The average American aquarist owns 1.something aquariums. So as you catch the breeding bug, you are no longer a typical aquarist. ;) And if you are a voracious reader, you have a lot of company, but again are not a typical living room aquarist.

I am delighted by the growth of aquarium related sites and the number of people visiting them on the net. We do need to be careful to critically examine a lot of the statements (given the Net's ability to be a haven for just every opinion, political platforms and belief system imaginable) made on most sites and certainly that includes everything stated on Guppylog.

I Googled "average number of aquariums per US aquarist" since this isn't info on the back of the typical cereal box. Was surprised by a Wikipedia claim that 40% of American aquarists own 2 or more aquariums. But according to one of their articles, the average number of aquariums is 1 per household and 8.8 fish per household. (Obviously not keeping guppies.)

Your bedroom is already holding over a half-ton of aquariums, if most of the tanks are operating. You are probably to the point where support of that room must be considered. If it is a second floor room, are the aquarium's safely supported? You don't want that to become a first floor fishroom. ;)

Other issues, which I'm sure that you have considered include how that room can be temperature controlled so you don't go broke (or nuts) running individual tank heaters, how you get water into the room, how you treat and season the water, how you change water and get that water out of there (that last is my biggest challenge) and how you bring air to the tanks.

Living in a house with a slab foundation, we don't have as many worries about supporting aquaria. However this place gets hot in the summer and there are times when I wax nostalgic for the basement fishroom in a townhouse we used to live in. Ease of heating in the winter and ease of modest cooling in the summer(and energy efficiency) are also big issues.

You have probably also been considering electrical supply. Most home outlets are dangerously low. Our place can't take GFI outlets (code in many place for outlets near water in bathrooms and kitchens and maybe laundry rooms). We will have to pull out all of the old, rather obsolete, wiring before we can do that. (Not an electrician or particularly handy ...) I have still read that a person can still be electrocuted around a GFI (ground fault interrupter) but one's odds of surviving a splash on something electrical are helped by having GFIs.

Sometime I should encourage the placement of a series of slides on a site. A friend in the local (Chicagoland) killifish group built a fishroom in a part of his basement - from scratch. First the pluming for a sink, drain, RO unit and hot and cold water taps was run. He then planned where he would put the vats for treating and seasoning water. Then he erected the (steel) studs which would wall off his little fishy kingdom from the basement and his other kingdom (a photographic darkroom) next door. Before any water resistant greenboard walled in the room, placement of electrical lines (four feet off the ground) and GFI outlet (one every three feet or so) was arranged.

He also arranged for a vapor barrier in the ceiling. (A couple of us were recalling a tropical fish wholesaler in the area - years ago - who was closed down because humidity leaked from his place to the electronics related business next door!)

We do want to make sure that with multiple aquariums, that we don't mess up our homes. I was tempted to put in a roof fan to pull the hot air out of our attic several years ago. A comment on the Killietalk e-mailing list caused me to ask questions and we realized that an attic fan would probably draw all sorts of humidity out of the fishroom and into the attic! Not wanting all sorts of problems with mold and decaying structure (not to mention providing a comfortable environment for carpenter ants and/or termites) we dropped that plan fast! I'm continually thankful for advice from that mailing list. (So many lists, so little time!)

A heat exchanger through a side wall might be an initially expensive way to control heat and humidity. Probably I'll settle for a custom screen door on the end of the room. That can be open in the cool hours. A fan could blow a fair amount of air out that door, drawing air in through two fish room windows or from elsewhere in the house. A primitive way of dealing with summer time heat and humidity, it may be the best we can do with our particular architecture and finances.

You have probably already considered these and other fishroom issues. That can be something of an on-going process. The more which can be thought through ahead of time, the better.

I can provide a good bad example of what not to do when it comes to water holding and carpeting. I ran a line from our laundry room, where I actually installed an RO unit, through a wall (worried a hole for the line through the wallboard with a screw driver so as to NOT cut any electrical line with a drill). The line was run into a 32-gallon container. So far, so good.

I should have put a float valve on that line to prevent overflows! There were a few times when I didn't get back to close the valve to the 30-gallon per day RO unit (which really ran at about 2/3s of that capacity) and water slopped out of that trash can (dedicated to things fishy).

One day I casually bent over to pick up a piece of paper next to the RO receptacle and to my absolute horror, realized that it was a small mushroom! Fortunately as a teacher on summer vacation I was able to immediately cut and rip out a lot of carpet and the under pad immediately. (That wasn't on the agenda for the day but what can one do?) The tile under the carpet, over a cement foundation, popped up in some cases too. No wonder one had a little trouble breathing in there!

I got a kick out of your moniker GilmoreGuro. Is this a reference to one of the nine or so Gilmores in the US? The reason I wonder, is that may be a factor in what suggestions are made in terms of securing breeding guppy stock. You already mentioned your virgin tan and may have a line of guppies you wish to work with. Some shops get good stock from commercial sources or private breeders and keep their guppies separated, at least for a fair period of time. Sometimes one can approach general aquarium club auctions, where really good and sometimes junky lines of guppies can be found. There are also a few IFGA events, which might be of interest. http://www.ifga.org/

That organization and their breeders produce stock more consistent than some of the guppies commercially available. However, as several people on GL have pointed out, there are a lot of neat looking guppies promoted on the Net which are quite different from the IFGA show lines.

Still reorganizing after the AKA convention, I was surprised to see that the St Louis guppy show is this weekend. Oh well... Maybe could make the July 20th guppy show auction in the Detroit area.
http://www.ifga.org/Show%20Rules/MGB%20Show%20Rules.htm

I'm doing a little presentation on "The Geography of Livebearers" for the Michiana A.S. that evening and theoretically could swing by the South Bend area on the way back from Detroit.
http://www.michianaaquariumsociety.org/html/Calender/

This isn't intended to toot my own horn, though it would be fun to meet any Guppyloggers in the South Bend area. The Michiana group are neat people too! Mostly, this is typical of fish-head calender hopping and speculation.

Don't know where you hale from (in a general sense I'm from the southern 'burgs of Chicagoland). Sometimes it is handy knowing the region where a person is writing from, if we still can respect their privacy by not asking them to be too specific. Sometimes a few suggestions can be offered (free and maybe worth every penny) on where to look for guppies.

On the other hand, you can Google your city or state or region or country and Guppy club or Aquarium Society or maybe fish club. It is fun, making specific plans or even just speculating whether to sometime drop by. About 1/2 have the general aquarium societies in the US have vanished in the last 15 years. Many of the survivors though are very active and vital.

Specialty fish clubs (guppy, killifish, cichlid, Betta) tend to continue at a much higher survival rate than the general aquarium societies have. However, if the killie groups' experiences are typical, there are not quite as many regional shows and auctions as there used to be. The tanking economy (where more and more of us have less and less discretionary income) and rising fuel prices may only aggravate this trend.