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Hi all, As some of you know, my currently my set-up looks like this. With enormous amount of help and encouragement from my fiancee, we have now got the fishroom to this state. It feels awesome walking in there to play with water :o Amazingly for me things have not stop improving here! We are in the process of building a new house and getting a purpose build fishroom in it. The construction started just before Christmas last year. In this fishroom I wanted to have some of the things I wished I had or I had done in my current set-up. 1st Priority: Insulation I wanted to be able to keep the room warm in winter and cool in summer with minimal power consumption. Living in Canberra we get cold winters (nights especially) and a week or two of extreme heat every summer. We decided to build the the whole structure; house and fishroom, with a relatively new building material suggested to us by our builder. It is a thermal facade system called 'Exsulite' it is manufactured by Dulux. It is a system that uses foam, foil, airgaps and various boards. It provides a lot better thermal protection than regular bricks for example. Between this system and the gyprock regular insulation batts are fitted. The whole house including the fishroom and the garage has insulation batts on the ceiling as well. I also decided against a door that opens to outside and windows to minimize heat loss through these. 2nd Priority: Access to water I wanted to make sure I had all that I needed within the room in terms of access to water as well as getting rid of waste water. I decided to have a 42L laundry tub fitted into the room to provide all important 'cleaning' station. I no longer need to take over the laundry or worse the kitchen during certain maintenance of various fishkeeping related items. I have also got a separate tap installed next to the laundry tub to have my water reservoir line to be permanently connected to this tap. I won't need to connect and disconnect this line unnecessarily in the future. A center drain in the middle of the room was also a must. 3rd Priority: Access to power As with almost everybody that is in the aquarium hobby, I always found I needed more power points than what is available around the tank/tanks. This always inevitably leads to using of powerboards, but even with using quality ones there is always potential to overload or something to go wrong. As much as possible I wanted to avoid using power boards and double adapters in the fishroom, though I know resistance is futile and I might resort to these at some stage. To ensure I have access to power where I needed I decided to get 20 quad power points installed in the room! That is 80 power points!!! I had to show photos of my current set-up to the builder and the electrician when their eyebrows were raised when I requested this. They were wondering why I need this much power? :anonymous: I am getting the power points put in two lines; one over the other. One line is going to be connected to a wired timer. These power points are for the lights. The second line is ordinary points for various other equipment. The electrician have put another box and 3 circuits in this room alone! 4th Priority: Lighting and ventilation As already mentioned, will be lighting all my tanks relatively well by fishroom standards. I do not see the point of having a fishroom where you can't see the inhabitants of the tanks very well. Each row of tanks are to have LED lights fitted above them. I have recently been replacing my T8 fluoro units with these. I am finding this is saving me a lot of energy. As I have been known to leave smelly things in the fishroom; like a bucket of blackworms that have died, it was super important for my fiancee that the room can be easily ventilated! This was something I wanted anyway as the room has no windows and no access to outside aerating the room is not possible. We are getting a toilet/bathroom style exhaust fan installed in the room. Its a type of model that has flaps that close when not in operation providing no gap for heat loss. The room is getting two ceiling flouro lights as well, for the times I might walk into the room when the tank lights are off. That's about the progress so far. We are still couple of months away from completion.

Shed skin is opaque white. The recently moulted shrimp are pale. Either way leave it in the tank.