Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Come on Stu, the cold is a small price to pay for not being woken in the middle of the night because the person next door flushes his/her toilet, or passes wind.. I mean " how's the serenity"

H.

Bugger that... too bloody cold...

we lived next to a large family of Greeks in town, then moved to the hills, only to live next door to Rally car drivers- literally. When rally season is on, look out even though they are 200 metres away

Oh come on it can't be that bad, next you'll be telling us he keeps Trout..

I have had my system in since october last year.... I did lose my initial fish, but have had silver perch fingerlings in and growing well, since Late Jan early Feb, but my plants have never had great growth. I planted a few different veges in dirt next to the bed and the dirts have out grown my aqua bed by about 3 times.
So im trying to work out what im doing wrong.
My ammonia is consistently 5ppm and nitates at 15-30ppm my nitites is always 0. So im sure the plants are using some nitrates....
anyway my system is flood and syphon, but it does it quite regularly, i will time it but i estimate every 5 - 6 minutes.....
is that my issue? is it too fast for the plants?
My water temp is 15-16' now, but since the fingers were in it had been at 23-26. I am heating it to around 20 and will try to keep it there for winter.
Any tips or answers would be good.....

Yeah mate, I know what you mean

rhyskw... can you start a thread of your own... and describe your system... pics would help...

I'm concerned that you say your system was started in October last year... and that you run an Ammonia level of 5.... always...

I will get some pics and start a new thread..... I will also confirm my ammonia readings....

Okay, so the fish are doing really well. Feeding like crazy, despite the really cold weather / water.

The gravel beds appear to be plenty big enough to cope with the NH3 and NO2, but the current issue is that the nitrates are high. I think the growbed area is a bit small - I've stocked it with loads of plants but with a few large broccoli they're tending to shade things a bit too much and the growth isn't very strong.

I'm thinking that some NFT pipe strung up along the fence (north-facing) will do the trick. I have access to some free 75mm stormwater pipe but need to know if that is big enough? What's normal?

I'm thinking of using a second, low-power pump to trickle water down the stormwater pipe. Is that all I have to do? Does anyone have a link to a basic "how-to" guide for NFT?

Even in commercial aquaculture... nitrates < 400 are not considered a problem...

Okay, so I'm probably not in danger of killing the fish at the moment (closer to 100ppm). But I'd like to make better use of the nitrate if I can, and grow more stuff!

75 mm might be a bit small for NFT but it might be ok for growing some baby lettuce or something that you pull out before the roots get big enough to block things.

Alrighty, turns out the free 75mm pipe I was going to use isn't available any more.

So... 90mm? 100mm? What size pots? Ideally I'd like to grow strawberries, cherry tomatoes, and basil.

I'm planning to run it on a flood & drain scheme with a small pump - does that sound reasonable?

Sounds fair to me...
More grow area the better I think.

we have a couple of lengths of nft tube available if you would like Jimmy, cheap. pm me if you want , at least it is food grade UV stabilised material.