Building a Fishroom - Part 2

The following tips should help you avoid some major mistakes when building your fish-room. on’t be penny-wise and dollar-foolish.

Often it pays in the long term to put a little more into the room up front and recover substantial savings and other benefits down the road. Heating costs are major and buying insulation is far cheaper in the long run than paying for wasted heat. Remember, the insulation material must be waterproof. Fiberglass is not good for fish-rooms. It will usually get wet from condensation unless all spaces around it are heated. Sprayed foam is the best. Rigid Foam boards are next best, providing you have no air gaps on the edges when installed. Our fish-rooms all have a minimum of R30 in the ceilings and R19 in the walls, even the one in the middle of my house in the heated basement. If you are putting up a stand-alone fish room with very cold weather on the immediate exterior higher R-vales are recommended. The fish-room door should also be insulated. We usually end up making our own door in order to get this. Metal doors will cause warm moist air to condense on them if the outside temperature is much colder than the fish-room temps. Keep in mind, any wood that touches concrete floors or walls should be pressure treated.

If you are so early in the construction phase that you can plan for radiant floor heating, do it. It is by far the best way to heat a fish-room that needs heat over and above what will be generated by the electrical devices.

For optimum heating efficiency when using electricity to heat the room – cover each tank and add a tank heater. Evaporation gives off heat, so covering the tanks retains this heat. Tank covers will make for more work, and heaters can be a pain to work around, so carefully weigh the advantages of each in your situation.

You must have a vapor barrier unless every tank is completely covered. The easiest-to-do vapor barriers are foam insulation boards with taped seams. All electrical outlets must also be sealed against vapor. This means completely sealing around them with no air gaps. If you do not do this, there is the potential for cold moist air to condense on the electrical outlet, causing it to trip the breaker.

All electrical lines must be on a ground fault circuit. Ceiling outlets tend to be the most convenient, by far. The lighting circuit should be separate and it’s best to wire it with an inline timer to control lighting. Any technical questions on electrical requirements should be addressed by your electrician. Just tell him what you want and let him determine exactly how to get it.

An airtight room needs fresh air and humidity control. We highly recommend the most efficient Heat Recovery Ventilator you can find. They can be put on a timer to regularly bring in fresh air while exchanging its heat value with the outgoing air. We’ve had good luck with those made by Lifebreath, but there are other good ones. Now, the tricky part with these units is to properly install the incoming and outgoing air ducts. The key is to create a negative air pressure in the fish-room. This will force air into the room and out the air exchange unit. If you don’t create this negative air pressure, the humid air will force its way into your building, exposing it to possible mold hazards. Here’s how you do it: The outgoing duct takes all of its air from the fish-room and expels it outside. However, the intake duct must be split in two, with only half going into the fish-room and the other half going to another part of the house. This will create the negative pressure in the fish-room that is so desirable.

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