an 8 foot tank setup (grow out system) on its own breaker, it has all the discus, tiger loaches, plecos, zebra loach, and then I put driftwood in there. This seems to be running good, fish are good for the most part (I have a couple discus that may be permanently damaged from the temporary setup they were in). I still have the temporary setup going but with the red tail botia and the threadfin catfish.

I did get some work on the automation side of things done, I setup a raspberrypi3 as a local server and I am building out an api endpoint for it. So the way I see things happening is I have sensors on everything and they are only worried about collecting information sending that to the api endpoint and then I can decide what to do with it from there. I have the temperature sensor working and my flow sensors, but I haven't added them to the system yet, I figured it would be a waste to do that if I am not storing it anywhere or have somewhere to read that data.

***** WHAT IS NEXT *****

1. Set up a 55 in the grow out system to move the red tail botia and the threadfin into.
2. Completely teardown the temporary setup.
3. Get the breeding rack running again with its' new electrical line I have ran to it (this may have more sub tasks).
4. Focus on getting the current discus to start pairing off.
5. Move pairs into breeding rack.

I will do another post to add pictures and show the state of things ( looks like a tornado went through there)

 

[deeda]

Thanks for the update, sorry for the losses and Congratulations on the new baby!

 

[Trey Kzn]

Hi Giman,
been following the entire build
congrats on the baby

keep it up !!!