Order those eggs! Installing foam to insulate your tank. Who's doing TIC?

Order your eggs now!
Recently Tom Jones, of Vermont Fish and Wildlife, sent out a list of schools that have requested eggs. I forwarded that list as an e-mail attachment to all Vermont TIC participants on November 27. If you weren't on the list, please order your eggs ASAP using the application available in this Google Docs folder

Detailed instructions on installing foam
Through the wizardry of Bob Wible, it's possible to insulate a 55-gallon tank with a single 4' X 8' sheet of foam board. You can find Bob's instructions here.

Bob buys 1 3/8"Tuff-R poly insulation at Home Depot.  It has foil on both sides.  He also purchases (at Ace hardware) a 50-yard roll of 1.88" wide foil for each tank installation. 

Bob alongside his well-designed tank insulation system.

Some set-up advice from our most senior salmonid raiser
Trip Westcott raised salmon at the Lothrop School in Pittsfield, Vermont, for over a quarter century, making him (as far as I know) the most experienced TIC/SIC teacher in the state. After Trip retired in June 2015, he donated his very well-used equipment to our Vermont TIC program. (It's now back in use in Danielle Levine's classroom at The Schoolhouse Learning Center in Burlington.)

Here are a few of Trip's set-up suggestions.

1. You need a low table for the tank and space under or beside it for the chiller. [Some teachers who lacked a sufficiently sturdy table or counter used stacks of cement blocks covered by an appropriate length of plywood.]
   
2. Get tank clean and empty. Use only cold pure tap water. Paper towel OK. Use NO chemicals to clean {NOT Ever]!! Not even the school anti-germ soap that is in every school.
   
3. Keep those new buckets pristine.
   
4. Do not use old sponges for anything near the tank. They are full of anti-germ stuff that can wipe out your fish in a very short time.
   
5. Cover the tank top with plastic or paper  so no cleaning agents and yeasts float in.
   
6. Test your tank platform for strength.  (Danielle Fagen had 500 pounds of kids sit on it.)
   
7. Find an electrical outlet that the janitor does not use.  
   
8. The bottom piece of insulation board goes on first under the tank. 
   
9. Have some dark brown paper to put directly under the glass bottom. It will help later activities.
   
10. No water yet; but after we do add water, we'll test the tank for a few days.

Current list of TIC schools and teachers
A few schools that decided late in the season to try to join the TIC program found that they would not be able to pull it off this year. Even so, we have 66 Vermont schools participating in the 2016-2017 TIC program. Thanks to a grant from the Jack and Dorothy Byrne Foundation, South Royalton School has two tanks, one high school tank and one in middle school, so that brings our tank total to 67. This is 30 more than we had last year!

In addition, because many schools have two or more teachers collaborating on the TIC program, this year 93 Vermont teachers are doing TIC.

You can find the latest list here.