Goldfish Enthusiasm "Goldfish Crazy"

Maruu Wakin 16 days post spawn

Daphnia season is in full swing

Harvested a handful of daphnia today. The special fish are well today.

LED DIY Lighting

The Goldfish Garage is currently being retrofitted to upgrade it's lighting.  The T8 fluorescent shop lights and various aquarium hoods are being replaced by custom made DIY light bars that I've designed.  As far as I can tell, this method is by far the best, cheapest, most efficient and simple design I've seen.  Some of the Big Aquarium DIY guys have designs but they miss the boat being over thought and overly complicated.  LEDs are directional, so any design bouncing the light off a reflector is flawed as light intensity falls off exponentially with distance and reflective surface refract and deflect light in away that is less efficient than directly shining the light at the water surface.

There are three basic areas to cover.  The LED strip themselves, the power supply and controller if RBG and substrate the strip is mounted to.

The LED's I'm using are 5 meter (16.5 feet) 5630 (chip size) waterproof in cool or natural white.  I purchase them on Amazon or Ebay.  I have a few RED BLUE GREEN (RGB) strips but they are not bright enough for my larger tanks and the wiring is more complicated so most will be the single color white strips.

The power supplies can range from a simple lap top type power supply for a single 5m roll on up to large central power supply units like I'm using.  The unit I've installed is a 360 controller that can run up to about 100 feet of 5630 LED ribbon.  The power supplies are 12 volt and generally referred to as Switching power supply.

The light bars are made with 3/4 inch x 3/8 inch thick walled Aluminum channel.  I get it from a local steel yard and it is $13.50 for a 16 feet sections.

Supply mounted in metal box.

Cut the epoxy

Bend

Remove

SXK (1/14/14) 2 year Topview Ranchu

This is the sole remaining pair of the SXK 1/14/14 spawn.  In Feb 2105 a heron ate 19 of the stock.  These fish were raised in the garage and put outdoors in May 2104.  They have been outside for 2 years (only in greenhouse briefly when the polar vortex drop us to -10 F) in an elevated fiber glass trough.

Her belly is soft and he has tubercles and milt.  It will nearly 80F tomorrow, but we were in the 50's with heavy rain earlier in the week so hopefully that will make them frisky.  The Maruu Wakins have already spawned in the greenhouse so the spring season is looking up.

Female:

Male:

Maruu Wakin F1 12 day post spawn (4/2/16)

Medaka hypermelanist black dragon ricefish

Maruu Wakin Spawn 4/2/16 First spawn of year outdoor