Electrical System
Wiring a fishroom for electricity is not hard at all… if you have a father-in-law who happens to be an electrician.
One of the biggest mistakes that can be made when designing a fishroom is to underestimate the need for electricity. Trying to predict the amount of electricity is not easy, but I tried. Here is how I calculated the maximum amount of wattage that the room would pull if all electricity-powered things were on all at once.
40 x 100-watt heater = 4000 watts
20 x 200-watt heater = 4000 watts
10 x 300-watt heater = 3000 watts
80 x 40-watt light bulb = 3200 watts
1 x 80-watt air pump = 80 watts
miscellaneous pumps and other stuff = 1500 watts
total wattage = 16,280 watts or 16.28 kW
All of the electricians reading this are laughing very loudly right now. I am not an electrician, and I figured that this would be useful information (it is if you are trying to predict the effect of your fishroom on your electric bill). My father-in-law set me straight. All you need to worry about from a wiring point of view is the resistance in the circuit. He looked at my list and drawings of where I needed electricity and decided that the room would be divided into four circuits, each with its own breaker. The three circuits with the potentially largest draw of electricity would get 20-amp breakers and the last circuit would get a 15-amp breaker.
That brings us to the breaker box…
This is a picture of the box after the new breakers were installed. The bottom four breakers on the left are the breakers that run the fishroom. One of the things that I looked for when selecting a home was the size of the breaker box. This one has plenty of room to add more breakers. The cost of adding a few breakers is small, but if we had to install a whole new box to accomodate the needs of the fishroom, the project would have cost about $100 more.
I am using some commercial-grade bus strips that I purchased through Jehm Co. to plug power cords into. Here is a picture of one of them.
These bus strips are made by Tripp-lite, are heavy duty and have an internal breaker. Jehm Co. sells several sizes ranging from 8-outlet to 24-outlet. I purchased a bus strip for each planned rack, and an extra 12-outlet strip. I calculated the number of outlets I would need per rack by adding the number of heaters to the number of light fixtures, and added three outlets for accessory equipment. The bus strips are screwed to the wall behind the racks to allow for drip loops on the power cords. The room is wired to 4-outlet boxes spaced around the room.
We also wired a 2-outlet box specifically for the small refridgerator and chest freezer, and a 4-putlet box in the ceiling at the center of the room.
The room has been operating for about 8 weeks at the time that I am writing this page. I have not had any electrical problems at all.
What will the effect of all this electricty on the power bill be? Hard to say. We do not have a year’s worth of baseline data without the fishroom to compare current bills to. Electricity costs money, however, so a portion of the electricity bill is directly associated with the fishroom. I do not think that the fishroom uses an unreasonable amount of power. The lights are probably the biggest draw. They are on for approximately 16 hours each day. The heaters, which are usually the biggest users of electricity, are not on all that much. I have walked into the totally dark fishroom in the middle of the night (when it is coldest in the house) to see how many little red lights are on in the tanks. The most I have seen on at one time were five (out of 22), and those were all small tanks on the bottom shelf of the rack furthest from the furnace vent. The room stays very warm an cozy due to a combination of the location of the home’s furnace (in the fishroom), a vent from the heating ductwork directly into the fishroom and the amount of warm water in the room (convecting and radiating heat into the room).
Here is how that calculation of kilowatts mentioned earlier can be useful. Our electric company charges $0.0668 per kilowatt - hour (kW-hr). The claculated figure of 16.28 kW is the amount of energy that the room would draw every hour if everything were running. At the current price of energy one hour’s operation would cost $1.08. A full day would cost $25.92, and 30 days would therefore cost $777.60. The last electric bill was less than a quarter of that, so I am pretty sure that the fishroom is not going to drive me into the poor house. The light fixtures that I am currently using are costing me about $30 per month. I doubt that the rest of the electicity usage in the room is more than half of the lights’ usage.
