Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Oh shit. So they had the little red bits as well?

we've all been there and done some variation of that theme.

moral is DON't leave the AP system while filling / emptying. you WILL get side tracked!

You know what i love? How when you remember that you were fillng the aquarium with the hose 30 minutes ago and that you should have checked on it 20mins ago..................the mad break neck dash for the lounge room...............like 10 seconds of calm walking is gonna make a diff at that stage of the game! rofl.

Yes i think so how did the water from the green house get in the sump

LOL yeh. The "Oh shit" sprint. I been doing plenty o' that with all my emptying and refilling!

Best illustrated with a picture:



So the water runs down the outside of the GH, and then runs down the two pipes going into the sump. It feels like it would be a very small amount though.

ok, so its only from the oustdside of the green house, not like it could have picked up any chems you used inside.................hang on, thats an AP greenhouse anyway, isnt it?

Yup, the very same green house that my ever decreasing population of Koi live in.

I'll sort it out by putting a tarp under the green house wall and over the sump. No water gettin' in then.

i cant see it being the GH then, unless the neigbours have sprayed..............

F&F's green house was a dirt style and he had used tommy dust a year or two prior..................

Ah. Well it's probably not that then. I'll fix it up anyway though.

I am going over there after work tonight, so I'll give another update then.

Back to the question about salt: does salinity reduce naturally or does it only happen on water changes?

If it reduces naturally, it is very very slowly. Salt does not evaporate, so the only way it reduces is if the plants take it up. I re-checked my salt level, and it is still at 0.4ppt. This from using salt when I got a stressed-out bag of fish at end of January. I dosed to about 2ppt, and did some water changes afterwards, but I still run a touch of salt apparently.

What do you use to measure it? One of those optical salt meter things that I've seen elsewhere on here? (Off ebay I think it was).

posted in wrong thread please ignore,

Yeh, I've thought that, my test kit only goes to 7.6! So it's pretty useless for high pHs. I squeezed a lemon into the sump one night to bring it down but then the next morning there were 4 dead! So I don't know what to do, nobody can tell me a way to reduce the pH! Also my ammonia readings look like they zero or very close to zero.

I found another one dead caught up in the netting around my intake for the hoses this arvo. I don't know how long it had been there, maybe a couple of days. It's the setup pictured below (old photo):



So I changed my system so that my intake pipes now suck water in from a 90mm PVC pipe with holes drilled in it and end caps, so there is no way my fish can get sucked up or entangled in it (no photos sorry). I was thinking that maybe if a fish had died and remained stuck there for a while the water quality would suffer quite a bit. Could well have happened.

I also made sure no water from the greenhouse was getting in the sump, so we can rule that one out too.

Oh and I think I may have found another potential source of contamination:
I've been using pine dowel in the system to hold up my return hose, some water was running over it and dripping into the tank.... I was pretty sure they were untreated, but maybe that's a potential cause? I have since removed them from the system also.

I am slowly removing the potential causes, but I'm killing fish faster than I'm removing possibilities.

My salt test is a test-tub-n-drops deal.

Reducing pH naturally will take time. You can also try adding clean driftwood or filtering through peat moss.

There are high-range pH test kits; you might consider trying one. Fish do have a preferred pH range, and if you are outside that range, the fish will be stressed. The thing that will stress them even more is to bounce the pH all around by trying to change it too fast, or if the water has too much buffering.

Coco-coir generally has a pH in the range 5.5 - 6.5..... so you could put some in a pot under the return line or even in the sump or fish tank itself....

Remove periodically and test... if necessary put it back... etc...

Some coirs are also soaked in brine, as such they have a salt content....



Heed Janet's above warning... although with your mortality rates, what have you got to lose anyway...

Of course the other way to change the pH is to do a 100% water change over a day or two.... from a source with a better pH obviously....

This would also remove any free floating pathogens from the tank, but not necessarily from within the sump/growbeds etc.....

Bit drastic, but ultimately might need to be done to "sterilise" the system anyway...... F&F basically had to do so and start again.....