Hey, guys.
It's been way too long since we've been in the hot seat. Finally. So excited to get you guys a podcast. Let's just start right in first. Finally got some editors to get more podcasts out, so hopefully we'll churn some more than six months apart and shout out to Summit City corals. You can check out their website, summitcitycarl.com. They're in Fort Wayne, Indiana. That was a shout out from the podcast editor. Thank you. Lot of life changes, kid. You'll hear more details in the episode, but again, we'll try to push up more content when we can. This podcast is happily sponsored by Shrimp nv. Shrimp nv is a family run small business out of Oregon. Oregon. Oregon. I'm not sure how you cut that. They're going to beat me up after this. But they make homemade, premium, organic shrimp foods. All natural ingredients. No fish meals, no shrimp meals, no fillers, no junk. Just good stuff for your shrimp. Guys. Check it out. Shrimpnb.com special. Treat these aquarium guys at checkout. Right, aquarium. No spaces, guys, to receive 10% off your whole order. These orders support the podcast. It's a fantastic place. And you don't just find products that they make. They carry all different types of botanical blends, supplements, equipment, shrimp foods, of course, because that's what they make. But a ton of variety of beautiful, healthy homebread Cardenia shrimp, I mean, check it out. It's everything from a shrimp to nuts. Oh, I hate myself. But seriously, check it out. They got stuff that they import from Japan. Stuff that you won't see anywhere else if you're looking for amaranth leaves, I've never seen it actually offered on a botanical website besides shrimpnv.com. Check it out, guys. Shrimp envy. It's only natural. Last shout out for you guys and really why I've been so busy. jimmy's had a lot of life issues with his wife jen finally becoming an rn. Congratulations, adam's. Still been Adam. But I have been helping my friend Derek schumann open up a store in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, called Dees Fish. If you guys want to check it out, certainly you can come see the aquarium guys in person. We we live right around this place. We will meet you at the shop. You can find the website. Deesfish co that's deezfish co you want deesfish not dosefish. Come check us out. Let's kick that podcast. Welcome to the aquarium, guys.
Podcast.
Holy shit. It's been a while. It's been a hot minute. Do you know how many people I've gotten Jimmy messaging me? I think I get one maybe every other day at the lowest and the peak. I've gotten like ten people messaging me. Hey, man, you grease your skid. where's the podcast? Coming up. Did you die? Hey, man, when are you coming back? We really miss your podcast. Hey, the other people stop doing podcasts. Hope it's not you too. We need that stuff. And the other guy's sitting there like a coke going man for the first time. A month ago, I've discovered your podcast. I went through them all just to find out you've been in this hiatus. This is not how I need this right now. So. Jimmy. We're back.
Who are you? What are you talking about? What is your name? You look fame familiar.
This is episode 91. If they haven't listened to the weird.
Episode 172 if you wouldn't have been set in prison.
Hey, we all had a lot of lives, but I'm your hostess with the most. This rob soulson.
I'm Jim colby. I'm not the one that's been in jail.
I don't think any of us have been.
Well, where have you been?
I have had a kid.
No, your wife had a child. Very beautiful girl, by the way.
Nine months now.
Thank God she looks like her mom.
Yes.
Thank you, Jesus, for that.
Yes. That's a blessing. Did that open up a fish door with a friend? Yeah, that's actually the main distraction. I'm not going to lie to you.
It was something shiny.
We've been planning this now for three years and he decided he was going to quit his job and we dove head first. He owns the entire thing and I'm just a voluntold.
Voluntold?
Yep.
What's a voluntold? You volunteer and told what to do?
Yeah, volunteering is noble. Voluntold is a step up. It's where you volunteer to a point where you're obligated and voluntold almost marriage. That's a good example.
Good example. Yeah.
It's something you do, but you don't get paid for.
Right, exactly. And you get no satisfaction or you're getting some satisfaction. I mean, a little bit.
Every time I see him, you know.
Ring up a big sales, it makes you happy.
Every time I see him not order endlers in it just, oh, my God.
Let's talk about endlers and how much they suck. Because adam's not here and there's nobody defend the defenses. Little endlers, little pieces of shit.
He's on vacation.
He tried desperately. He tried very hard. We spent a long time trying to get Adam on the podcast. He's on vacation with his family. He's calling from some sort of nudist colony somewhere and not sure why he took his children with him, but that's where he's at.
That's where I've been. Where have you been, Jimmy?
I'm pretty sure you've been in a nudist colony.
I mean, I could be, but no, no, doing the fish store. You have been being the good husband and helping your lovely wife finish her rn.
I did. I've been in the house doing dishes and everything I can to help her out. That stuff is her job, but that's the stuff that she chooses to do.
Smooth. That's the one activity.
Well, the only thing I'm not allowed to do in the house is pee without the lid up.
Is that right?
Yeah. And then the other one is I'm not allowed to do laundry. wreck a couple of $100 worth of clothing, and you can't do laundry anymore.
You're cut off.
But she wrecked a car, but she's still driving. So what's the deal?
Also, now that she's an rn, slutty nurse outfits finally makes sense.
Oh, gosh, yes. Or she's been working for the last several years. They put her in a position of being an assistant director of nursing. And so she has her own office now. She doesn't have to wear scrubs. She is in management. So the other day, I was sitting at my at my house, and the doorbell cam thing went off, which happens a lot because it's windy up here. And then the dogs bark, so I knew something was going on, and I looked outside and there's a Ups man. Oh, what could he be bringing? Jim? Why is he bringing me a refrigerator? And I'm like, Son of a gun. She bought a refrigerator for her office. I know she did. And so it wasn't like he dropped it off. There you go, Jim, have fun. And then my phone rings and she goes, hey, I saw that a refrigerator came to the door. Can you put that in your car and bring it to me? I go, no, it's not going to fit. She will use a trailer. So I hauled the trailer in and.
Is that the story of how you lost your testicles?
No. Okay. This is how popular I am. This is how much I went above and beyond the call of duty. Being a good husband, I haul this refrigerator in, which is a three quarter size. It's a pretty good size.
I figured I get a call by now. I'm a big bitch and you just use me for lifting.
That's what I did today. Yeah, it worked out well.
It makes sense.
Yeah. So anyway, I bit my bottom lip because I was mad because it was nap time. It was nap time, dude. And I drove 20 miles into town, dropped off this stupid refrigerator, and then just to be the greatest husband ever, I went and got all kinds of ice cream bars, like $40 worth of ice cream bars, and went back and paraded through her office and said, here you go, sweetheart. I got you and all your little friends ice cream bars.
Now, did you bitch out and do the cheap ice cream bars?
Or did you go, no, I got snickers, I got the M and Ms. You got the good oh, I got all the good stuff. I got, like, six, seven varieties.
Wow.
And anyway, you got a lot of.
Pms and women that are now your.
Well, they all put me up on their shoulders and cheered me on and chanted, Jim, Jim, Jim. And, yeah, they all loved me very much over there.
So before we get too far, this is an aquarium podcast. Oh, I forgot you were mentioning something about some project with some baby netting.
I've been trying to increase my Guppy production and I am tired of making these nets.
Let's marvin Gay and get it on. Oh, I thought that's what you're using, the Guppy production.
Oh, it's a little marvin Gay. No, I don't use marvin Gay. I use viagra. I just put it right in the water.
I've been really trying baby so much. It's been so long.
I want to put you right in front of the throat. With his scissors. With his scissors. All right.
So you increase your guppy production.
So yeah, there's a gentleman that I've got 3000, 3000 more guppies coming next weekend.
Well did you just ask him how he's increased his production? Because clearly he's winning.
I stuck over there.
Did you? Yes, I did you buy him a sandwich?
You know what? Yes.
How about an ice cream bar?
No, I did not give him an ice cream. It would have melted in my pocket.
So what's he doing? He is doing does he want to shout out?
No, he doesn't. Okay.
A mystery man.
Yes. He's actually going out of business. We're going to call him John and great guy. Raises two, three flavors of guppies and a bunch of other stuff. But he is moving. He bought a new home. He's moving and they don't know if they're going to put up a fish room yet or not. So he's keeping his equipment beginning involves his livestock. So I purchased all of his livestock. And anyway I was trying to find some netting. I took a pvc and made a large cube because I have several 110 gallon ponds. And I made basically probably about a 14 inch by 36 inch baby net to put all the adults in.
So the baby is rectangular.
Right, right. rectangular. Yes. That's a good word.
Good word.
And anyway, I ordered and ordered and ordered and ordered stuff and then our friend dabney ordered stuff and we still never got the right net or didn't get anything at all. So I went on not Amazon but on Ebay, which I don't go on there very often. And I saw some of the coolest stuff on there. If you folks are looking for cool stuff, ebay has stuff. They actually for like $30 you can get a square net that is probably twelve foot wide by 30 foot long.
I feel like you just discovered Ebay for the first time in 25 years. You're a little late.
No, I've just never found that stuff on Amazon fair. And anyway, so I ordered this net going, I know it's going to be wrong because I've already gotten three different types of net that's wrong. Basically one of the net just made, it was kind of like a gill net for guppies. I mean all the guppies got their head stuck in there and died. Yes. And so I've tried the plastic netting, I've tried this, I've tried that.
Oops.
And so I bought this netting from China.
It took China.
China? It took probably over three weeks to get here, and it is a catch me out. And for like, $20, I probably got about 6ft by 25ft.
Nice.
And so now I'm in the process of sewing up the edges and stuff to snug it all in. But that was my last little project that I was doing and stuff. But now I'm trying to find tanks to house 3000 guppies, which I had not planned on buying until the other day.
That's a lot of guppies.
It's a lot of damn guppies. Yeah. And then he goes to me, you want the babies too? Well, yeah, they're all adults. You might as well throw in the babies.
I mean, why not? What's even it's a buy one, get one free sale.
Oh, it was more than that. I said, here's what I'll give you. And he goes, I don't know what else I want to do. So, yeah, I bought it for next to nothing. Kind of like your goldfish. Tell your goldfish story.
Okay, so goldfish story, right? We're catching up with local stories. So we live in central northern Minnesota, right. We're about an hour from fargo.
Are you asking me?
No, I'm telling them.
You're telling everybody.
Right. We're about an hour away from fargo, North Dakota. Right. So I see there's this local fish group, and I see that someone has discovered ditch goldfish.
Fargo is what did they discover?
Ditch goldfish.
Ditch goldfish. What is it?
That are goldfish and a ditch.
Really?
That's how that works? Yeah.
It sounded dirty just the way you said it did it dirt goldfish, ditch goldfish.
So they said, oh, there's some ditch goldfish. We're reaching out to the DNR to notify them if someone wants to come and rescue these. There seems to be quite a few here. And that's where this whole post started. Then apparently droves of people showed up because there's nothing better to do in the flatlands of North Dakota, meth and ditch goldfish and get eaten alive by.
Mosquitoes while you're doing it. Right.
So it's one of the worst floods that we've had in a little while. It's not like rolling down homes, but it's definitely flooding a lot of businesses.
A lot of overland flooding.
A lot of overland flooding, yes. So you go, and if you're listening and you're in the morehead area, they're still there.
There's still more there.
There's thousands of them. All right. People get there and they're like, oh, I think we got them all. Then the next post oh, we got a couple of hundred next post. We got a couple of hundred. Next post. I brought home a truckload, and everybody in their mom thinks they found gold.
Yeah, right. Absolutely.
Swimming gold in a ditch. So it's a drainage it's a cement drainage ditch by moorhead state university. It's not far off, right? Going down there. There's not a lot of water in this drainage ditch, so it flooded up through the drainage ditch and there is no exaggeration. Thousands of ten inch goldfish. Thousands.
Yeah, they're big.
It's pretty impressive. So we went out there of course, got a barrel together. Probably got three or 400 ourselves to stock in the local fish store.
Yeah, you dropped off a few for me.
The DNR, it's Minnesota side, so we're not transporting invasive species across state lines because we brought them. We're in Minnesota staying in.
Yeah. It's not like you're sampling crack or feeder guppies or endlers.
The DNR were notified they're too busy breeding walleye right now and dealing with other issues and clearly these have been.
There a long time and they're not going anywhere.
They're nearly not worried about them. So they just kind of left them there. So if you want some goldfish, help yourself. Just don't put them back into a natural waterway. They're right by the moorhead State University and we brought them in. They're extremely healthy. We quarantined them for weeks and yeah, they're good goldfish.
Didn't you say that they're eating egg crawlers or something?
I assume they're eating egg crawlers from the location that they were at. Yeah.
They're huge and they're beautiful and they're great.
Yeah, they're great. They're common goldfish that are now ten inches. So lots of fun. Sell them for $5 apiece at the fish door. Also, this fish store we're working on, there'll be links in the podcast notes.
But it's dees fish like dees notes.
Well, we want to do a Minnesota play, not the meme. So Derek schumann is the owner. We'll get him and do a podcast with him and interview him. This whole thing got set up but we want to do a play off of a Minnesota accent. So we want to tell people, you don't want those fish, you want these fish. So it's a lot of fun, pretty successful. But yeah, I'll put information in there and if you're in the, you know, central north Minnesota area or fargo fargo, North Dakota area, come check it out. It's pretty, pretty fucking sweet.
Yeah. It's getting fuller and fuller and fuller as days go by. So we get something new every day.
We have 30 inch koi, we got stingray, we got arijuana. Just to of course make fun of me. They have to have an arijuana.
I was going to say is the arrangement needs any food.
I don't know. But they don't have a tiger catfishing yet to feed two or for the.
Arizona, I'm going to order one just.
For that, just for the cost. Got any other news Jimmy?
Any other news? No. My wife graduated. I get my summer back now. And now the summer of podcasting, summer podcasting. We've got a few trips that we're going to take to get to mow my yard and drink beer and that's what I like to do.
All right, so we are doing this live on discord. So check out Aquariumguyspodcast.com Bottom, the website. You'll find a link to discord. Join the debauchery. Even if we're on a hiatus, this is where people are going to find out and jump in.
Or just a rumor mill. Just check out just the rumor mail. Just the rumor mill.
To see if anybody had something to say here.
I think a lot of people said you suck because you've been gone for six months.
Right?
I think that's what they said. That's what I put on there anyway.
Oh, here we go.
It's pretty dope.
I was there before the grand opening. It got even better. So yeah, we have a local user in here.
Yeah, every day. That's mikey.
That's mikey. Let's talk about sums, Jimmy.
Sumps.
Well, yeah, like, for instance, I like sand. You like gravel. And we argue about it.
Yeah. I saw you had three or four bags of sand outside your door out here. We do. And so I took my razor blade.
And cut them for son of a bitch.
I did.
I hear you.
Yeah. I don't know if you noticed. Over at my house, robs and his family was over for my wife's graduation party. I found some aquarium gravel. And I don't know if you saw where I put it out there by the mailbox. Did you see that? No, you missed it. It's right next to my mailbox. Yeah, my mailbox.
Oh, good.
So I put my mailbox I was going through some old ten gallon tanks and I found some tanks full of sand and some clown puke. And I thought, you know what, I'm going to put it right out here by the mailbox. That way people know where I'm at. So everybody tying. heidi noticed, jeff and Nancy noticed. And you didn't notice? I didn't. All my aquarium people noticed.
But to be fair, I was driving in 1952 Ford, and it's a lot of I've used both arms to drive that vehicle.
Yes.
So there's not a lot of paying attention to gravel.
No.
But anyway sums, Jimmy.
Sums.
What is your experience with sums? Do you enjoy them?
I do enjoy sums. If you stay with the maintenance on them, which you need to stay on top of, they're pretty flawless. You got to be prepared for power outages. And I've had some stumps where I had a power outage and sump wasn't big enough and that kind of peaked all over the floor. So, like, on my sump that I have in my acrylic unit, I haven't marked exactly how far I could fill it and how the minimum is that I keep it at. So I really like my acrylic unit and stuff. I am now in the process of making a baby nursery. I've been watching some YouTube videos I watched today. What the heck was it? We had the gentleman on our podcast a while back, and he interviewed the master breeder with macquarie M co op. And they were showing how they built a baby nursery out of small boxes and put water and so they'll have.
Like I want to say those are small boxes but yeah, I know what you're talking about.
They have they're actually like little six court shoe boxes.
All of those. I was thinking the big tubs.
Yeah, no they and anyway I watched that today. I'm getting lots of ideas and stuff because what I'm doing I've got another twelve kinds of guppies coming in. Some high end guppies from a gentleman. I want to get on this podcast and I'm slowly going to keep them all separate and so I'm going to keep the baby separate. So right now I'm putting all my babies in one big tub or three big tubs and just letting them go. But I want to try to keep some of the strains pure. So I've got some crazy stuff that I just bought for they're not feeder.
Guppies is what you're saying.
Right? I paid like twenty five dollars to forty five dollars a pair.
That's a hefty amount.
Yes, it was. And I bought twelve pair. That's why my wife did not get a convertible for a graduation.
Yeah. You got guppies instead.
Well, gifts keeps on giving me and.
Derek just for funzies because we're exploring all of minnesota's pet shops and we went to Twin Cities Guppies.
Yes.
Have you been to that place?
I know them.
It's in the I can't remember which mall that is. It's a huge mall. Love the mall. But yeah, they're selling pears for like $75 trios. Excuse me.
Yes, they are. At the show back in March that Adam and I were at and Twin City Guppies were there. We visit with them for a little bit and stuff. Nice people.
Yeah, they, they do a hell of a job. You should go check them out. I think they do sell some online but I think they just go through so much that they're always out of stock online and you got to go in person.
Yeah, I was going to say I I've been online looking for their stuff and a lot of out of stocks.
So yeah, definitely something to check out. But anyways, sumps. So we got beginners to overview what a sump is. So let's go with a quick overview of the gamut of filtration. Right. You have your traditional hang on the back filter where you have a pump that sucks it into a small shoe box that pumps water through cartridges. These are the ones that you normally find given the old fashioned kits you buy at Walmart local pet store. There hasn't been a lot of change to these. In fact, I think the aqua clear from fluval. I think I'm saying that name right. Hasn't changed since the original design works.
Well, they've never really changed them at all.
The only thing that they've added is Marine Land I think, has the patent for the biowheel.
Yes. So I like the bio wheel. If it works.
If it works.
Sometimes they don't work. Sometimes they quit spitting. That makes me mad.
Shame on you, Jimmy.
Speaking of mad, let's talk about my heater.
We'll put that one on the parking lot for later. Jimmy, we're in helping people with time.
Okay? Right now I'm having an argument with a heater, and the heater is smarter than us at this moment.
All right?
That's pretty truthful, right? It is, because you've worked on it with me.
We'll get there.
We'll get there before the end of the podcast.
Take a breath.
No, before the end of the podcast. I just want to see if anybody's got any we will get there information for us that could help us out because I feel like a real dumbass.
Calm down. I promise you.
Just my blood pressure.
All right, so we have the hang on the back filter.
Oh, sure, that's cute.
We have internal filters that they put inside the aquarium that generally have a piece of sponge or another cartridge.
Yes.
Tetra makes internal cartridge filters.
Yes.
Then we have canister filters where you take the water from the aquarium, pump it into a canister, and that goes through layers of media sponges and then comes right back out to the other side of the tank purified. And the most simple sponge filters where you just have an airline that blows bubbles that slowly absorbs water through the sponge. And my favorite filter of all and.
Where do you get the best sponge from, Rob?
The best sponge from your 1964 cadillac.
That's right. From the seat cushions. You just rip it off 100%.
Don't tell Swiss tropicals. That's what everybody uses. But the stuff that we're talking about is a sump, and sumps are more DIY. You can't go to your normal local fish shop and just say, hey, I'm looking for a sump. And they get one out of the box and hand it to you. It's more of the custom design yourself. Or you'll get one that's at least pre cut so you can put your own elements in it. So think of it as the DIY filter for your needs. So if you have let's pretend you have a 55 gallon tank.
I do have a 55 you have to pretend underneath.
You could have a 4400, 425 gallon tank.
I would rather have a 400 gallon sump. Wouldn't it be awesome? Think about how clean your freaking water would be.
I can just see you. You'd be the one guy that would make a sump.
I keep all my plea tails in the sump and then nothing up in the tank.
Excuse me, what is this? No, it's a sump. The first step is you use quilt batting, and then the next step is you have it biologically uses jimmy's balls. Bacteria.
Well, there's plenty of bacteria on my malls, I'll give you that. That is disgusting.
So back to the analogy. We have a 55 gallon tank underneath. We have a smaller tank? Traditionally, yeah. 40 to 25 gallon would be kind of the range you want to be in.
And if you're a print, the idea.
Is you pump water from the tank into the sump and then pump it back in the aquarium.
So select the circle of life.
Circle of life.
I like the better. We used to dub in music and get in trouble. That was more fun.
Yeah. I don't think you were ever going back on YouTube.
Really?
No, it's such a waste of time. We're doing this for fun. And people that listen to the car is way more fun than trying to see your ugly mug on YouTube.
We should go on pornhub.
Ooh, there's an idea.
Wouldn't that mess people up if we.
Got to tone down the tangents? Yeah, but what if we had just breeding fish on pornhub?
I know it wouldn't be a young guy's pornhub channel, and the titles could be like, Hottest Fish Ever.
We'll just have nothing but a channel of molly's doing it.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm in. Chicken.
Chicken, boying.
Boy, I'd subscribe to that. I would do that in a hot minute.
And you know what would be sad is we'd be number one in a week, because people like you or dementia will be going, you got to check this shit out. I'm going to send it to you. And here's a link.
It will just dust off your old 70s records to get some obscure music in the background.
Oh, yeah.
Anyways, back to it. So it's a tank underneath your tank that acts as a giant filter. It gives you way more ecological flow. You can use it as essentially an equilibrium for your tank. So instead of having the forgiveness of a 55 gallon tank, you now have tacked on an additional 40 gallons. So if something craps out in your tank, you have that much more water.
So are you saying that I could put at least 10,000 goldfish in that tank?
That's the idea is you can overstock on purpose. Still don't recommend it?
I think it would be really cool. And I'm just saying just to mess with people. I love my fish. I'm not going to hurt my fish. But wouldn't it be fun, like over in your pet store, if you had a ten gallon tank with a 300 gallon sub in the basement and you had 500ft of goldfish in a ten gallon tank, and it's crystal clear, and you tell people, oh, yeah, you can do this at home. I think that'd be fun. It would be fun for me.
No, I feel like you're the guy that has an ornate sock collection, like.
One of those people, when I was single, socks were my friend. But that's another story.
All right, back to sumps. So the elements that you put into a sump. So there's three layers of filtration.
So you got your quilt batting.
That's the objects we got to. Know what they do. So you have mechanical, mechanical, chemical and biological.
It's one of my favorite bands. Chemical my chemical rumors. Okay?
Stop it, Jimmy. Stop it. We got to get back on the bandwagon. So I know you're rusty, but we can get through this podcast.
So mechanical, mechanical, chemical, chemical. What was the other one?
Biological.
Biological, right.
So the first step, like you said, is quilt batting. That would represent mechanical or bunch of old socks. Bunch old socks, yes. You need something to actually filter particles out of the water, debris, detritus, extra food, anything to grab and actually polish the water.
So you can do polish an old dog blanket, something like that.
I would use something that's probably intended for water.
Okay, so back to do they still make do you remember when you go to buy that cottony fiber cotton stuff that was called filter media? Do they still sell that stuff?
They do, but it's quilt batting. Well, now it's all polyester. It's 100% polyester. It's a certain grade.
It's more organized now. It is. It's all in the sheets where it's not in a big puff ball.
Yeah, it used to be a puff ball.
When I started it, it was a big puff ball.
So you could again, quilt batting.
Quilt batting.
It has to be 100% polyester.
And you can find that cheap online or at your local store.
That way instead of just cleaning it out, you can throw it away and grab a new piece. You can wash it, I mean, a couple of times, but eventually it's going to get gross.
Kind of like your underwear.
Especially my underwear. Three times.
Throw it away.
Just like wheel batting.
That's right. Okay.
You can use sponge material, like from the car. Yeah. You can cut out all your cadillac, put it in there. Otherwise you can get these batting sheets on Amazon. You can get any size that you want. So you can put a wall, like a mat and filter, right. And then you just take the whole sheet out. You clean out the sheet, you put it back in yourself.
When I moved my tanks over at my house, I had my matin filter set up for over a year. And it took me longer to take it out and rinse it and put it back in than anything. It was like five minutes per tank. And I moved like twelve tanks. And it was really easy with a garden hose just to spray it out in the crystal clear. I love that matt and filter. I got that from our friends down. Meaning where they at? duluth. Where they at? Who our friends? Amazon our friends.
Oh, duluth for sure. yep, 100%. So there's a bunch of different options for mechanical, but using the sponge or quilt batting is by far our favorite. You can also get filter socks. Like you made the sock joke, but that's the real thing.
I have filter socks with, and I put in carbon in it, the filter.
Socks, you can again purchase those directly on Amazon. You can get they have essentially it's a plastic ring with the essentially plastic, like, polycloth underneath. So you just drop it in to a piece of acrylic or glass or plastic that fits the hole, have the water pump in the sock, and you just simply clean out the sock, unroll it backwards, rinse under the faucet just like you would a sponge, and keep moving on. They're cheap. So, again, easy to replace.
Yeah, I love using them for charcoal, for carbon. And what I like about it is that it's so darn big that you could put a lot of godding carbon in there, and it's easy to rinse out. And I just like it because it's cheap.
Nice. So that takes care of the first layer. So when water pumps in, it's got to go through something. The next layer is the chemical, and the first layer has to be mechanical because you don't want the rest of your sump to be gross. The other layers you can do chemical or biological in different orders. That's up to you. So just to start, chemical. So the options that you have to treat your water chemically would be carbon. Is one of them putting in a carbon bag what I use I have a roll over here, Jimmy. This is gutter sock.
Gutter sock, guter sleeve. I think they call it gutters.
I get it 100ft at my local maynards and you not one end. You pour your carbon into it, not the other. And then I can cut it, right? Then when I'm done with the carbon, I just throw the whole bag away and just cut myself another bag.
Yeah, he said Maynards, but it's minards. And that's our local hardware lumber store. That's huge up here in the midwest.
They even have it all the way down to West Virginia when I flew. Did they really? Yeah, it's getting huge. Kind of like the Dairy Queen of.
I love the Dairy Queen of hardware stores. I love the Dairy hey, you know what's funny is that the other day this has nothing to do with fish. I don't care.
So you and your goddamn to engines listen.
So a lot of people don't know what the Tasty Freeze is. So when John mellon, John cougar mellencamp came out with Jack and diane the song, everybody's heard Jack and diane the song sitting outside the Tasty Freeze, john mellencamp said he had no idea that nobody other than midwest people knew what hell a Tasty Freeze was. He would go over to Taiwan and they go, what's that tasty Freeze? Well, they probably don't talk like that. I just did that. I'm sorry. I should have won. What's that? Tasty Freeze.
I like how you go from one accent to the other. I'm sorry.
Not better? No, not at all. So everything is regional tasty freeze up here is like a Dairy Queen. Which Dairy Queen is like, I don't know, frosty, I don't know. frickin.
There's a lot of ice cream on this episode. I feel like you need to have a bar.
I need an ice cream.
Your sugar is low. We need to hurry through this. So that's one element of chemical here, you use zeolite. That's another one. In fact, they mix zeolite in the carbons nowadays. That's what you see the white pebbles mixing with their black pebbles.
Yes. That's kind of like when people mix their cocaine in their heroin. And it's called a speed ball. It's a speedball for your aquarium.
So the carbon represents nzolite represents ammonia absorption.
But I thought you're going to say something like black and white and unity for all, and I thought you're going to go on a tangent like that.
That's why you get the equal mix.
There we go.
Besides ammonia, it also removes harsh chemicals. So, for instance, if your mom decided to go to your tank and lyse all your tank, hopefully the carbon will help absorb some of the toxins from the water.
My mom wouldn't even pick up my damn socks. Of course, they're kind of crusty under the bed.
Your mom learned to knock?
Yes. A lot. My mom's gone now. I wish.
Adam, if you're listening to this, we miss you. It's been a long time for Jimmy.
I am just excited to be out.
Of the house now that you're out of the house. So that's one form of chemical filtration. Another form is uv filtration. So people can get a uv filter to put in your sump. Generally, like the internal filters we talked about before, is the common way of getting uv filters. You can get a couple hang on the back, but they're very expensive. The cheapest way that Jimmy and I have found, particularly in sumps, if you can get by with it, is getting a uv submersible. I've been drinking uv submersible bar. They range between anywhere from the lowest I've seen it's, $12, all the way up to $40. And you could drop that right in your tank. But the problem is it's not covered. There's still ultraviolet radiation coming from the light, much like a tanning booth, and it will bleach a lot of plastics, a lot of objects, including tanning. Your fish.
Yes.
So make sure that if you have uv filtration in there, that it's covered and the excess light isn't bleeding through to your fish.
I got one of those. Robbie found them somewhere. I don't know where he found them. But anyway, the interwebs, that thing that.
You figured out, the ebays.
Oh. So Robbie was on the dark Web and he bought these things and he gave me one and I put it in my Acrylic unit down in the sump. And my sump is Acrylic, and it made my acrylic sump foggy, kind of like smoky, milky white. And did it.
Really?
Yes, just where that was. Right. Sitting. So what I ended up doing is I went and bought a bigger piece of pvc pipe and put it in there, and then that took care of the problem. So if you buy one of these, put a kind of a sleeve on it, because in that sump, there's a lot of movement. So I wasn't worried about the water going through there, but it did make my Acrylic unit kind of foggy like milky white. So I don't like that.
Now, if you have a deeper checkbook than Jeremy and I, the best way.
Everybody'S got a deeper checkbook than you and I.
This is true. That's why we're podcasting. I'm just kidding. Get a uv filter that's in line, meaning it's just a uv filter and it goes between your plumbing. So if you have a pipe, it just flows right through the uv filter, either after the sump or before. I definitely would prefer the after. That way you're not going to clog it up with fish yet. And it's already mechanically filtered, like we spoke of before.
Poopy, cocka, booby, cock.
Now, for other sumps, saltwater sumps, there's a lot more different types of media that you can put in. What is that? The smaller pellets? I want to say it's bb's.
Bb'S sand.
What's the fancy name for sand?
Silica.
There you go. silica.
I went to high school in North Dakota.
You didn't drink either, clearly.
No, not today.
Shame on me. anyways, moving on for freshwater. So that, again, a couple of options for chemical filtration. Then the most important and why the sumps are, in my opinion, the best types of filters is the biological filtration. Most of you there listening have heard about the nitrification cycle. Just a brief overview. Fish poop and pee. Fish poop and pee turns into ammonia in the tank. And ammonia's got to go somewhere. So you have bacteria, beneficial bacteria in a tank that eats the ammonia, turns it from nitrate to nitrate, and then eventually you'll do a water change or plants take it, but you need that bacteria to break down ammonia. Otherwise that's how you quote, unquote, crash a tank, kill fish and have a bad time. So with a sump, the more surface area you have, the more beneficial bacteria, which means the more fish you can put in to shit and piss, because you have that beneficial bacteria. So in there, anything with surface area, people buy bio balls. They're a common thing on the market.
That job is dirty.
It does. They're plastic balls and they're generally hollow or honeycomb in nature. That way they have the most surface area for bacteria to grow as possible. They're expensive, getting just they are small bags of them are lots of money.
They're not cheap. You made some on the thing you got over there, right?
So, give you an idea. The balls I made were about a quarter. That's how big around each ball. Takes me a half an hour to 3d print.
So you print these on your 3d printer, right?
Each ball is 30 minutes to print. So if you need, I don't know, a bucket of balls for your sump, good luck printing for weeks.
Leave on leave on Monday, come back Thursday. Maybe it's done right.
So, not recommended 3d prints unless you have a lot of extra scrap, filament and a lot of time to waste.
Or you've got a better 3d printer than Rob.
Yeah, do a huge sheet like you have some industrial cnc machine and you want to leave it on for a week.
I think you should buy one of those new 3d printers that they're building houses with. that'd be cool. Have you seen that they're building houses for hud right now?
Yeah, they've done in our area.
Yeah, they're pretty sweet, pretty cool.
But anyways, more options for biological. So, again, what are the objects that we can use with the most surface area? Well, bioballs some plastic material to make it. We recommend going to your local dollar store and buying packs of pot scrubbies.
Scrubbies.
That is the cheapest thing that is safe for tank to put in is plastic pot scrubbies. Make sure when you grab them, you're getting just the generic cheapo plastic pot scrubbies. Not the ones with preloaded, with dawn. This detergent you want just the generic sniff them if you want to test them. If it smells like soap, don't put it in your tank.
Kind of like when you get dressed.
Up, smell your pot scrubbies.
There you go.
That's what we're saying.
So, yeah, you can stuff a lot of pot scrubbies in there and you can find them three for a buck some places. And they're pretty cheap.
I've used to find them ten for a dollar.
Here's another thing that people can use, too. If you find those little shower what do you call those? Those little shower things? And they're all mesh net and they're in a big loopy.
Oh, loofas.
Loofas.
I like, yeah, he said luffy. And you were so close.
Yeah. I want to lay next to you naked. Well, that's close as I'm going to get to you. Anyway, there's a new comedian I saw the other day, and I'll tell you about this off the air, okay? But anyway, the loofies, the Louis, I feel like I've been doing roofies. The loofas. If you take those apart, our buddy Joe, a Joe Shrimp shack, he will take those, unravel them and cut them up and use them for transporting shrimp. He'll put them right inside the shrimp bag so they got something to hold on to.
Pretty genius idea.
Yeah. And pretty inexpensive.
Yeah. So check out for pot scrubbies and loofas. Some of the more natural stuff, lava rock. Lava rock is very porous, very light, and if you get true lava rock, it should be more or less PH.
Neutral yeah, I got some large loop of lava rocks over my landscaping that I bought down. When we're in South Dakota, I wish I would have bought more because they are just so useful and so beautiful. And they also are very good at scratching up your legs when you walk by. So they're good for skin grafts, stuff like that.
There you go. Another one would be my brain just gave up the moving beds.
The moving beds, like the sand moving.
Beds, not sand moving beds. What they do is they make smaller bio balls and they're generally a lot lighter. They're made with a light, clear plastic or white plastic. You can just look up moving bed filter media if you want to search them on like an Amazon or wherever you buy your fish goods, you get a bag of them and they're light enough in the water that if you put them into a square box with bubblers, they can actually continually move and cycle. That means that the bacteria will grow on them, but not enough to keep debris and other detritus on them. So they do even better than any other filter media. As far as biological filters, moving beds are the strongest.
Back in the don't know who made it, but it was all the rage for a while. It was a clear, probably three inch in diameter tube that was twelve inches long. You pump the water through it and the sand just continuously rotated in there and that was the biological. But what happened with those things is that they would clog up and you could never get them unclogged again.
Oh, the diatom filters.
Well, that's the mechanical no, that's the powder that you use. I had those too. Yeah. No, this stuff was just actually looked like the sand in your aquarium right there.
I'd love to see it.
It was a long tube and stuff, and you ran a power head through there and that whole the sand kept on moving and that's where all your bacterial was at. But then what would happen is we had no way of cleaning it out, so it eventually would clog up after six months.
Oh, it was a sealed unit.
Yes. It was all the rage for a little bit and then people go, I can't get it clean because I can't take it apart.
So there is this cool decoration thing and you can giggle this on your inner tubes when you're not driving in the car. They call it a sand waterfall in the tank.
That's cool.
So essentially you put a nice thick water sand in the bottom of your tank and you have a plumbing system much like a sponge filter, where you have an airstone sucking up the sand, loose, light sand, and then it blows out the top of the spigot and it just cycles. And it looks like a waterfall inside of a tank. But instead of water, it's sand.
I've seen the waterfall and I've seen a volcano, right?
They do these and I don't think you can buy them. You have to custom make them.
There is so much stuff I've been watching on the Internet, on the DIY stuff and watching especially overseas in some of these third world nations where they're taking whatever scraps they have and they're doing these beautiful things for ponds. They're taking styrofoam and cement and pieces of glass and making their own freaking pond that stands on top of the cement outside their homes. And it's absolutely gorgeous. You can get so sucked into it so hard of all these things that you can build for your house and it's just unbelievable what people come up with. I love the Internet when it comes to that stuff.
Fun.
Hey, we're talking about sumps. I just want to throw out one more thing, and I know a lot of you already know this, but if your sump for some reason like mine, is sitting on a cement floor, take a one inch or two inch piece of styrofoam, cut it to the bottom of your sump and put that underneath your sump. Because if your sump is sitting on the basement cement, it just sucks all the cold onto the cement and it's so hard to try to keep your tank heated and it's just another tip just to get it up off there. Because when it's sitting on top of the stair Form, it doesn't lose heat like it does when it's sitting on top of some mansion.
There you go. So generally with the sump, again, you have the biological we talked about just the cycle of the biological bacteria. More surface area. The more surface area, the more fish you can put in your tank. Technically speaking, the other ones are naturals. So plants, if you can find somewhere in your sump to get away with growing plants, that is probably one of the best ways of natural filtration. In large saltwater sumps that we see, we see main growth in freshwater sumps, we see a lot of those. ivies be careful if you have cats because they'll kill them. But ivies bamboos any type of plants that you can put, even terrestrial plants where you can have them grow, like a hydroponic deal is extremely beneficial. Even some of the rougher stuff, like guppy grass, some of your mosses, if you have a section that's safe to put them in without clogging, your sump filter. All of those are fantastic ways of making sure. And then all your tannins. If people have a piece of wood that doesn't look good, but you know it bleeds a lot of tannins in there, you can find a corner of your sump to put them in. Just make sure that that's not going to break down and cause more waste in your filter or get clogged up into a pump.
A trick I learned here not that long ago is if you like that tannin look and you've got a piece of wood that's kind of deteriorating, put them in one of those socks that we just talked about and then you won't have that little tiny pieces of wood and stuff floating in there and stuff, but you'll still get the tannins released out of it. And that works really well, for sure.
The other things that we haven't talked about, the actual mechanical parts of the sump. So generally speaking, people drill holes into their tank so they have an overflow. So if you're pumping water into a tank, the other side spills the water out. So if you don't want to drill into your tank to release the water down into your sump, you can actually build a mechanical overflow that keeps a prime. You can buy these. They're generally very expensive. If you can find the overflows, I've seen them for $200 for just a piece of plastic. There's not a motor in it. There's nothing real proprietary. It's just a designed overflow to put in your tank that has a siphon. You can build this. There is a YouTube video that joey, the king of DIY, has done years ago, and it's pretty well foolproof. I've used them on a lot. You just got to go with a certain gauge of pvc you want to make it out of. And for, you know, $20, you can build yourself a reliable overflow that's not complicated. And we'll have that link in the description of the podcast for you.
So you've talked down about the three.
Things, the filtration rate, mechanical, mechanical, chemical, chemical, biological.
What about the most important part? The emotional.
The emotional.
How it makes you feel better because you put more fish in that tank.
That's true. That end, somebody will use it for time out. So if you have a fish that's been naughty, guess what? He gets to live in the sump overnight until he learns his lesson.
I know that's what I did with my grandkid the other day, and they put up no, I didn't for Henry. No, he's cute and he's not at my house very often, so he gets in trouble.
Never. No candy and out the door. Yes, as well you should. Pump size. So as long as the water reaches up, any pump size can reach from a bottom of a tank to the top. People are concerned about over budgeting their pump. If you're really concerned, get a pump with a controller where you can turn the speeds up and down so you have the control of flow. You don't want to overflow the tank in case the overflow gets clogged. So slower is better. You're already having a bigger sump. Make sure that you're not overdoing it and giving yourself a bunch of leeway, because the one time that overflow gets clogged, well, suddenly now you have a wet basement.
Right? And the other thing, too, when you're looking at the different pumps, depending on how far you have to. I mean, I know people that have sumps in their basement and they're pumping the water 10ft up to the main floor. And then you need a very strong pump. And that always talks about says head. And so the head will tell you how far it will shoot water up in the air. So, I mean, if you are trying to push water a large amount of space, say 10ft, then you're going to want a pretty strong pump, and you have to look at the head adjustment. Right.
Anybody that wants to put a tank above upstairs and then the thump in the basement, either the tank is so big they have to, or they really hate money and they love giving it to their insurance company. That's integrity. Stay away from it at all possible. Some situations we understand you have to, but that's just malarkey. We had a user from the podcast Notorious letting us know that K One is the keyword to look for the filter media, that is, the white plastic moving bed filter media we talked about for earlier. And yeah, that is the correct term. 100%. You can find it small amounts or in absolute mass supply on Amazon is.
For aquaponics, aquaculture, hydroponics and growing pot.
Interesting.
I just threw that in there. I don't know, maybe you can. Maybe you can't.
Damn. Now, I wanted to grow pot. Some tricks do's and don'ts do. Make sure to put your heater in the sump. People argue with me just for fun. You're wrong, I'm right. Tough. Put your heater in there, but know that your heater has to be below the pump. Let's pretend that for some reason your sump is running out of water. If your heater is above the pump, you could easily have your pump rise above the water line and burn out. We don't want that because have you ever had a titanium heater explode? Not cool.
I've got a titanium heater that doesn't work that I'm really upset about.
All right, now you get to talk about it. We can go back to the parking lot. Robbie, do I get to pull up the brand?
Robbie.
So let me start.
I want some help.
Aqua Top is a fantastic brand. I love aqua Top Products. They make one of the best hang on the back filters. They have a full line of very nice lighting. Their glass heaters are fantastic. But for some reason, Jimmy was given for free a case of 500 watt.
Titanium 500 watt titanium heaters.
Aqua Top Heaters.
The guy said, take them if you can get them to work, god bless you. They're brand flipping new with a $55 price tag on them. He bought them. He couldn't get them to work. I called up my buddy robbs, who lives down the street. robs comes, yeah, I can get that to work. Comes over, gets it to work for ten minutes, and it's never worked again.
I did get to work longer than you did, right?
I will give you that.
I want the jury to understand.
So anyway, I have four of these. There's not a water spot on any of them. They're not used because they've never worked for the guy.
So Robbie made one was open, the rest were all brand, right?
So Robbie made this complete sense to me. He says, you got to make sure it's completely submersed. And you know some submersible ones where you'll have it stick out. And I went, oh, okay. So he's completely submerged it all the way down to the bottom of the tank and it worked. You could sit there and watch the thing heat up. My Acrylic unit, it went up about four or five degrees and a half an hour while we're standing there. And you can see the heat. Heat kind of smolders off the top of the heater.
Yeah. You see like the heat waves, the little ripples.
Yeah. And I was like, Well, robbie's god, I can't believe he showed me this. I've been doing it for 37 years. And I go down the next day to 64 degrees. And I went, Robbie sucks.
Robbie sucks.
And then Robbie came over and said, I'll show you how to do this. And then 45 minutes later, he leaves one underneath his arm and says, I'm going to call the damn people.
I am. So if you're from aquatop and listen to our podcast, just assume that I'm still having problems. The model is Ex 500, right? We finally got that off our chest.
Yeah. And there's three sentences on the box on how to.
Reading it right? Now read it one, properly. Place heater into the aquarium placement via the diagram. Plug heater into wall outlet, creating a drip loop for safety. Three, press the temperature control button to enter set mode. It'll begin to flash. Press the button to reach the desired temperature. Once reached, wait three to 4 seconds until it stops flashing and the temperature is set. Four, the unit is heating when the blue light on the lcd display where the actual temp is in the aquarium. So the blue light is on and.
It'S set to four degrees.
We put it in. Jim even made sure it had a Poop loop. And nothing.
We got the blue light on. It says it's 84 degrees and it's 64 degrees.
So Love aqua Top Products They're probably.
One of my God, help me, but somebody helped me.
But Jim, we need some help.
I got four of them and it works so good.
They're not cheap either. Let me tell you what. Let me tell you what oh, here, review. aquatop heater worked for about a week. Stopped heating has yet to set. 78 degrees. Heating, 92. unplugged. Try different outlet. No success. We have multiple aqua top products. Never had any issues with them. Obviously a flaw in this 1500 watt design. You're not alone, Jimmy. What's.
The next one to say, same deal.
Yeah, two units of failures.
Heaters don't last more than a month. Terrible experience.
And it's all just the 500, all the 500 watt. The other watts all have five stars, like 4.64.8, you know?
And right now, they don't even have the 500 watt available.
They probably discontinued it because Jimmy got a podcast.
If I called them, would they be nice to me and just say, hey, dude, here's a free heater?
No, because you just told them you got them for free. You done Frank yourself, Jimmy.
What? I got it for free?
Yeah. I mean, you paid good money for.
Maybe if I paid $200 a piece.
For them you paid good money pieces from a reputable healer.
I just upset, all right?
So anyways, back to it.
Make sure my fish have got little muffins ear muffs on because it's so cold in that tank.
Less from cobalt will be kicking me. But I'm all for putting your heater in the sump. Make sure it's below the pump. Never ever have an equal or higher than the pump, or you will have a bad time in burnt out heaters in your sump. End of story.
Well, God bless you if your heater worked in the first place, because mine doesn't work, and I don't freaking care.
I love you. Other things you can hide in there.
Your mom's birthday present.
You could put your heat in there.
If you really wrap it up and pile.
Yeah, you got to, like you know what I'm saying? For sure.
I wouldn't do cocaine, though, because I've watched enough of these stories on TV where people are mules and then they swallow the condom full of cocaine and they burst in their stomach. Do you want that in your tank?
No. Another thing that I get, people have been trying out is putting those little breeder baskets. If you don't want them breeder baskets unsightly in your tank, you could put them in the sump and float them in your sump if you have enough room in your sump.
Yeah, because there's nothing better than a baby fish loves to do with the swim. 900 miles an hour.
No, they're in the net, so they don't get that high of flow.
Says you.
I've done it. Have you not seen the breeder basket in my own sump?
I'm not familiar with yourself. It just sounds dirty. I've not been out of the house for a year. I'm sorry, people.
For shame. Now what? don'ts right. If you're going to use a sump overflow rig, make sure that you're not putting, you know, breeding fish in a tank with a sump. Because you get what we call sump mollies. If you have live bears, specifically wait.
Back up the truck.
Some mollies?
Some mollies. Are they related to ditch goldfish here.
In the same family?
Honestly, they all live in a trailer park.
So what happens is your live bear we'll pretend it's a Molly, right? Gives live birth. Normally, fish would eat it or it would hide in whatever decorations you have. But if you have a sump, they're retarded and they flow to the overflow like a magnet. And you will find nothing but I don't know, a million, billion mollies in your sump at all times. You'll just see them all right, in that area where you have the first part of mechanical filtration all waiting for you, swimming, like flying, holding on to dear life with all that flow in the first chamber, trying to get mechanically filtered out. And by the way, thriving because they're eating all of the shit that gets caught in the throat.
That's because food is being jammed on their throat at 40 miles an hour on a daily basis.
My friends would come over and be like, bro, you got somali's. I'm looking for some mollies. And the dude, I got sump mollies. And they look at me like, the hell is a sump, molly bro?
It's like a ditch goldfish.
Come over here and they look I just take the cap off my sump and they look down. I'm like, hot damn, that's a lot.
Of I'm going to go look in your sump before I leave today.
In my sump right now, as we speak, I have the matin filter. So I use the big piece of sponge to go over the entire first section, first column of the sump, you will see placo full size, because my plato had babies. They fell through the sump, and they've been living in the stump ever since.
You're a dick, right?
That's what you'll see. You'll see shrimp because shrimp litz.
You're going to see a puppy a.
Little grown into shrimp, a little border.
Collie puppy that fell in there.
And you will see like one third size Molly's, because that's what fell behind, including probably some of adam's feeder guppies.
Well, we'll get everything out of the feeder gupies. We don't care about the antlers.
Oh, not to mention because I decide to take my overflows and push all my duck weed down the overflow chute. You'll see maybe £9 of duckweed in my sump I have to scoop out.
I need some of that for my pond.
All for you.
Oh, my god. I'm just going to go dig around in your sup. It's one of my favorite things to do is when I first started traveling to Florida, I would go to cigarettes farms and hang out there all day long and just irritate the piss out of those people. I still do, but it's just now I'm older and still irritate the piss on them. But their sumps would have, sandy their sumps would have every time you go in and look, there'd be like, oh, yeah, a 14 inch knife fish.
Well, the problem is with their sumps is they have this huge recirculating system, right?
I mean, it goes through the entire place building.
So they have sumps the size of.
Your car, anything that jumps out.
Yeah, that's where it lives.
It lives there until something you got.
To ask Sandy more. If they just do like once a year, they do like a sump sale. Hey, everything is a key word. Like, what are these? These are sump mollies. Yes, those are sump to go snipes.
You got any ditch goldfish?
I'm going to call Sandy.
I shoot you not. Last time I was at seagris, right up front, they have this little it is a ditch.
It's a ditch.
It's a ditch and it's filled with water. And I look over, shoot, you know there's angels, there's all kinds of shit.
Sore tails in the ditch, pretty much. And you see a sore tail go by and it's like not serious. Nine inches long.
Oh, yeah.
And it just looks at it. It's the most beautiful one you've ever seen.
It's a freak of nature.
You put your head over there and so they look at it and it's gone down a quarter mile down the ditch already.
You can never catch it behind poisonous snake or venomous snake.
Right? Yeah.
You don't want to dive in there is tempting.
The first time I was there, like, I'm pointing something out to them that they don't know about. I said to Julie, hey, do you know you've got like a twelve inch knifefish there? And she goes, yeah, he was like four inches when he jumped in there. I go, what's he eat? She goes, Whatever jumps in there.
Whatever they're feeling like, can you imagine, like, working there?
Be like he probably eats $3,000 in guppies.
Oops, I dropped a goldfish. Yeah, hilarious. So, yes, if anything gets caught in your sump, it is now sump x. So sump mollies are a thing?
Sump molly.
Some mollies. You give them to his gifts, just throw up with a bag. Like, what is that? That's a bag of sump molly's. Enjoy. And they just look at you retarded.
Yeah, I'm sure. Would you get Jim? I got some sump moss. Sump moss?
100%, dude. Sump moss grows better than normal moss.
Really?
That's a fact.
So you think we should probably start growing illegal things in your sump? Wouldn't it be hilarious if bro, that's sump pot.
That's the thing, though. I know people that hydroponic pots out of their sump. Yes, pots. Pots as in marriage I want.
Right. I saw the cool thing on the Internet again, on YouTube, where the guys, like I said, where they made their own tank and then they took seriously ten inch bamboo and they got ten rows of ten inch bamboo above the tank and they drill it five inches and they got a cup in there and they're hydroponically growing lettuce and stuff. So there you go. Lettuce above their their fish. And of course it's just being sustainable living in the third world country, and it's really beautiful and really cool. Nice.
All right, so we talked about dos. What's some dons? I'm going to let Jimmy go first. What are some dons? Sumps. Don't you have this wonderful acrylic overflow system with a nice sump? Yes. What would you recommend to not do.
To not do ever?
Yes.
I think we already talked about the thing that smoked up my thing?
Yeah, the uv.
Yeah, the uv thing.
Uv filtration. Make sure to have it covered.
Also, if you're going to put your heater down there, which Robbie wants to do big time and stuff, take your heater and really zip tight or attach it, because it will move.
It will move sometimes if it's in the appropriate area. Suction cups won't work.
Yeah, suction cups don't work. If you have a glass heater down there below, what will happen is it will sit there and bang enough times where it will actually break and then fry everything up. I would use a titanium heater or one of those I call them rubber heaters. It's a hard rubber, plastic I'm all.
About the glass heaters. But you get the bumpers, right? You can buy bumpers for them that are heat rated.
And so I would do that. Also, on your sump, you always want to try to mark where you want your water levels. And here's why. Because you're not home all the time, and you go to Florida to get drunk for a week. I ain't saying any names, but it's me and my son's home, and he's watching my fish tanks and my dogs, and he calls me and he's going, yeah, there's some damn noise downstairs. He doesn't talk Southern. He's not from south.
Just keep rolling with it.
Yeah, your son Billy, billy Bob thornton, he goes, hey, make a noise. slurp burger. gurgle gurgle. slurp.
Slur.
And I go, oh, the sump is going dry. Put some water in there. How much? I said, we'll just fill it up. And so he filled it up, which was fine until he pushed a button to stop the flow to feed the fish, and then it overflowed on the floor. And then all of a sudden, I'm the bad guy, right. But I was in Florida. I didn't care.
For shame.
So you want to mark the minimum and the maximum of water height on your sump.
So your sump was designed by a professional, right. And there is an appropriate law water level. Mine was done by redneck ass myself.
Yes.
And I have multiple I have one sump running nine aquariums.
Right. And you at least have a glass one. I do. And so you could easily take, like, masking tape and put on there.
Bingo.
But the people that buy, the ones that are completely they're acrylic. Well, there's also some that are just solid black, and then you can't see the water level.
Yeah, that's poopy.
Don't buy those.
Get clear sumps.
Clear sumps.
There's another good don't don't, don't. But mine, I have multiple tubes coming down from nine aquariums going to one sump. So when you have those stuffed in there, not only you need to be aware of the level, but why. If you have, for instance, eight of those nine tubes exposed and the water is free falling into the sump, good. If you have it above covering the tube, it creates a backflow that doesn't allow as much water to flow through and then causes that tank to overflow above it. So definitely how'd you learn test the waterline. I have my nine tank racking system with the sump right above my floor train, so I get to make all the mistakes I want and not pay the costs. Now, I did that and I had a very dry sump, and I had a grindy pump, so I still had to pay something.
You had a grindy pump?
I had a grindy pump. So that's definitely a don't. Now we have one from a listener notorious says pre filter sponge in an overflow box helps to prevent fish from ending up being a sump. Molly also a screen over the wear teeth for shrimp. I'm going to agree with 50% of this. Having the presponge filter and overflow, awesome. You just got to make sure that it is another piece that can clog. So make sure to check your sponge filters regularly, because the moment that sponge filters are clogged, there's more water on your basement floor. Right. The screen over the wear teeth for shrimp work, but using any type of mesh or screens over the overhead bulkhead filter clogs, even if it's algae growing or you got lazy or again, you went on vacation in Florida and your son had to take care of it. Duckweed diligent duckweed.
A dead fish, dead shrimp, duckweed will do it.
The whole thing. And make sure that you're not just using loose bulkhead filters. When we talk about a bulkhead filter is the hole in your aquarium where the water flows into. Generally, you have to have some sort of great system on there. Make sure not to cover up those and make sure they're in place, because fish do get rambunctious and can knock that head out. And when they knock that head out, like you said, debris duckweed, fish themselves can all clog it. I've had one that was not put incorrectly, and a medium sized plato got stuck in the overflow tube and of course, emptied the water out of my sump. But then he was crushed in that tube, so it killed him and he died in the overflow tube. So, yeah, be vigilant. There's pros and cons of this filter, for sure.
Yeah. Everything I watch on TV, people always try to come up with a little bit better. I just watched one today, too, where they're talking about that he doesn't like screen because it's too fine.
Yeah, you can do a more open screen. There's variable screens you can put on.
And the thing is, like with a baby nursery, which I'm building right now, I'm going to use foam after watching all these different videos. But he took on the plastic container that he has a nursery in. He made a six inch slit that was one inch high. Just to avoid something like that. Just to avoid all the amount of chances of it. Getting sludged up is a good word. There you go. sludged up.
So Victoria went in more description. He has made a design or borrowed a design and 3d printed it for a he calls it the leaf stops leaves from clogging in his weird teeth. So that's kind of genius, just for when he goes on vacation, puts a kind of a buoy around where the water would go to catch leaves. So damn decent design, my friend.
Yeah. If you've got a lot of live plants, you're always going to have a loose leaf that's going to mess up your day. There are so many great designs that people have come up with and stuff and you could take it and make it your own.
You basically go out there, find a piece of filtration or something you want to add to your tank, and that sump is the creative repository for you to be your own aquatic engineer and filibuster it into place. Just make sure if you're going to try something that isn't pre done or has a design already built and you want to try something on your own to see work out the kinks. Have a floor drain, right? Yeah. Have a cement basement instead of carpet. Do it in a garage where that water can flow out. Because let me tell you, I've done some unique building of my own and it's been life saver having that floor drain.
Yeah. Hit or miss. And the other thing, when you say don't this may sound really cruel, don't let your non aquatic person in your life help you decide what to keep and what to throw in your fish room. Because the other day I'm looking for little tiny pieces of I bought the matin filter from our friends from Swiss tropicals. Yes. There we go. That's what I was looking for.
Also, best place for sponge filters ever. They have some the most creative designs.
Yes.
Including jimmy's Square cadillac filters.
Yeah, I love them. So anyway, when I made matin filters for my for my 20 gallon longs and you have to kind of trim them to fit and I had all kinds of little pieces and I said to my wife, I said, where in heck did they go? I know I had them. Oh, I threw them. Why would you want to keep them? And now I'm making this baby nursery and I need little tiny pieces of filter and I don't have them. So don't let other people decide what you should keep. Get yourself a couple of plastic totes and keep all that oddball stuff that you think you're not going to use.
You have the scraps from every sponge, from every piece of plastic, from every loofa, from every pot scrubby I've used all over and over. A really unique way to have a media bed to grow good bacteria.
How many times have you all of a sudden right now is downstairs in rob's house here he's got a pair of rams. And what I love doing for rams is taking a little clay saucer for a little tiny flower pot and throwing it in the bottom of the tank because that's where they love to lay their eggs. And pretty soon my wife goes, oh, I brought a bunch of those little pots downstairs and put some plants in them, but why don't you go buy your damn own? Because now those are clay ones and you could go buy a plastic ones for next to nothing on the Internet. And the clay ones are kind of expensive. And she took all those from me. I was like, okay, I don't come down up to your kitchen and grab the turkey baster more than one time.
More than one time.
I now have my own turkey baster. It's her old one and she has a new one.
And I bet she has her own potting materials.
Yes.
So this is aquarium, guys, therapy. And it's a good session.
It is.
We're going to meet next week.
Keep people out of your damn fish room.
Go to Aquarium Guys podcast, bottom the website. You'll find the discord. There is a bunch of people beginning to post pictures of sumps. We'll probably have I think it's going to be like hashtag Sump Channel just to talk about sump design. In fact, I'm making sure it's here. So go check that out. Otherwise find us on Facebook.
I think it should be hashtag sump. There's all kinds of sump. Mollies, some mollies.
Yeah, no, that's the club, bro. I'd be part of the Sum Molly group. We have a gang sign and everything. Basically just a middle finger upside down.
Yeah, there we go. You never won.
So that's a crash course now, actually building your sump, that's more building tanks for silicone in spacers and all that. Me. I think the last DIY thing you could do is instead of if you just have a bear tank like you have a 55 gallon and that wants to be your sump, instead of you going and taking the time of cutting pieces of glass or plexiglass silicone them in place so you have the barriers and levels of the sump. Go and get that. What's that plastic grating, Jimmy, that they use for lighting the square grates.
It's called a lighter diffusers. And they come in two foot by four foot. And you've all been in an office where they've got the four foot fluorescent lights and they've got that grate, that white grate. You can go to your local hardware store. You can pick those up for seven dollars to twelve dollars, depending on the size. And if you are careful, because they do get sharp, you can take your wire cutter and you could just kind of snip snip snip make it work perfectly for what you want. They're big enough so the water never gets clogged on those things because they're probably a good three 8th of an inch square. And then you can put your bio balls in there and your filters and then maybe even a small playground for your sump guppies so they can live over there where it's nice.
All right. Real question, Jimmy. You know that guppies and molly's cross, right? Kind of like a horse and donkey.
Makes a mule, makes a zonkey.
Right?
Well, that's a zebra.
That's a zebra. So what is it? Is it gollies or muppies endlers? No, when you cross a guppy in a Molly it's a Muppy or golly.
It's a muppet. I don't know. A Muppy. I don't know. Never heard of such a thing.
You've never crossed a guppy in a molly?
No.
Jimmy, you need to get more mad experience. No, you need to have more sum mollies and guppies. Like I said, they'll make a sum golly. You know what I'm saying?
I'm not against orgies, but I'm just bad at multitasking. I've told you that. That is so weird. Why would you let your guppy and molly do it?
Remember, it's the rainbow month that we're all supposed to be that's right here.
Yes.
We have to be accepting of our guppies and Molly's crossing, I think, whoever.
They want and how they identify. Right, perfect. So what's a very odd a very odds to me is a cross between.
A plateau no, that's its own source.
I know, but it looks like a cross between a plateau and a sword tail. Very honest.
Yeah, people like Italian too much. What's that, Latin?
And you know what ENDLER is? It's a cross between a turd and a rock.
Oh, and on that note, we'll catch you on the next one. We're going to do a couple more of these in a batch here, get you more of the stuff you crave. Basically get your assholes off my ass. All right.
You're so rude.
We got a lot of demanding fans.
I had people that said to me, why aren't you guys doing a podcast? I said, Call Robbie and give him shit. And they did.
Yes.
Well listened to. Well played.
They did. How dare you?
That's right. So anyway, hopefully our lives are back in order where we can start getting a few of these more out to you.
Well, be sure to post jimmy's direct address and personal cell phone number so you can call him from now on.
Yes. And you could all camp out in my front yard.
Do you ever get that po box we asked for?
No.
How are people supposed to send us our snake.
Snake? We're not even worth our snake. But you know that if we you can send some baby powder in there.
You know, if we do, they're just going to send us dried out feeder copies in the mail forever.
Forever.
Oh, God.
I found something. Molly's.
Molly's. Hey. And if anybody out there has got any Molly stories or some ditch goldfish or some, I want to hear about it. Give us a call. Give us an email. Light up robbie's phone. I don't care. But be fun to hear other people find. I mean, the one thing that I have found that is most fascinating to me, which I don't think I've even talked to you about, I found on the YouTube this group, and it's called Ace. Ace. It's a bunch of foreign gentlemen, and they're just in the river system, walking up and down the river system with these bamboo nets that they've made. And they are grabbing goldfish and angel fish and all kinds of crazy fish, and they're just collecting them out in the wild. And I am just totally so turned on by watching it and so relaxing. They got this beautiful music in the background, and you can hear them talking a foreign language, and it's kind of like watching a Bob Ross video. You want to take a nap? Put that on. And you're watching them. They're collecting big angel fish and orandas and cambodian bedas, all in a river system. Which body of water in a river system where they were invasive. Yeah, it must be but I mean.
It must be done at the seagrass ditch. That's what they're doing.
Yeah, but it's in a different 100%. They're all talking different.
No, they just do that for the film. It's a segregch they're doing.
Could be over by the high school or the college or whatever the hell you fund your goldfish.
All right, before we leave you all, we love you. We'll do more podcasts, we promise. Get off my back, aquatop. If any of you, or if you're a friend of an aquatop executive, send them our way. We want to figure out these damn heaters. And if you do fix our issue, you know what? I'll throw up some advertising for free, right? I'll be aqua Top bitch. Help us. Thanks, guys, for listening to podcast. Please go to your favorite place where podcasts are found, whether it be spotify, itunes, stitcher, wherever they can be found, like subscribe. And make sure you get push notifications directly to your phone so you don't miss great content like this.
And the titles could be, like hottest fish ever.
We'll just have nothing but a channel of Molly's doing it.
Yeah, exactly.
I'm in Chicken chicken boing boy, I'd subscribe to that. I would do that in a hot minute.
And you know what would be sad is we'd be number one in a week because people like you or dementia will be going you got a chicken shit out, I'm going to send it to you. Here's a link.
And we'll just dust off your old 70s records to get some obscure music in the background.
Oh, yeah.