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Doing water changes on a rack?


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I would leave the top shelf empty to add a reservoir with float valve (from r/o unit) and gravity feed the water into the tanks via a manifold coming off an outlet at the bottom of storage tank. For 12 tanks, a 35 gallon horizontal storage tank would be perfect. A member here uses a 40 gallon breeder tank as their storage. Those reinforced storage totes (usually black w/ yellow tops) found at home improvement stores could work too. Short of that, submersible pumps are the only other way I know of.

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37 minutes ago, chappy6107 said:

I use hob breeder boxes to hold my WC water or topoff water and drip it in through an airline.  I set the breeder boxes on top of the tanks.

 

On 8/25/2018 at 6:15 PM, madcrafted said:

I would leave the top shelf empty to add a reservoir with float valve (from r/o unit) and gravity feed the water into the tanks via a manifold coming off an outlet at the bottom of storage tank. For 12 tanks, a 35 gallon horizontal storage tank would be perfect. A member here uses a 40 gallon breeder tank as their storage. Those reinforced storage totes (usually black w/ yellow tops) found at home improvement stores could work too. Short of that, submersible pumps are the only other way I know of.

Those are both great ideas. How much does your breeder boxes hold? The specimen containers i have only hold about .5g of water and im not sure that's enough for a water change.

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I feel like a breeder box would take too long, especially for 12 tanks... unless you had like 12 of the large marina boxes to spare, even then, you'd be limited to doing 5-10% water changes at most... depending on your tank size.  Any storage tank safe for potable water, should work fine for gravity feeding your water changes, plus you can do all 12 at once. :) I've kept r/o water in polyethylene inductor tanks for years without issue. I'm planning to add something like this for my up and coming 8 rack set up: https://www.usplastic.com/catalog/item.aspx?itemid=27845&catid=958. It's a bit pricey but worth it for convenience alone. You can see how many gallons are in there so you can remineralize to exactly where you want. The lid opening is large enough to get a float valve in there easily and it has a 3/4" bulkhead fitting on the bottom for adding any type of splitter/manifold you want.

 

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19 hours ago, AdvancedAquaculture said:

 

Those are both great ideas. How much does your breeder boxes hold? The specimen containers i have only hold about .5g of water and im not sure that's enough for a water change.

 

they hold a tad more than .5 gallons of water.  I do 10% water changes so on my 10g tanks I just fill it twice.  I do 4 tanks at a time and have 4 breeder boxes.  I dont mind the time it takes as I can do other things while the process goes on.

 

I will never store a lot of water up high on a rack system.  it makes the rack a bit too wobbly for my liking and this was with the gladiator brand racks sold by lowes/HD.  I have already had one rack (that one) collapse on me due to one of the legs of the rack getting bumped and it folded.  each shelf was rated @1000lbs+ and only had 3 ten gallon tanks on each shelf.  Now I have a much heavier duty metal rack and i still dont trust it completely.

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