COMPLETE DAILY ROUTINE OF A DEDICATED FISH BREEDER (60+ TANKS!)

Ajouté : 2026-05-14

[00:00:00]Hey everyone, Dan from Sydney's Angels and Bennett's Rainbows. Today I thought it'd be interesting to show you just exactly what I do every day in the fish room to keep that room running.

[00:00:10]So, I'd say probably the first thing I do when I walk in here, I look at the temperature.

[00:00:16]Right now, we're about 75 1/2°. There's Celsius for everyone else in the world.

[00:00:23]And I try to run this room around 74 to 80°. Anything above 80, I start getting like bacterial infections. Some of the fish, some of the tanks, especially the top tank, start getting really warm. So, I look at that. Then I take a walk around and I make sure there's not any water on the floor. I watered this last night, so I know what that came from, but basically I I just give a quick look to the ground. All right, no water on the ground. We're looking good. And the next thing I do, I just take a really quick lap around and look at all the fish. Make sure everyone's acting normal.

[00:00:57]You know, when you look at the fish every single day, you get really good at kind of noticing when something's wrong.

[00:01:05]You don't have to be an expert to like to know when your fish aren't acting right.

[00:01:09]So, I just walk I just take a quick look at all the tanks.

[00:01:13]You know, are the filters running? Are the fish swimming normally? Do they look colorful and happy? The next thing I do, I see how much water I have in my tote.

[00:01:22]This is 220 gallons all the way at the top. And I have a light up here that helps me kind of see how much water I have in here. And you can see it is absolutely full. So, I've got 220 gallons of water to play with. I check the um fertilizer level in my automatic pump system. It looks like I've got full fertilizer in there. Once I'm done with all that, it's time to feed the fish. I hatch out live baby brine shrimp twice every day that I'm home. I'm home every two out of three days. I start a batch in the morning and I start a batch at night and then 24 hours from that time period I can hatch th those batches. I also go into my freezer and I get some kind of frozen food. So right now I'm alternating from Hikari brine shrimp and Hikari blood worms. I buy these big packages because they're a little bit cheaper and I put them in aquarium water and let them defrost in there. And then I'm going to use a turkey baser to feed that out to my bigger fish, specifically cory's and um other fish that I'm trying to spawn.

[00:02:27]I'm trying to heavily feed to to boost egg production. So, I've got my brine shrimp, my blood worms. Next thing I do once I got that stuff ready, I grab my fry powder and I feed any fry I have going on. This room kind of goes through seasons. And what I mean by that is like I'll have like a breeding season where I'm just breeding a bunch of fish at once. Then I have a growing season where I'm growing all those fish up and not breeding too much. And then I have like a season off where I'm just kind of relaxing. Maybe I've got all my tanks full of fish and I'm not breeding or growing fish. I'm just selling fish.

[00:03:00]Right now I'm in the growing phase. Um I try to time this around family vacations. So, ideally, you don't want to have a bunch of fry in tanks when you go on vacation because most likely you're having someone watch your tanks.

[00:03:13]Taking care of fry can be pretty tricky to someone that's never taken care of fish before. They might overfeed them, they might underfeed them. There's a lot that can kind of go wrong. So, I try to get most of my fish to like a juvenile stage before I take a trip. So, early this winter, starting in like December, January, I was breeding like crazy. I had tons of fish producing lots of eggs.

[00:03:35]Then I started raising up those fry because I knew I had a spring break trip coming up. Once I went on my spring break trip, I only had a handful of fry throughout the room. And my mom my mom's a pro at feeding these fish. So, honestly, I don't have to worry about it, but I still don't want to task her with like millions of fry. Uh, but for fish that are fry, I just get a lot of my food from Ken's fish and I use these golden pearls, five to 50 micron. It's basically golden pearls that have been crushed up so fine that it's it's a powder. And I just take a small brush. I don't even know where I got this. I think it came with some kind of aquarium filter. I I dip it in the powder like this.

[00:04:19]That's all you need is like a light coating. And I just flick it right on top of the water. Um, this especially works great for rainbows because they're top feeders. I just give it like one quick little flick like that. It's going to be really hard to see, but that's that's coating the top of the the water.

[00:04:36]Next thing I want to do is check my hatching system right here. So, I've got a little light switch that I turn on.

[00:04:44]Right now, I've only got three bins that have anything in them. And I check this every day. Sometimes there's no fry in here. Sometimes there's a ton of fry in here. Okay, so there's actually no fish in here. If there were fish in here, all I do is I take my magical blue net.

[00:05:01]I get underneath the fish really, really gently like that and just drop them down in one of these trays here. Let them swim out of the net. Doesn't hurt them at all. Doesn't shock them. Um, I've hardly ever lose fish moving them like that. I have over 70 tanks in my house right now. And I knew that I would never be able to keep up with maintenance without putting in some kind of automatic water change system. So, every one of these tanks in this room, with the exception of the three big ones, are drilled and there is an overflow installed. So, I don't know if you're going to be able to see this, but you can see there's a bulkhead behind that tank. Once water reaches this point, it goes into this drain, goes down a black tube just like this one or a clear tube. It empties into a main line that will then go out the wall and it'll go get collected in a IBC tote in the back yard where I can use it for gardening and stuff like that. That is uh critical if you if you're busy and you want a lot of tanks.

[00:06:02]You're going to need some kind of automatic system, unless you just want to dedicate like a day every week or so for water changes. And if you're okay with doing that, then that's fine. An automatic water change system does not take the place of real maintenance. I still do water changes on all of these tanks every 2 weeks because while giving these tanks fresh water is a bonus, it does not clean filters and it does not siphon up m and poop off the bottom of the tanks. So, I still choose to do that. That's why when you look at some of these tanks, they're going to look like they're a little low right now.

[00:06:33]It's because I was in here last night um siphoning off some some poop off the bottom of these tanks here. So, I'm thinking before I feed these fish, I'm going to fill some of these tanks up. And since I'm pressed for time today, I'm going to use my automatic water change system. Turn water change on for 11 minutes.

[00:06:57]All right, there we go.

[00:07:00]So, it's fresh water going into this tank.

[00:07:07]And I'll let this kind of fill up a little bit before I start feeding them.

[00:07:10]See, all these tanks have water lines.

[00:07:14]Some of them are running faster than others. Like I might turn this one up.

[00:07:17]It's another thing I have to do every week is kind of like monitor everything and make sure everything's working the way it should. Sometimes these get a little clogged up and I have to fix that. So, you see these tanks down here need water. And the flow on this one's pretty low. So, I'm going to turn this one up a little bit. There we go. I just moved a new group of rainbow shiners into this tank here. They're still pretty small. Might give them a little more flow, too. Just if there's a certain fish I want to grow faster or give more water, like uh any group of plecos, I like pretty much double the water volume that comes in. I have the adjustability to uh do that with this system, which is really nice.

[00:07:57]I'll have to clean off floating plants so that the plants underneath don't die off. Um I'll scrape the glass. I do a lot of other things. So, don't ever let anyone tell you that automatic water change systems are the, you know, they are direct replacement for maintenance because they're not. You still have to do a lot of stuff. It just keeps the tanks fresher for longer. It kind of buys you time, honestly. It's the way I look at it. It buys you time. And honestly, the most efficient way to use a system like this, if you had the time to do it, would be to come through here, siphon off the bottom of every tank, and then fill it up with that. That would be like a zero waste situation. So, the next thing I do is I clear the walkway, make sure my cart can get through here.

[00:08:45]I'm going to go grab my cart, and I'm just going to make one circle around the fish room, and I'm going to feed all the fish. So, I grabbed my little cart and I specifically asked for a cart that was a little more narrow so that I could fit in all these hard-to-reach areas. I get my blood worms and my brine shrimp. And first thing I'll do is I'll feed these two tanks here. A little brine shrimp to these guys. Everyone's got their like staple food that they give. Mine is flu bug bites. And still the best way to feed it in my opinion is to put it in a rechargeable pepper shaker like this.

[00:09:19]You can control how coarse or fine you want the food and you don't have to touch the food.

[00:09:26]You don't have to break it apart with your fingers.

[00:09:29]This makes it so easy. You can give this to almost every fish.

[00:09:33]So, I'm going to get rolling. I'm going to make my way around the room and show you what I do. Every tank is kind of unique. Uh, every tank has its own feeding requirements. Jordan and I both know what they are, but when I'm away on vacation, what I do is I I use these sticky notes, and it's very simple. I just will put one color sticky note on a bottle like this, and then every tank that has that sticky note gets that food. So, that's just one simple way I found to market it for my mom. These guys will get some brine and some flake foods. I try to mix it up. I try to rotate foods to kind of give them like a varied diet. um tanks that have lids. I kind of open them all up in a line. So, I'm gonna do the way my brain works is I'm gonna do these left to right. Then I'm gonna close these lids. Then I don't have to worry about them till later. I come down here twice a day when I'm home. Once during my kids naps around lunchtime, at the second time after I put them to bed. So, I'd say at a very absolute minimum, I'm down here for about an hour a day.

[00:10:37]That's if I'm just feeding and that's it. cuz um start to finish feeding takes me about 30 minutes sometime. I mean I can I can run through here in 10 minutes if I wanted, but I like to take my time and make sure I do it right because I I like being down here. It's it's peaceful for me. And almost every single tank gets brine shrimp every single day because that is like the one live food I feed. This year I want to get into feeding more live foods. I generally feed all the brine first. Soft fer this all the way up.

[00:11:15]Everybody likes the brine.

[00:11:20]You know, even my plecos, I give my plecos brine shrimp. They really like it. I don't feed brand new plecos brine shrimp because um the shells can bind them up. If they eat the shells, I can actually kill brand new plecos. But once they're a little older, they really like the brine shrimp.

[00:11:38]So, I don't mind feeding them that.

[00:11:45]See, I'm not I don't feed too much cuz if you feed too much brine shrimp, you're going to end up with problems.

[00:11:52]Yeah. If you overfeed brine shrimp, you end up with hydra. And if you end up with hydra, I just use this medication.

[00:11:58]It's called no pleneria.

[00:12:01]I get it on Amazon. and it's extremely expensive right now for some reason. So, I use it sparingly. So, now that I've done that, I grab another food and I just supplement my feeding with some golden pearls. I do a lot of golden pearls in the fish room. I love these bottles. They make it so easy to feed a lots of fish at once.

[00:12:26]I try not to overfeed, but like I don't want to underfeed either. I want everyone to have a little bit of something to eat. I used to have step stools uh next to all the really tall tanks, but I realized that they were getting in the way of my cart. So now I just kind of have one wedged in the corner over there because I absolutely need one to feed these next groups of tanks. And then I got another one by my fry hatching system. And I can move those around if I need to. But um I see these guys up here. Give them some brine shrimp. I still got an absolute ton of rainbows up here. Here I've got the Herbert Axarati and there's a lot of fish in here. So we're going to give him a big old pinch of flakes, too. And I'm just just just tall enough to reach the top. But I'm a short guy. So it's a bit of a stretch for me. My belly usually hangs out and I get flakes everywhere, sometimes even in my face. So it's kind of gross, but we do it because we love our fish.

[00:13:26]So with these taller tanks, I go I start up here, go down, then I move over, do those, then I move over, do those. Just makes more sense.

[00:13:36]Little bit of flake food for the BL.

[00:13:38]Nice big clump of flakes for all the goodids I got down there and rainbows I got down here.

[00:13:45]And I try to have a mental um checklist of what I fed them last time so I can kind of alternate it. I'm always trying new fish food. I got to get some more bug buffet from Keeping Fish Simple. I want to buy some more of that stuff. I know it's expensive, but it's really good for these fry tanks, actually. And I really liked Cory's magic fry food that he uh gave me, too. Really enjoyed that. So, I'll probably pick up more of that as well.

[00:14:16]I just go through so much food that um generally if I can't buy it in bulk, I don't buy it just because I feed a lot of fish food. Obviously, I have a lot of fish. This corner is a little tricky with the pond here. The pond kind of gets whatever. You usually just give it a big old clump of flake food. And there's some big rainbows in here that fly up and hit it like a shark. It's pretty cool. See my angels? I'll probably give them some bug bites. And I'm going to give them a little bit of uh blood worms, too.

[00:14:45]Cali tawas will get a little bit of brine trim and they'll get a little bit of bug bites.

[00:14:55]So, I'm going to do this back wall. At this point, I don't want to be repetitive, but same thing, brine shrimp, you know, flakes, um, pellet food, whatever I'm feeding that day, blood worms. If I've got breeding projects like these guys up here, they'll get, um, frozen brine, frozen blood worms. Same thing with fish I'm trying to grow up. Rainbows usually get like blood worms. A lot of people say not to give rainbows blood worms. If you don't do too much, you're okay. Just don't overfeed them. It's a little bit of a tight squeeze with this cart, but what this cart gives me is all of my food with me wherever I go in the room.

[00:15:28]So, it is worth heaving along. And also, when I'm feeding, I'm looking for eggs on the glass. If it's a Corey tank, I'm looking for breeding behavior in any of my fish. And um even if I'm not breeding that fish, if I see a bunch of eggs, I usually collect them if I have room to put them somewhere, uh a lot of times with these corey holding tanks, even the tanks that I sell out of and the cory's get mature enough, they start breeding and um I might end up with a bunch of eggs on the side glass and I usually will grab those. I'm also looking and making sure I didn't feed too much. If there's a bunch of food on the bottom, I'll siphon it out either right now or later tonight. I don't want to leave a bunch of rotting food in there. So, I've got 30 20 gallon tanks in this room. 15 on this rack and 15 on this rack. This rack is quite a bit higher than this rack. At least I six inches higher. So, I need to use the step stool down here to get to the top tanks. And uh not a big deal. So, pop up here. If you don't mind getting up here, it's not a big deal. Just be mindful of what you're putting up here.

[00:16:33]Don't put fish in here that are really hard to catch. Don't put plecos up here.

[00:16:37]You will thank me later. But, you know, rainbows, guppies, um, any fish that you can really catch pretty easily by like lowering the water level, not a big deal. And, um, my new siphoning hoses that I built with the long PEX tubing, the rigid tubing, make siphoning these tanks pretty easy, actually. The one thing about tanks this high, if you don't get up to this level and look in them once in a while, you're going to miss stuff. Um, there might be a dead fish on the bottom. There might be a bunch of mal or detritis on the bottom. And if you're not getting up here and looking at it, you're not going to see it. So, you're going to be like, you might just see the water and be like, "Oh, it looks okay." But getting up here is kind of a a good thing for me cuz I'm a short guy, but I can look in these tanks and be like, "All right, like these two look awesome. This one's got a little bit of poop at the bottom.

[00:17:32]Poop at the bottom. So, tonight maybe we'll come in here and we'll siphon this out. Just I'm making a mental checklist of things I want to do.

[00:17:41]So, all the fish look great, though.

[00:17:42]They all look really happy. So, when I get close to exhausting my brine shrimp, I fill this up with tank water, shake it, blow it out to get any residual brine shrimp in there. I'm still going to rinse it, but then I'll take my actual brine shrimp uh cup and I'll just start dumping it.

[00:18:00]tanks that I I know need little extra loving. And like I said before, all my plecco tanks, they love brine shrimp.

[00:18:08]Um, they love it. So, even if there's nothing but plecos in there, I'll give them brine shrimp. Really seems to help them grow quite quickly, I'll also go back and I'll look at all the other tanks and if one tank's completely empty of food already and I just fed them like a minute or two ago, I'll come back and I'll feed them again. So, that that's another reason why you can't really race through this process all the time. you kind of have to be mindful of what you're doing and pay attention to how much they're eating. If you if you look back 10 minutes later and there's still tons of food in the tank, then you fed too much. Since everything's always growing and evolving in a room like this, you have to make adjustments as you go as well. So, coming down here and and spending a little bit of time with the fish and learning what they need is really important in my opinion. Although I'm not actively breeding these fish at the moment, I like to keep them all in breeding condition. So, when I have frozen foods, I give them a big old helping of frozen foods every single day. That way, when I pull them out of this tank, if I want to breed them, they probably have lots of eggs on board. And I just like watching them eat the blood worms, too. They just go absolutely nuts for them. Might give these guys a little bit of flakes, too, cuz they ate they hate those blood worms really fast.

[00:19:19]And you can see I'm dropping flake food.

[00:19:21]I think everyone does that. You drop flake food, it gets everywhere. So, about once a week, I'll come through here and I'll vacuum. So, three things right here that have made the fish room so much more efficient and just better overall. Might seem kind of simple, but a garbage can with a lid. Uh, super nice. If you don't have a lid, you'll start smelling stuff. Ask me how I know.

[00:19:43]So, I got this for free off of uh my sister-in-law. So, I love it because it could smell horrible in there and you won't know until you open the cap, which is nice.

[00:19:54]Uh, next thing that really makes my life a little easier. This is a like pet vacuum. It's made by Bissell. It's like the Crosswave Pet, but it's a water vacuum. So, it's got, you know, a roller. It can do dry and wet. This is a water tank down here, and then there's a solution tank up there. So, I usually just uh you can buy the fancy soap for it, but I just put a little bit of uh bleach and water in it, and I just clean the floors with it, and it does a really nice job. It'll uh suck up puddles, which is super helpful because I get the floor wet in here all the time. So, that's really nice to have. And finally, some kind of little vacuum for doing little jobs. I've got a DeWalt uh 20 volt vacuum, and it's a normal vacuum.

[00:20:40]It's got like this normal rolling uh base, but then you can also It comes with attachments. And this is really good for like getting food off the tops of aquariums or like you know getting hard-to-reach places. If I'm cleaning off the workbench or something, obviously if you don't have DeWalt and you have like a different brand of power tools, get the vacuum that you know uses those batteries. Don't don't buy a whole separate battery just for your vacuum.

[00:21:10]But honestly, this has been really nice in the fish room, too. I use it almost every single day. So, my little dude has just woken up and I have to be done for now. Before I go, I'm going to just show you my cart really quick. It's definitely not done being optimized.

[00:21:26]There's a lot of room down here that I can store stuff. So, I'm thinking about building like a wooden shelf to have more room down here for more storage.

[00:21:35]But, uh, this top part is mostly dedicated to just feeding. So, this is the this is where I I drive it.

[00:21:42]Obviously, there's paper towels that sit underneath there, which is really handy to have. Um, in general, I just have a couple sponges that I use to clean tanks, flashlight, methylene, blue, golden pearls all the way from 100 micron to 800 micron all in a row. Dry erase markers that are really handy if I need to write a note for my wife on the tanks.

[00:22:05]TDS, PDH meter, and uh a cooking thermometer actually, but it it gives me really accurate water temperature, glass cleaner, strips, scissors. You always need scissors in a fish room. And I have it all set up so that all the food is kind of on this side. So, the tanks will be on this side. I can come around here, look at what I'm feeding, and um like I said before, these are just blood worms in aquarium water. This is my brine shrimp.

[00:22:33]I've got two different kinds of algae wafers that I'm using at the moment. I'm using the extreme bottom scrapers and the Hikari algae wafers. I buy these in bulk. Fish seem to like both of these. I also use a lot of repachi.

[00:22:51]Aquinex cool mix. I use their community blend, but I also have used their green.

[00:22:57]I've used their garlic one, their medicated one. Bug bites. I buy this in big buckets and I just store it in here cuz it's more convenient. That's what I'm feeding out of this pepper shaker.

[00:23:08]Super convenient. I've been really getting back into Hikari Viberites. Fish really love these and Hikari's really high quality food. Ebo foods are really hard to find right now. I think there's one guy that sells them. They're pretty expensive. Uh, so these are great for certain plecos and honestly my cory's love evo foods. All four of these are just backups of golden pearls.

[00:23:38]I buy all my golden pearls from Ken's Fish. And I've 3D printed a couple funnels. They come in handy. Down here I've got some extra mops for when I'm breeding rainbow fish. Isopropyl alcohol is really good for cleaning stuff. I've got hydrogen peroxide for algae problems.

[00:23:56]I've got other stuff down here like rice fish mops.

[00:24:01]I've got some dip and pores that I keep down here when I'm moving fish around the room or fry.

[00:24:08]And I've also got little glass cups for when I'm picking eggs. I put them in there and then I can dump them in tanks accordingly. Um, other just containers.

[00:24:19]When I'm sorting fish, like if you buy CPDs from me, I usually put them in this square container first. That allows me to pick the ones I want to send out. So that you get a pretty good ratio, male to female, if that's what you're looking for.

[00:24:35]But like I said, I could build this up and make it a lot more um friendly, user friendly.

[00:24:40]I also just have some clamps right here to like clamp hoses and stuff. I keep more of them. over here on my sink.

[00:24:50]So, that's all I have time for during our lunch break. You can meet me down here again at night and I'll uh go over some more maintenance that I do. Okay, now it's the night shift. My kids are both sleeping and it's going to look a lot like earlier. I'm going to go around the room, feed every tank, and then this is when I really get a lot of my stuff done. So, if there's water changes I need to do, I try to do a few tanks every night so I don't have to do them all one night.

[00:25:16]uh if I have to move fish from one tank to another, for instance, if a group of fish is growing too big and they need to be moved to a bigger sized tank, I'll do that right now. I'll catch them all out and move them. Uh a lot of times at night, I'm actually catching fish and packing fish for orders that are shipping out the next day. So, if I have three, four, five orders that are going out tomorrow, I'm going to pack them up tonight because there's no way I'll have time to do that tomorrow. Um, so the fish will stay in a box overnight, but I do overnight shipping, so they're really not in a bag for very long. Um, this is when I get most of my creative work done. So, if I'm trying to shoot a video or think of video ideas or tinker with something, this is usually when that happens, too. Just because this is when I have more time available. So, every night I try to do a few water changes.

[00:26:09]Sometimes I start on one side of the room and I just try to go around the room. So, I'll do like this wall one night, this wall one night, that wall the next night. I'll do something like that. Other nights, like like tonight where I've got something else planned, I'll just look at certain tanks that are starting to look a little dirty and I'll just spot clean some of them. And what I basically do is I just siphon off the bottoms of them, clean any sponge filters, and um if I'm only doing two or three tanks, I'll just do the five gallon bucket. If I'm going to do more, I take out my whole water change system. It's a little more uh timeconuming to set up, but if you're going to be doing this on a larger scale, it it's totally worth it. I'll pick eggs out of mops. So, I will um squeeze these out, throw them on the table, maybe throw something on to watch like some YouTube or something, and I'll just pick some eggs cuz it's would be a pretty boring task by itself. But I'll take care of those. And then I'm just going to do a quick water change on this tank, too. It's getting a little late.

[00:27:09]So, the last thing I'm going to do is empty this tank right here. So, this is my master breeder Dean's fry system. You can see that I have all of the trays lifted off except for one because this one has some fry in it. And um what I end up doing when I'm raising Cory's in here is once they get to a big enough size, I just flip them like that. they go down to the bottom and they just grow really fast down here. But ends up what ends up happening though is you get a lot of different cory's that reach uh a mature size and that need to be taken out of here and put in bigger tanks.

[00:27:52]So, what I like to do is get several different dip and pores and I just kind of catch them one by one and sort them through different dip and pores and then they just go in their respective tanks wherever they're going to be going. So, I don't know if it's just me, but I find that catching fish is easiest when you don't give them a whole lot of water cuz then you kind of eliminate the up and down. Now you just got side to side to worry about. So, I've got this down to just a few inches. And then I have all my dip and pores down here. I'm just going to separate the different varieties of Cory's. And I see some uh luminatus in there. And I even see a rainbow shiner in there. And somehow someone got behind the Matten filter.

[00:28:37]So, we're going to take that guy out.

[00:28:39]Who knows how long he's been back there.

[00:28:42]Okay. Well, I finally got all the fish out of here. Took a little bit of time.

[00:28:46]These are all stirby.

[00:28:50]These are all gold laser. I think I got four of the false jewelies.

[00:28:57]Then little more than a handful of the Venezuelan. So, mostly Stirby and Gold Laser. So, now I'm going to be just plopping these in the tanks that I want them to go in, filling this up, and then I'm going to bed because it's 11:30 and I got to work tomorrow. But, uh, yeah, there's probably a lot of stuff I didn't cover, but I hope that gives you, I guess, somewhat of a realistic view of my day-to-day workload with this fish room. It's it is a lot of work, but, uh, it doesn't feel like work because I just really enjoy it. Uh, it's it's it's really fulfilling to me and relaxing. It's kind of a d-stresser, honestly, coming down here and and working on tanks. So, I don't look at it as work that I need to do. I look at it as work that I get to do and I really enjoy it. So, as always, thank you so much for watching. If you liked it, hit that like button. It really helps me out. And uh if you want more videos like this, consider subscribing. Thanks so much. I hope you're having a wonderful day.

[00:30:00]Goodbye.

[00:30:04]Heat. Heat. N.