Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hello,
I am a colleague of charlie's and have also worked on the fish farm in question for 3 years.
Just a couple of points to clarify and a few extra bits of info to consider.

Most of what Charlie says is spot on with reard to the seasonality of the loading. It is hard to put a finger on when the highest loading is because some fish are moved to other sites during the summer so the total biomass of stock goes down and then up agian but it will be around August.

I made a few estimations of NH3 loadings and water flow through the system. It comes out at about 23.12kg Total Ammonical Nitrogen (TAN) at a concentration of about 0.548 mg/litre. This is in asystem flow of about 233260 gallons a day. so you can see that when it goes back to the burn it is diluted about ten fold. Total burn flow is about 2 million gallons a day ( maybe a bit less in summer). The aquaponics set up would have to contend with the higher concentrations before returning to the burn. A safe level for brown trout would neeed to be less than 0.01 mg/L approximately, so the effluent leaving the aquaponics would have to be about 0.1 mg L or less. I hope this helps clarify some things. I can probably give some othe info on the fish farm set up too, if necessary.

Thanks,

Richard.

geez there are some nice big numberd to deal with here--
come on you young folk - bring out a smart box to rearrange those numbers..