Periodically I buy a lot of black worms from Dan out in California. In order to keep the cost down I usually buy 5 lbs. at a time and split the order up between several other folks leaving myself with a pound or two at a time.

The hassle of having to rinse the worms daily, frig space, etc. usually ends up making this another PITA that I just don't have the time for, but the fish do love them and it's always been a great conditioning food for my corys and angels so what to do?

I've been checking out what others have tried and came up with a lazy cheapskate approach that so far seems to be working quite well.

I started with a spare Sterilite plastic storage tote that was just sitting around. Big Lots and WalMart sell them for about $7 - $10. The one I'm using is 7" tall, 16" wide and about 24" long. I also used another Sterilite container that's 11" tall, 9" wide and 15" long, (about $7 at Big Lots).

About 2 1/2" down from the top of the larger tote I drilled a 1" hole using a cheap one oiece hole saw bit from Home Depot (about $4.50).
Through this hole I screwed a 3/4" dia. PVC elbow that has a male pipe thread on one end and a female slip fitting end on the other. I also used a 1" O-ring on the inside. On the outside I screwed on a 3/4" dia. PVC threaded coupling (female on both ends) and added another O-ring, (cheapskate bulkhead fitting).

Another elbow matching the one inside was added to the end of the coupling and then a few short pieces of 3/4" PVC pipe and a pair of slip X slip elbows were added to that to form a narrow 'U' shaped tube. The pieces of pipe were cross cut with a band saw but you could also just drill some 1/8" holes, and that forms my over flow. The smaller container is my sump and for filter media I just used up what I had on hand. In this case I started with a layer of giant 2 1/4" bio balls that I had left over from an old pond filter and then covered that with a scrap piece of egg crate light diffuser. Over that I layered a 2" piece of reticulated foam and a layer of scrap foam and left over slugs from the middle of my Hydro/ATI sponge filters. The very top layer is a piece of bonded white & blue poly batting.

I used an old AquaClear 110 foam insert to hold back the bio balls and create a small well on one end of the sump and that's where my return pump sits. With the approximately 12" head the little Ecoplus pump moves about 100 gph. ($8.25 @ Kens Fish ). The return uses some odd pieces of clear tubing and left over fittings to get from the pump back to the large tote and a 1/2" plastic spray bar.

I squeezed out a couple of sponges over the sump, put about 8 gallons of water in the large tote and another gallon in the sump. Added a pound of worms two days later and started feeding the worms flake food two days after that. I did rinse the worms first and did a 75% water change after they were in it for the first day.

It's been almost a month now and they are doing fine. No additional water changes and the only extra effort needed is to shut off the pump when feeding so the food doesn't all wash down the overflow.
Probably could do it again for about $30 and just use Dollar Store scrubbies for media. The tank looks like it will support at least two or three pounds of worms so that'll be the next step, to see how many it will support effectively and how quickly they'll reproduce to replenish what I use to feed the fish with.

Sounds like a cool little project! Got any pics of the setup?

Keeper

In the middle of a marathon water changing. I'll get some pics tomorrow.