New Goldfish/Feeder Systems at Fish Mart

Fish Mart is proud of our latest project completion – the installation of custom-designed goldfish systems! Keeping the very specific and special needs of goldfish and cold-water feeder fish in mind, we have two aluminum vats which each hold 1100 gallons, and are each supported by a pump, a sand/pool filter, an Oxygen Saturator, and a Chiller!

The holding capacity for each vat is enormous – 150,000 comets; or 300,000 tuffies; or 75,000 medium comets; or 2,250 pool-sized comets! Each vat has three sections, so we can have different fish in each section as we need to meet you orders.

This system also includes an aluminum reservoir vat which holds 550 gallons and has its own chiller – this reservoir is used as packing water for whenever you buy our feeders.

We maintain a water temperature of about 58 degrees. Tap water is running about that now, but as you know, when spring temperatures warm into summer, tap water gets into the 70s, too high to adequately support goldfish and their need.

Goldfish do better in cooler water for several reasons – their metabolism is reduced, they require less oxygen, and harmful bacteria are less likely to reproduce. As always, for delivery orders, we still use ice packs to help maintain a cool water temperature.

Equally if not more important - as temperature to the successful quality care of goldfish - is the amount of dissolved oxygen in their water. 

It is common knowledge that goldfish generally require more oxygen, and now we have Oxygen Saturators which directly inject oxygen into the water of the holding vats.

The level of dissolved oxygen (DO) we are maintaining the fish at

 is more than DOUBLE what we could with our prior method of 

100% water changes twice daily!

When the fish are first delivered in trucks from the south, that also have chillers and oxygen injection, we match the higher level of dissolved oxygen the fish have during transit, and actually acclimate them over a couple or several hours to our maintenance DO level (much as we do with our new shipments of saltwater fish with the CO2 to reduce the pH level of the water they are going into, so there’s no pH shock and the ammonia is neutralized). The fish settle in so beautifully it’s amazing! We were shocked to see that after only a couple of hours, our first shipment of goldfish were so happy that they were coming to the surface of the water looking for food! So we fed them!

We add fresh (filtered) water to the holding vats, and can adjust that to where we’re changing  the water in the vat every three hours or every 24 hours and everything in between – all based on the amount of fish we are holding.

Finally, additional and new packing areas have been integrated into the systems, making the packing of hundreds of thousands of fish a little easier on our great crew. The bottom line is that your feeders from Fish Mart receive the most optimum car and are therefore of the best quality available!