Every year at about this time of year, I start the process of getting the fish out of the pond in the yard and into a tank for the winter. Usually, I have the winter tank set up in the basement so that I don't have to worry about the water freezing. I don't have room in the basement for the stock tank this year, so I decided to have the tank in the greenhouse for the winter. I use the same stock tank for the winter tank that I use for the aquaponics setup in the summer.
Since I'm going to have the winter pond fish tank in the greenhouse for the winter, I have to do some extra work to keep the water from freezing. I need to insulate the tank so that it holds in the heat of the water so it's easier to keep the water above freezing. I had several pieces of foam insulation board and foil faced foam board to use to start the project
I started working on this a few days ago. The first thing I had to do is to insulate the space between the tank and the walls of the greenhouse. Since the tank sits in the front corner of the greenhouse, I had to insulate one side and one end of the tank. I started by emptying the tank, taking it out of the greenhouse, and cleaning it out. I figured that it's best to start with a clean tank. With the tank out of the greenhouse, it's easier to start the insulation process on the lower greenhouse walls.
Here is the corner where the tank will sit.
There will be several layers of insulation between the tank and the wall, the more, the better. I started by cutting a piece of foam insulation board to fit between the 2X6s that the lower wall is built from. I jambed that piece in between the 2X6s and then cut another piece as tall as the tank to put up against that.
Then I started the same process for the front wall.
With that much of the insulation done, it was time to bring the tank back into the greenhouse and put it into place. Then I cut various size pieces as needed to fill the space between the tank and the walls of the greenhouse. With the sides of the tank being stepped, I had to cut several sizes to get the space filled. I did this to the side and the end of the tank.
With the tank in place and insulated from the walls of the greenhouse, it was time to fill the tank with water for the fish. Since I have to pretty much drain the pond to be able to catch the fish, it made sense to fill the tank with pond water. Also, by using the pond water, I'm not changing the water that the fish are accustomed to. A large change in water can shock the fish, possibly causing them to die.
I set up my sump pump to pump the water out of the pond and into the tank with a couple of garden hoses and my barrel filler hose attachment so that the hose won't get pushed out of the tank by water pressure.
I use this bucket to keep the debris out of the pump when I'm pumping water from something like the pond. The bucket has the bottom cut out of it, and has a screen mounted inside it about 2 inches up from the bottom.
It took a while to move the 90 or so gallons of water to fill the tank, the sump pump is not one of the powerful ones, and with 2 garden hoses on it to reach from the pond to the tank, there's a fair amount of water flow restriction. Of course, when you have all afternoon to get the tank filled, it doesn't really matter how fast it fills.
Once it was full enough, I put the remaining pond plants that had been in the tank before I cleaned it back into the tank. Now it was ready for the fish.
The next thing I had to do was drain the pond down to about 6-8 inches of water in the bottom so that I could see the fish and catch them in the much smaller pool of water. I have found through experience that it's really difficult to catch them with a net if there's enough water to get away from the net.
In my next post, I'll talk about catching the fish and getting them into the tank.
That's all I have for this post, I hope you found it interesting!
Thanks for stopping by and checking out my post, eh!
Every time I see the work that you have achieved I am in awe. You should be proud of yourself. I am. Follow your passion.
Thank you! I appreciate that!