Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

@ Levi: Thanks! I am pretty paranoid as I don't have a really kind landlord nor do I have very social neighbors, but I do think the plastic hamster 'bucket' will act the same as a tarp would do. So for now I'll just have to ease up on the paranoia . But seriously though, I have had it running for a couple of days now and the first few days I left home I did kinda worry about the state I would be in when I got home. But after seeing it perform without any major hiccups I'm feeling more and more confident.

Ok, now for the other part of this post. I'm sorry I lied haha, I did not post any pictures of the AP in the hours after my previous post. This is because a few things went south after I though I had finished the build. First off the drainage was way to slow and the FT was getting drained almost to the point the pump would not be submerged anymore. So I had to play around with the drainage pipes and ended up drilling a few extra small holes in them. Now the pump settings and the drainage from the MB's are more balanced. Also I know it does not have to drain really fast, especially because I plan on making the system eb and flow using a timer. Slow draining is kinda useful in that setup, right? Also, something I can't really explain went wrong. After tinkering with the pipe settings and such, I plugged the pump back in and it made weird sounds. So in fear of ruining my new pump I pulled it out and examined it in the washtub. Looked like I unscrewed something on the inside when adjusting the output (the pump has an 'volume knob' on the front), so I opened it up and made sure everything was fastened and I placed the pump back into the system. No noise, great, or so I thought. No water came out the pipe at the top MB where the pump is directly hooked up to. So I thought, what the f? Where is the pump pumping the water to then?! Well, through process of elimination I found out that the 'tap' (the pvc part where the pumped up water comes out and enters the MB) sucked in a decent amount of hydroton pellets... It was totally clogged with pellets, so much so that the water couldn't get pumped up. Had to take that pipe out of the system and carefully drill the pellets loose. That worked, and now I have attached some PVC mesh to the 'tap' so it can't suck things in anymore. All tough I will have to keep an eye on that mesh if it doesn't clog up with miscellaneous sludge that will eventually come up from the FT.

I also discovered pretty quickly that I didn't have enough hydroton pellets to completely fill both MB's to the point I wanted, so I had to buy another bag. It now has about 60 liters of hydroton per MB. The total water volume of the entire system is about 80 liters, of which 40 liters resides in the MB's when the pump is running. So if I am correct, the number of fish I can have in here is based on the lowest amount of water that is ever in the FT, right? That is about 40 liters, so I could eventually have 8 (5cm) fish in there, correct?


So to sum up, a few newby questions here awaiting your godly AP-knowledge:

- Does cycling the system have to take 2 months, even when the size of this system is relatively small?

- Is the number of fish you can have based on the lowest amount of water in the FT, or can you base it on the average amount if you have sturdy fish? (I.E: 80 liters is full, 40 liters is when pump is on, can I base the amount of fish on 60 liters then?)

- Is it really that bad for a pump to be hooked up to a timer? I mean I don't want to buy a new pump every year or so..

- And does anyone have decent tips on how to get my MB containers to stay 'straight'? They widen out with all the pellets and water in them, I would rather have it not widen because it then takes up more pellets to fill it to the top.

- Also, compared to the top level of the media, how much deeper does the drainage pipe have to be in a small system such as mine?

I know some of these questions are somewhat answered on the IBCofAP site and on this forum, but I am asking them because my system is relatively a lot smaller than most setups.

So without further ado, here are some pictures. Bear in mind that I've added more hydroton pellets and did some tweaks here and there.

sorry slipped on the keyboard.

Looks neat Cheese,

1. some systems cycle faster than others.
2. No of fish is based on wet volume of media, 25L media per fish so 2 or 3 fish for 60L of media (big ones)
Gold fish who knows maybe 4 or 6? just make sure you feed them the AP floating pellets. maybe 5 or 6 gm per day max?
3. Pumps won't get harmed running on a timer.
4. Hmm that's why we use strong GB's
5. Water should be 25 to 50mm below top of media.

Well for those still following this project, it's still on!

No leaks or clogs so far and I've reduced some of the noise the draining makes by placing caps on the PVC media guards. Also the water has completely cleared up. On a side note I think there is a little efflorescence going on in my system, as a couple of hydroton pellets have a salt-like residue on it. Only at top level though.

I planned to do a fish-less cycle for about 8 weeks. Its now almost 5 weeks later and I kinda got a little anxious and me and my GF had a day off so we went to the local aquarium-store.

A few weeks back we planned to eventually get goldfish, starting with one and adding a few more later. But after careful consideration we decided to make the fishtank a bit more interesting (as it the whole AP setup is pretty prominent in our living room) so it has become a simplistic sub-tropic aquarium.

So a couple of days back we got 5 Harlequin Rasbora's to start out with. The FT is fitted with a small heater which brings up the temp to about 25 degrees Celsius. We're not planning on breeding fish in this setup so thats no worry. Today I got another 5 as the little fishies seem to thrive in the FT, plus they like being in a school. In the future we're looking to add one couple of fish to fill in the top layer of activity, as the Rasbora's tend to stay in the center. For the bottom liveliness we'll probably add one or two algae-eaters.

Speaking about food, @Slowboat, I have read something about AP floating pellets before but I'm not sure what that's supposed to be called in Dutch. I understand the fact that the fish-food is an important part of AP as it basically turns into the nutrients that the plants need, by becoming poop. At the same time I had to buy something to feed our fish. The guy at the store recommended 'Sera complete flakes', because pretty much every subtropic fish will eat that. (It contains fishflour, wheatflour, brewers yeast, Ca-caseïnaat, gammarus, volei powder, cod-liver oil, mannan-oligosachariden [MOS 0,4%], Spirullina algae, assorted spices, snail clover, nettle, flour of greenlipmussel, sea-algae, parsley, spinach, garlic, carrots.) So ehm, will this be sufficient? Is the need for pellets purely because they are less messy? Aka will flakes be okay as long as I have a 'cleaning crew' sifting through the bottom of my FT?

Before adding more fish, we're going to add some plants and seeds in the MB's and wait out how that will go. Will update with pictures if that goes successful.

Cheers!

To keep the GBs from expanding out, you could build a wooden frame to keep the sides where they need to be.

I personally would still be concerned about light. Since your media doesn't go all the way up to the rim, any plants that are close to the edge will get almost no light. You said the levels weren't where you wanted them, so if you get the media up higher, that probably won't be a major problem. Though when the plants start growing, you might run into a problem of plants at the front blocking light to plants in the back.
Does the top GB get enough light? That must be a really tall window for it to be getting a lot of light.