Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hiya Moneybox, nice build so far.
I didn’t know there was scoria here in the west! Well I haven’t seen any in the landscape supply places anyway.
You may want to do a quick vinegar check of the rock for piece of mind.
Any reason you’ve gone for the auto siphon opposed to a bell siphon or just a stand pipe? Are you planning to run the system 24/7?

I'll do the vinegar check.



Ok, done that. The rocks are good. I was confident anyway because many of these rocks will set-off the metal detector and that's a fair indication that they'll do the trick.

Scoria is in big patches around Cue. I guess it's the volcanic activity that brought about the quartz and hence the gold. Not that we have much gold anymore, it's been raided for the last 150 years so it's a bit thin on the earth but they did leave the scoria behind

Why did I go to this type of siphon? Well it was a simple case of that's all I had to build from. If I don't have it in the shed and I can't find it a CueBunno (our tip) then I simply can't get it without a big drive somewhere. I do like ebay but at the moment it's taking 10 days to get express post.

Do I intend to run it 24/7 ? I don't know enough about what I'm doing to make those little decisions. We go away for a month or two at a time and every time we come home to a dead vegi patch and overgrown natives and bougainvillea. I'm just doing my best to turn that around.

I have a 10,000 litre pond that I think will be my only tank. I'll have a float valve to maintain the water level. The submersible pump will draw water from the pump recess near the top of the pond so that it can never run the pond dry. That's an Orange SP100 drawing 180w and pumping about 200 L/minute. I think I'll have that on a timer to circulate the water through the bio-filter and aerate the water. I've purchased a little 40w submersible pond pump just to supply water to the growbed. That water tumbles back into the pond and will aerate the water to some extent as well and should run 24/7.

I won't have many fish because I want them to survive if everything goes wrong while I'm away. I'm not sure about the fish feeding because they don't take pellets. At present the only feed supply is fro the overhead insect zapper that's on a timer.

The insect zapper is turned off at the moment as well. I want to get them hungry enough to give the pellets a go. That's not the only reason. My 19 spangled perch have had some blotches on the sides that are similar to the 4 that died after the first couple of days. I've salted the water now and I'm pumping water through 100m of 19mm black poly pipe lying in the sun. I'm trying to warm the water up from the 14.5°C morning temperature. It comes out of the pipe at about 3°C warmer.

Last week I tried to catch the fish and put them into a hospital tank. All I did was successfully stress them out more so I just put them back in the tank (still only 3,500L) and added the salt to the whole tank. After I had them out they all went quiet. The whole 19 huddled under one small rock completely out of sight. They have hardly moved all week so I've not fed them, just did my best to treat the water with the bio-filter, lots of bubbles from the tumbling water and the added warm water. This morning at 6:30am I saw most of them swimming about but as soon as the water flow started they hid back under the rock.

Let's see what tomorrow brings

We've been busy. Our spangled perch have been very quiet. They huddle about in a school and spend most of the day in hiding with just the odd one taking a spin about the pond once in a while. They obviously haven't heard about social distancing



They only get active in the evening when the UV light is on and the moths start to land on the surface. To start with they would school together under the light and attack the moths but that's changed now. One or two fish tend to bully the rest out of the way at feed time. I guess that means they are starting to get hungry.

We only have the 19 fish and two yabbies so we took a few days out on the goldfields to try to get some more. It seems like the ones in the wild are quiet as well because nobody ventured into the trap. All we got was one more yabby but we found a few grams of gold while waiting for the fish so it wasn't really a waste of time.



It's time to head off for a while in search of gold so we've put some effort into setting up the pond to keep the fish alive until we return. The pond is under a deciduous tree similar to a Tipuana tipu but it gets big bunches of spherical fluffy flowers that fall along with the leaves leaving a heavy layer over everything underneath. I erected a 10m long truss from the shed to the house and put a 6m x 5m shade sail over the top.



It won't give the pond full protection but we hope to be home again before the flowers fall. We've been slowly filling the pond too. I've been filling the 1000L IBC with scheme water with a sprinkler and releasing it into the pond every couple of days. Another 1000L should do it for now.



I had to get in today to move the plants Mrs M had in the water. They were starting to drown. While I was there freezing my butt off I walked about the bottom with the submersible sump pump and picked up most of the leaves but I stirred a lot of sediment as well.

Anyhow the fish must be getting hungry. They still ignore the pellets and black worms but they actually swallowed a bit of mince and cooked rump steak tonight. It's the first time we've seen them take anything that wasn't struggling across the surface.

Hopefully they'll learn to eat something that we can put into a fish feeder

I had a battle buying expanded clay. The cost of the 50L bags was ok but they wanted twice as much in freight. I ended up getting a quote and paying MyDeal for five bags back in April. We waited around for weeks for delivery that never happened.

We left in May and while away I left the flood and drain running 24/7 on an empty growbed. The filter was set for 4h a day mainly to aerate the water. The fish won't touch bought food so the automatic fish feeder stayed in the shed.

We arrived back home in August to find the pond quite green with no fish to be seen. I found one fish under the shed door about 10m from the pond but we've since seen the rest of them looking bright and healthy.

Sandra stayed home and my brother brought her 5 x 50L bags of expanded clay from Bunnings in Busselton nearly 900km down the road. She went ahead and washed the clay and set up some plants.



The plants all looked really good for the first few weeks.



I went back prospecting and left her to it. When I came home at the end of September we looked for ways to clear the green water. The fish are obviously living off something but the light mounted under the bridge was not attracting any insects. There were none of the moths and other bugs that were feeding them before we left.

I was told that a few handfuls of Zeolite would soon clear up the water. Sandra had a 5kg bag of small gravel delivered. We hit the 10,000L pond with a couple of kilos and sat back to see the change. Perhaps the water did clear quite a bit but the biggest change was to the vegetables. Everything seems to have stopped growing and all the vibrant colour has gone. The tomatoes and lettuce have some leaves going brown, not good.

Great read Moneybox. I'm glad you are using spangled perch since they are tough as boot nails provided temperature stays above 14C. Below that they quickly sicken and die and none will survive at all below 12. I suspect the cool temps were responsible for your losses (plus stress from handling maybe). In warm years they can filter down the Murray-Darling into northern Victorian lakes, but within a year or two, a cold spell will bowl them all over. I'll be really interested to see how much bigger they grown in the tank compared with in the wild, hopefully they'll really thicken up.
I also would like to know how they get along with each other as they can be quite aggressive.
By memory, zeolite is an Aluminium Silicate and maybe the Al is poisoning your plants. You might need to do partial water replacements to dilute it down. (A dive bomber crashed into the bush a little north of us in WW2 and still no trees grow in the furrow where it crashed and burned).
Don't be too worried about the pond turning soupy green for a while. It will find a balance and then clear up on it's own within a few weeks.
Great choice of fish and please keep us updated on their progress.

I was using an old pool filter without the sand. I inserted a bundle of mosquito mesh and some fluffy bio-balls where the sand used to be. My main concern with this type of filter is that I had no way of knowing how badly it was blocking up with leaves and other matter.

We had an old plastic barrel that originally came from Midland Brick. Sandra used to use it to cart water before I met here more than 20 years ago. I decided to use it to make a radial flow filter. The one thing I really wanted was to have a visual indicator of when the filter needed cleaning.

I've done away with the old pool filter and put the fluffy bio-balls into the new filter above the mesh screen.











Hopefully the sediment level will show in the clear bottle making it easy to see when it's time to open the valve and drop it out

[youtube]https://youtu.be/Dn8OS_5vRXw[/youtube]

I'm having trouble getting my youtube video to load. I'll try again but I'll post the address here so hopefully you'll find it anyway.

https://youtu.be/Dn8OS_5vRXw

The video is working.
You said in the video,something you used to clean up the algae,what was it? I couldn't hear it properly.

I used Zeolite but never again. It worked, it killed the algae but all the plants in the grow bed came to a grinding halt. They are still alive but have not grown at all since the Zeolite and are looking sick.

The healthy looking green algae turned black and can be swept off with a broom but then it floats through the water as a black cloud. Today we pumped out about 6000-7000L leaving about 450mm of water in the bottom.

I want to get a look at the fish so I cleaned out the pump recess and put clear water in there. Then I built a fish ladder and ran the hose hoping to get them up into the clear water. It didn't work, they stayed hidden. Perhaps I've scared them too much by dragging the bottom with the submersible pump to collect al lot of the Zeolite and leaves.



I'll try again tomorrow, hopefully by then they've forgotten the way they were treated today. I've seen them jumping at least 500mm up the side of the pond when fresh water is running in from the IBC. They'll easily swim up my ladder when they are attracted to the fresh incoming water.

Algae are mini plants,so using something like that to kill it would also kill "normal" plants too.You should have asked on here first,if it was safe to use.
The best method to stop algae is to block the light going on the water & or use algae eating fish.

It's been a while since that vid,have the plants picked up yet?.

Have the plants picked up yet? I have no idea

We just refilled the pond and witnessed the fish taking a few pellets for the first time. I guess they are hungry since we killed everything with the Zeolite. Anyway we decided it was time to setup the automatic fish feeder with a weatherproof cover. They still don't rush in to take the feed but at least they'll have something to eat.



We left for Perth the next day and we've been gone two weeks and it might be a couple of more weeks until we make it home again. We changed the water and the water filter as well as adding the fish feeder so anything could have happened by now

Love the fish tank, you should get some rapid fish growth in those blistering Cue temperatures.

Hi everyone. a bloke sold me a bag of zeolite once and said it was far better than any other medium and showed me some photos of plants growing in it. I promised to give it a good try and let him know how I got on. Well nothing did any good in it. on reading the above comments it might explain why my whole system turned to crap. I have photos of my plants early on and they looked great but I have never been able to get them looking the same for years . The water from the pots that had the zeolite in them was running back into my fish tank so that may be what the problem is . Some times a major problem can be caused by some simple little thing that you don't even think about.

Well we're back home again and the pond is looking alive again. By that I mean that the green algae that died when we introduced the zeolite is back again. The pond is greener than ever but the fish are bright and healthy. The plants haven't recovered at all since the zeolite shock and they don't look like ever coming back.

While away I purchased a pond water test kit. I had to shoot off to Perth for a few days but Mrs M tested the Ph, Phospates, Nitrates and Ammonia.









I was still in Perth so I grabbed a couple bottles of PH Down.



I might have got more but there was no room left on the truck. I think I should make it into the city a little more often.



Anyhow we dosed the pond with the first half bottle and we'll see what tomorrow brings