Now that winter is upon us keeping our finned friends warm is a big consideration. We keep a lot of different sizes of tanks for our Bettas so finding good methods of keeping everyone warm and healthy is formost on our minds.

One myth I'd like to address, that of heating 1 gallon tanks. We keep eleven one gallon tanks each one with a heater. I think how the myth started was that people had problems with the old style bimetallic aquarium heaters which have been around for ages. These heaters use two strips of metal which expand and contract at a fixed rate to control power to the heating elements. If this mechanism fails it can lock the heater on. This will overheat the water in the tank to the point that your fish may die. Since these small tanks hold a very minimal amount of water and most of the low powered heaters are either 25 or 50 watts and designed for a much larger volume of water this situation can prove lethal.

Today however there are a number of companies that make aquarium heaters which are electonically controlled and have built in safeguards that prevent the heater from locking on. Some have sensors that can detect an overheating condition and will shut themselves off. We use Hagen's Tronic heaters in our one gallon tanks, these are not only electronically controlled without the use of bimetallic strips but are short and submersible allowing them to be used in these small tanks. One word of warning all heaters should be unplugged if you plan on removing them from the tank for cleaning or other tank maintenence. If you leave a heater out of water the glass can become very hot if it is plugged in and comes on, if you were to drop this back into the tank there is a good chance that the glass tube will shatter so beware!

Above is one of our 1 gallon tanks equipped with a Tronic heater, even though it is one of the smallest heaters on the market it needs to be angled slightly in order to make good contact with the tankwater. Another good feature of this heater is that it is totally submersible.

The one problem with heating individual tanks if you have a lot of tanks is that it can become very expensive! For example each Tronic heater sells for $29 cdn at retail so if you have several tanks on the go this can amount to quite a bit of money such as our setup below.

We realized this when the cold weather started to return to our area and sought out a different more cost effective way of heating a group of our small hospital tanks that cannot accept even the small Tronic heaters.

A trip to Walmart netted us a great solution to our problem of heating 10 small and larger tanks in one of our rooms. It took the form of an oil filled electric radiator which we thought would also be safer than the exposed element forced air space heaters that have been around for years. What we realized was that we could heat a designated 'fish room' with this heater, it also turned out to be a lot cheaper since the one heater could now handle our ten tanks and cost $64 cdn or roughly the cost of two Tronic heaters.

We've found this oil filled radiator (above) to be fairly consistant keeping our room at a nice toasty 77 degrees as long as the door is kept closed. The heater also has three setting and so far we have found that set at the lowest, 600 watts is just fine for keeping our fishroom warm and toasty.

Above is part of our fishroom, in the forground are some of our 1/3 gallon tanks that we picked up at the dollar store for a dollar. These are great for keeping our guys who have special needs. Behind and to the left is our divided 15 gallon tank and to the right is Earl of Red Five who is lucky enough to have his own 5 gallon heated and filtered tank. Also of note is a digital thermometer that has two memories which recall the highest and lowest temperatures recorded. Very handy if we want to make sure the room isn't going through a broad range of temperatures in the course of the day. There is also a probe which can be placed a fair distance from the main unit for taking reading from a second location.

Annette being really handy with power tools made this storage area for some of our fishkeeping gear. She is also the one who cut and built all of the parts for our divided Betta tanks! I think one of the great finds this year were these small 1/3 gallon tanks from the dollar store. For an extra buck you can also pickup a matching battery powered light though we normally don't use them as they will burn through AA batteries pretty quickly.

Annette and I are strong believers in keeping our tankwater as clean as possible. One way of doing this is through constant water changes though a downside is the amount of labour and also the possibility of contaminated tapwater. Since I like the idea of clean filtered water in a cycled tank we started to build divided tanks this summer. Above is our last project a divided 5 gallon tank. This was pretty straightforward since there is only one divider which has holes drilled into it to allow for water flow. A Hagen Aquaclear Mini filter is used which straddles the divider so that the pickup is on one side and output on the other thus providing filtered water to both sections of the tank.

This divided 10 gallon tank was actually our second undertaking and probably the most complicated in terms of flow dynamics. Since we wanted to have 100% circulation of tank water through all compartments we had to design dividers which allowed the water to flow from one end to the other. Since we were using Hagen Aquaclear Mini filters again and the distance between the intake and outlet is short we had to redesign the layout of the dividers so that the right compartment received the output from the filter. This was done by building a small compartment that runs from the 2nd to 4th compartment at the rear and the 2nd, 3rd and 4th dividers attached to this instead of the back tankwall. This way we were able to channel the water flow to the far right compartment and then have the water snake it's way back to the far left compartment were it was picked up by the filter intake.

This is actually our first attempt at a divided tank, it's a 15 gallon tank divided into six compartments using plexiglass. Each compatment has several rows of holes staggered front to back to force the water to flow from compartment to compartment in an S direction. This prevents dead spots from occuring in each compartment.

The big difference with this tank was the use of a Fluval 104 power filter instead of the Aquaclear Mini. The main reason for this was because we needed a filter that could have a large distance between the pickup and outlet so that we could put them at opposite ends of the tank. Annette has drawn up some sketches of our design and construction for this tank which I have included.

The above diagram shows a simple sketch of what one divider looks like. To give an idea of where we located the 'flow holes'.

This diagram shows where we put 'blobs' and/or 'beads' of silicon to anchor the dividers into the tank. For our 15 gallon, I did not use the bead of silicon as pictured along the bottom of the divider (I included it here because I did use this method for a hexagonal 5 gallon that I divided with a piece of glass). I found that 'blobs' of it in all 4 corners (both sides of the divider) was enough to hold it in place. Be generous with the blobs. I did them big enough that if I did any bigger, you'd be able to see them below the black rim of the tank on the top and bottom. If any does end up protruding past the black rim, and this bothers you, you can shave some off with a razor blade after it dries. I found that if the divider was not snug enough to sit in the tank on it's own (ie, if it tended to "fall over" while the silicon was drying), that it is best to do only a few blobs at a time, holding corners that are not being siliconed with a clothes pin, then doing the 'pinned' corners after the others had dried. I allow 48 hours to completely dry.

Above is a diagram looking down over top of the tank. To show placement of dividers with respect to the holes. To show how we wanted the water to flow through each compartment and how we did this by hole placement in the dividers.

Many people believe that in a filtered tank Bettas will not or cannot build bubble nests. This is not entirely true, but you do have to think out the flow dynamics and be able to use filters that can be adjusted so that there is a very gentle flow of water and not a strong current. So far we have found that the Aquaclear and Fluval filters fit this bill perfectly and as you can see our guys are very happy bubblenest builders.