Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Zucchinis doing great! Significantly better than to those planted in the dirt.

I have killed a lot of trout by putting in too much tap water.A couple died from the ammonia being too high so I drained a lot out and put the hose in and got distracted and came back to find the tank running over and that killed the rest.you can top up with tap water but don't over do it.Also your temperature may be a bit low for tilapia

Thx for sharing your experience Don.

I was pretty much sure it was the tap water but it seems I was overlooking another step on bringing in new fish that's not something the literature and the overall online info are stressing as a key precaution....

Well, last Friday I went out to grab some juveniles to add them into the system.
Couldn't find any reasonably sized tilapia (as I wanted bigger fish that would be more resistant) so I had to decide between black bass and pacu (Colossoma macropomum) as they were the ones I found in my area...
Made a call for the second option as the first was really pricey.

Got them home, 20 juveniles with varying size from 3 to 5 cm (~1 to 2 in).

Started by putting the bag on water surface, floating, so to bring the temperature to a balance.
After a couple of hours, went ahead and opened the bag using those clouth clips to hold the bag onto the fish tank and left the bag open for a while.

Fish were very happy up until the moment I have opened the bag but all of a sudden, they got pretty much idle and stopped swimming!

Yellow alert!!!

Something was not right here...
I had an insight (though it now seems to be something pretty obvious!) and thought with me:
a) It cannot be the temperature as two hours was more than enough to equalize it;
b) it cannot be the PH as I havent started mixing water yet;
c) it cannot be the ammonia as the fish were happy up until just now;
d) so, it can only be dissolved oxigen!!!!!!

Went ahead and thrown one of the water stones inside the bag!

Eureka!!!

Right after that, fish slowly started swimming again and shortly after were happy again!

Another lesson learned...

I don't know whether this was the root cause of my previous failures but it is certainly something I was not paying proper attention...

Well, hope this will alert other people going though the same sort of pitfalls!

Well, just complementing that I did the remaining steps of slowly add water into the fish bag for a few hours and them did the "launch" of the fish into the fish tank with no further issues... Fish were happy right from start!