Dicsus in my garage?

[sdshawn]

Hello all,

It's been time since I've posted since I've been busy moving and traveling.

For the first time in years I'm finding myself very low on fish. I currently have a 40 gal set up with 4 discus, half dozen cardinals, and a few Cory's.

I just set up my 150 gal in the garage, and hope to add a few more tanks in there if all goes well. My main concern is temperature fluxuation between day and night. I was hoping that someone with experience could point me in the best, most economomical way, to maintain a constant temperature.

I had an 8 degree temp swing from 90 to 82 yesterday. It's the first day and I dont have any heaters in the tank yet. I want to get an idea of what I'll be dealing with.

Do you think it would be best to heat/ac the garage, or just heat each tank individually?

Looking forward to getting and growning a bunch of new Discus. :) Kenny has some Beauty's in the last shipment.

Thanks all,


Shawn

[sdshawn]

I should add that I live in the S California desert. 70 Miles N of San Diego,a nd 70 miles E of LA. I guess winter night temps can get pretty cold.

[Elite Aquaria]

Shawn,

I live in South Florida. My fish room is in my garage. I do not use heaters. I have an AC/Heater duct piped into the fish room. During winter months we get about 1 week were we have cold fronts down to 50. I just open the duct and the water stays around 82. If it gets really cold I turn on a space heater. My fish room is 1/2 of a 2 car garage. I built walls and insulated them so the heat or AC stays in the room.

[Jhhnn]

Insulating the garage is probably a good idea, as is installing a temp controlled roof or soffit vent system to keep the temps down in the summer.

Insulation board on the back, bottom and sides of the tanks holds heat in, and bubble wrap or reflectix over the top and front at night will help, too.

I'm sure there's some crossover point where it's probably more economical to heat the whole fish room w/ natural gas vs heating each tank w/ electricity... figuring that out is the rub, but you'd probably need a lot of tanks to get there... might want to supplement the tank heaters w/ a duct from the house or a space heater in the winter, as suggested above...

[scottthomas]

I have a split level style house. This has made it really easy to keep discus in the garage. My garage stays cool in the summer.I walled off part of the garage and added insulation. I dont even heat the room. The tank heaters easily keep the room 80 degrees year round. I dont know how your house is set up but I bet you could easily keep the temp high enough with insulation. I'm unsure about how to deal with too high heat though.:confused:

Scott

[tcyiu]

Well, the one thing you have going for you is a large thermal mass. 150gal is a lot of water to heat up. Assuming the temp does not stay in the 100 range for many days, the large amount of water will dampen the swing. In other words, the water temp will not fluctuate as fast as the air temp.

The good news about freshwater fish is that they evolved to handle some amount of temperature change. Unlike ocean fish which live in incredibly stable temperature. Those get stressed with temp swings of more than a few degrees.

Tim

[Jhhnn]

Where you live, I'd be most concerned w/ garage temps going too high in the summer. Which is why I offered the bit wrt attic venting. Evaporative coolers should work well in your low humidity situation, as well. They're widely used all across the West. I use one in conjunction w/ an attic fan/ vent system to cool our whole house. They're a lot cheaper to operate than refrigerated A/C. The most common mistake wrt their installation is that you have to let hot air out so that the cooler can push cooled air in...

[allan_mark76]

Shawn I have all my tanks in my garage. I'm located in Mira Mesa in San Diego and they are all perfectly fine. If you want you are more than welcome to stop by and we can chit-chat about discus.

Oh yeah during the summers I turn off the heaters during the day and have them on a timer. So around 7pm the heaters go on. Mind you I only do this during the summer months of late June to middle of September. After that the heaters are all on and the timer is removed.

It's been really hot the past few months here in SD.

~AKA~