Meeting your needs
Everyone has 24 hours, nobody have more of it or less of it. It is how we fully utilize and the willingness to allocate time for things that matter. This is because i believe that let us strive to improve continuously; for we cannot remain stationary. One either progresses or retrogrades.
This post helps to conceptualize the Why of things and streamline the processes to gain back time.
We all have busy life with work and family that we need to take care. We have jobs that need us to be there majority of time and we still need to spend time with our love ones. However, without giving up any of those we can stream line our processes and optimize our setup so we can spend more time with things that matter. At least for me, i would want to spend as much time as i can with my family, so this the “Why” i invest in the initial setup. Time and Resources during the setup.
There are two things that takes up majority of time (excluding seeing them), water change and reset of tanks. There is no escaping that water change is necessary and resetting of tanks is necessary but both takes up a lot of time if you have a lot of tanks.
Hence, this is the why of things that i do what i do and still progress on the hobby, which in retrospect helps me a lot more in visualizing what i want to do with the next project and such.
I’m going to share with you how i do it in the following paragraph.
Setting up the infrastructure
During the course of my journey and as i learn how to better optimize the infrastructure such as the tank setup and location, it becomes important to me. For example there are 2 main important things which i really look for :
- water source
- drainage
- Sink
Though very basic for shrimp keeping, i needed these two important things due to ease of water change. Water change is a large part for shrimp breeding. This small yet essential change to the infrastructure helps reduce time taken to drain water and fill it up.
There are a few ways to do so, either we drill a hole in the tank and make it an outlet for draining or we can use gravity with another hose to drain the water.
since filling the water up is fairly quick, i have opt for using gravity to drain the water in the tank.
Lastly is a small sink which allows me to wash and disinfect tools, unpacking of shrimps and so on. A sink provides a lot of flexibility when dealing with the aquatic hobby. With the opportunity to re-do everything again, what i did was to have a sink, a drainage and water outlet all in one place. This helps contain and reduce movements in and out of the facility.
Drainage and Inflow
Draining using gravity requires some calibration to the hose use to fill the tank up. It uses the same inlet into the tank but with an additional valve to drain the water out. 
This method if done correctly will help save a lot of time in draining the water. However, this doesn’t remove the need to siphon or clean your soil once in 3-6 months.
From the picture below the first 4 tap is for the inflow of water into the 4 tanks after draining and the last tap (5th) is the drainage valve. What this does is if the “main water in tap” is shut off and the “water out tap” is turn on, than the draining process will begin. If multiple tiers are connected, it is important to note the draining hoses connected at the next tier below for draining need to be lower than the draining height. A safe method is the connecting valve on the next tier be at the level of the bottom of the tank.
Alternatively, individual tiers can have it’s own drainage outlet but all connected to the main drainage outlet.
Thin layer of soil but more frequent reset
The reason why i use thin layer of soil is because it is easier to manage from a 3-6 months siphoning (cleaning of soil) perspective and it is also faster to reset the tanks when needed.
These two elements help reduce time spent in resetting and siphoning. With thinner layer of soil yes we do need to increase frequency of tank reset but resetting tanks frequently also helps boost the shrimp to breed.
During reset, what i do is to vacuum out the soil and water together and i can now reset tanks very quickly. The entire end to end process takes 15 mins per tank but does not exponentially increase with more tanks because now i can reset 4 tanks in an hour. In the past when i have UGF setup and box UGF i couldn’t reset as fast.
Now it is a breeze.
Increasing grazing material
Daily feed is still a routine for me and it is something i do so the inspection of the shrimps are done that way, looking at how the shrimps are doing. While i feed once or twice daily, i have opt for using lubao as a grazing material. This helps and allow me to go on vacation or days without feeding if needed. Increasing the grazing material helps with extending the time between feeds.
Enjoying Shrimp Breeding
Personally i would like to achieve minimizing time spent in the various necessary task essential to shrimp breeding, and with the above steps taken i was able to truly enjoy the shrimp hobby as it doesn’t steal away a lot of time yet able to achieve good results in breeding. Over time i was able to keep improving through the years and consistently do what i believe is great work.
Life is short to live in regrets because tomorrow is no guarantee. We can’t become fit if we go to the gym once a year, it is through small steps, small changes, small adjustment and doing it consistently that will eventually adds up to the goal.
i’ll close with this quote which i like from Roy Bennett “Maturity is when you stop complaining and making excuses in your life; you realize that everything that happens in life is a result of a previous choice you’ve made and start making new choices to change your life.
Hope this post is beneficial for those who are rethinking their setup and or going towards a different phase of shrimp breeding.
Hi. Thanks for all the amazing information. When you reset, your only using enough soil to cover the bottom? That’s enough to keep ph low?
Also can you describe siphoning and cleaning of soil?
Lastly can you provide how you setup tank? As well as cycling Amazonia? Thanks
Hi, yes the 1cm layer of soil is sufficient for the pH buffering, i reset my tanks more frequently at around 8 months. Siphoning of soil is to remove the dust from the broken down ADA and also manually remove the waste leaving only the soil intact. Yes for setting up the tank i do it with ADA soil cycle for 40 days before adding shrimps. Measure Ammonia and Nitrite and Nitrate before putting shrimps in the tank.