new tank

[MikeF]

Last night I stared a new post about my electric bill going through the roof. All my tanks are in the basement, that is not heated. One of the suggestions on the thread was to place all the fish in one tank to try and conserve some energy. That is what I am in the process of doing. I have 3 established tanks with discus in them right now. I have 2 55's and 1 75 that I am looking at combining into a 150. All tanks have been running for a while with 2 sponge filters in each, and a couple HOB filters. I have seen in other post that it is recommend that when going from a smaller tank to a larger one, just place all filters, fish and any other substrate into the larger tank, and everything will be ok. That is what has been recommended for one tank, but what about combining 3 tanks together. If all fish are healthy, will there be a problem if I place all fish into a new tank with media from each tank in the new one? This is what I am looking at doing. Just wanted to get some other opions about it before I do it. Is there anything that I should look for after the fish are placed into one? Thanks for the advise in advance.

[Hattawi]

I don't see why not.

The chance of fish from a given tank becoming sick from mixing up with fish from another tank would be equal for any 2 tanks. 3 tanks would probably raise the chance a bit. If you are adventurous, go ahead and do it, but if you are cautious, start with mixing up 2 tanks, and at the same time, take 1 or 2 fishes from the mixed up tank and place them in the 3 tank. If all goes well, add the contents of the 3rd tank. I'm not an expert. It's just my way of thinking.

[DiscussDiscus]

Mike,

I'm a newbie also, but I'll let you know what I did when I decided I needed to limit my tank load...

I recently brought three of my other fish tanks (non-discus tanks) together. While I've always been in the habit of keeping the tanks as close as possible in water parameters, I took a week of doing every-other-day WC's on all three tanks with the same source water. After that I did a week of daily WC's from the biggest tank into the two smaller tanks. What I was going for (in my head) was to get all three tanks on almost the same water parameters, and then make sure that all three tanks could accept the biggest tanks (destination tank)'s water. So it looked like this:

Week 1 - I made 40 gallons of fresh water
20gal : 5-7gal new from fresh water
30gal : 10-12gal new from fresh water
75gal : 25ish gal new from fresh water

Week 2 - I made 30 gallons of fresh water
I siphoned 30 gallons of water OUT of the 75 gallon tank and INTO
20 gal - got 10 gals of water from the 75gal tank
30 gal - got 15 gal of water from the 75 gal tank
75 gal tank got 30gal of new water.

While I'm unsure how sound this is from the hobby standpoint, it seemed to make a lot of sense to me. It also introduced water parameter change slowly to the tanks over two weeks, so that none of the fish would get a big change when I plopped them all into the 75.

When the time came, the 75 got all fish and a few extra plants from the 20 and 30. I did not move substrate since the 75 had plenty.

I did move both filters from the smaller tanks onto the larger one, even though the 75 had enough filtration on it to handle the increased load. I took those filters off after another couple weeks and put them on a quarantine tank to keep the right stuff alive in them.

Hope that helps, keep in mind I'm a newbie too, so if I somehow did something drastically wrong but things turned out ok, I'd love to hear from one of our more resident experts :)

Lee

[Don Trinko]

You could partialy insulate the tanks. Put foam insulation on rear and sides. ( bottom also if possible)This will hel some. Don T.

[Eyecandy]

Hi. I agree with Don. I use the blue insulation sheets that you can get from Home Depot as the background and sides for my discus tank and it seems to help keep in the heat.. It also makes the peppering less and the fishes color brighter. Ps. It's also very cheap.. you can just use velcrow to attach it and then remove the side pieces in the summer or whatever. HTH Sue