Oosie's porch AP system

Oosie

I had a bit of a setback this afternoon.

After testing and seeing that my pH is steadily climbing over the course of two weeks up to 8,8 from 7, I decided to help bring it down by adding 50ml of 30% HCl, HydroChloric acid. In the past this has done the trick and a dose every 3rd day brought it back to around 7.

Lo an behold an hour after putting in the 50ml of HCl as I usually do, all 25 of my goldfish that were in there went belly up. Panic sets in and I break out the testing rig. My pH went from 8,8 to 4,6 in an hours time. I cannot even start to understand what happened. All of the maths on the volume of the water and the pH tells me that it should have moved by maximum around -0,6 to 8,2.

Now I sit with a system that has no fish, probaply the low pH killed of the bacteria as well so I all in all I have a completely new reset system that I will have to recycle after the water has settled down.

Anyone care to gander at what happened here?

Oosie

Cobus wrote:

Thanks Oosie. I'm planning a trip to Fisheries Hartbeespoort this Sunday to get some Banded Tilapias for my boss so maybe I can then pass them by and get myself a kit.

Cobus,

How has your dealings with Hartbeespoort Fisheries been? I need to restock my tank after my pH disaster and I finally convinced the missus that fish is food and not only prettyness. :headbang:

I see on the internet that their prices are quite decent, wondering about survivability of their fingerlings though?

MartinC

Hey Oosie, sorry about your setback and hope you get back up and running soon.

If you figure out what happened let us know. It's always good to learn from these things.

Regards, Martin.

tojo

MartinC wrote:

I look forward to the pics Oosie.

You need to work out the fish weight versus grow bed size. Do a search on this forum for "stocking density" and you will see lots of discussion.

This is one of the comments I've seen:
"Fish should be stocked at 1 fish for every 9.5L to 10L. So you could put 100 fish in a 1000L tank as long as you have the grow beds to support the filtration. Another guideline ratio is to have 20kg of fish per 1000L. A third guideline ratio is to have 5kg of fish for every square meter of GB surface area. When starting a new system it is best to understock to keep the Ammonia under control. A new system cannot handle an Ammonia spike very well as the bacteria in the GB is not yet a mature system."

100 fish / 1000 liters of water is a severely overstocked system and this has been said many, many times throughout the forum. For me, even 50 fish in 1000L is overstocked if the system is new and even if the biofiltration is enough! It's asking for trouble and heartache imho. You could probably get away with 100fish in 1000L if they were guppies or mosquito fish

So Oosie, I think your 30 goldfish are enough for the system. Oher than that very pretty system and nice sketchup work!

Backyard Aquaponics A place to discuss aquaponics

Oosie's porch AP system

Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics