Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hay there, I'm up now.
We used some cable and strapping to secure the panels in a cylinder. I think heavy duty steel banding would work but may eventually rust. If I had the stuff to use steel banding to have made My tank, I probably would have used it.

We used two panels because I wanted a 6 ft diameter tank and it takes slightly more than 16 feet to make the circumference of a circle that will have that diameter so we offset them and strapped them together. Most of the tank has the double fence panel for a small bit is only one layer. A slightly smaller tank would be fine with one panel I think.

Love the big system, even when limping along for whatever reason (like an old lumber/liner bed still leaking) it seems to just continue along working anyway.

Still working on getting a fish cam set up in it. I have an underwater camera, Now I just need to figure out how to share it on the internet. Hopefully I'll be able to make some progress on that next week.

oooo, this fishcam is eagerly awaited I tell you, it'll be like the Truman show, except with fish, which get eaten at the end

heck, we have the duck cam going already at least.
http://www.aquaponiclynx.com/aquaponic-lynx-live-garden-cameras/duck-tv

and more to come soon I hope. Just gotta pray that my computer skills and old computer can handle serving it all up.
http://www.aquaponiclynx.com/aquaponic-lynx-live-garden-cameras

Yea I already made my my there using your signature The ducks have the chickens on guest stars just about now. Why does it go by slowly and jerkily though, is that just my internet?

could be my internet at the house too. It is cable internet so if lots of people along the pipe are using it heavily at the moment, then everyone gets slowed down.

I'm not at home at the moment so I figured it was the internet where I am at right now, keeps re-connecting and stuff but if it is all jerky to you too then it might be at home.

It is not uncommon for us to need to re-boot the cable modem regularly too.

I'll try again later

ARGH
The disease problem I was having in my 300 gallon system seems to have gotten back to the big system. Obviously the disease (whatever it is) came from the main system or is simply everywhere and was hitting the fish that I stressed out by moving them but some where along the line I stressed the fish in the big system out enough that we have lost 5 over the past week.

Plan now I guess is to start harvesting heavily. Clear the 300 gallon system ASAP so we can get new stock, smaller fingerlings which will hopefully handle the move better and I can only pray that they survive. Water quality in both systems says it's good and I did get readings when I dosed the system so it isn't that the kit is faulty.

Sigh.

Now something I have noticed which is interesting. I think water cress is a huge nutrient sink. Last spring I had a rather low number of fish in the big system and I wasn't feeding heavily and my nutrient levels were still up in the orange range. This spring, I've got twice as many fish in the big system and I'd been feeding well but my Nitrate reading is now like a trace perhaps 3 ppm. In my high pH system I've almost never experienced Nitrates much below 20 ppm even when feeding was minimal. Well Now I'm way low on the nitrates and the water cress is taking over the world. I'm lucky the ducks and chickens eat it since we only eat a little.

So those of you who have a high pH system and struggle to keep the Nitrates down and battle the iron lock out. Watercress is a great nutrient sink and will even grow in some of the shadier locations and is happy in a bed low on gravel as it will grow right in the water.

I think maybe I've discovered why/how the Growing Power systems work at all, the watercress being a water plant may also be using up ammonia before it even gets converted. This might also be why some of the people trying to set up Growing Power sort of systems have failed, most of them are not doing it exactly like Growing Power and don't have a huge amount of watercress planted.

Anyway, who wants to come over for a big catfish fry? I think we will be cooking catfish a lot for the next month or so.

Bummer. I assume the fish are still eating well and seem fine, other than the little issue with dying? I've found that both ich and salt above 3ppt tend to really cut catfish feeding rates.

Hmmm....let's check my schedule and see if can make it out there.....dang, I guess not.

Good luck.

I'd love to TCL but I will have to wait until August as this is when we have a planned visit (well NY and LA for some concrete expos)
If you are up for a visit I love to drop in

Hey C1

if your driving from NY to FL (long trip) im on the way....

have a guest room for a rest stop

jT

Hay C1
Well I'm not really near NY or LA but if you get close enough for a visit (or if there is ever a concrete expo here in Orlando again) I'd love to have you visit!!!!

Actually, I'm thinking I would love to learn more about concrete and using it to make some really ornamental aquaponics systems. One thing at a time though.

Had a look in the systems today. The fish in the big system as far as I can tell (it is deep water so hard to get a really close look at the fish) look fine So hopefully the little dose of salt 0.9 ppt and leave them alone and perhaps they will be fine.

300 gallon system, that was dosed to like 1.5 ppt of salt. The 6 fish left in there mostly seem to have a slight bubbly appearance on their skin. This doesn't really look like the columnaris disease I've encountered before with the catfish. (which usually looks like their mouth or gills rotting away with white/off white discoloration or more commonly the skin on their back/sides turns white then it's like patches of their skin is gone and you see the meat under and they die.) With the columnaris it usually only happens when the fish get stressed or scraped during handling or when they are in an overly stressful situation (too small a tank) or if the water quality is poor. Most of the time if I leave the fish alone and keep the water quality high, they have recovered with only a rare random death from it here or there after way too much handling or a bad water quality spike from say overfeeding while I was away.

Anyway, hopefully JD will have some ideas for me or perhaps at least help me identify the disease. I'm not sure I can transport the live but sick fish to a lab without them dieing before they get there. Apparently the lab has much trouble isolating the disease if the fish is dead before being sent to them as lost of other bacteria go crazy and mess with the results after death. I don't know if Florida has any labs that deal with catfish diseases and shipping fish off to Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama or Arkansas where most catfish farming is done seems a bit far.

So salt baths aren't helping? Must be a tough disease... Is there anything else you could try? I seem to recall a copper treatment that most APers were against using but if your fish are going to die anyway maybe try it in an isolated tank?

The real problem will probably be once it is in your system there will be no way to eliminate it (unless you somehow could sterilize the whole system).

Regarding the water cress as a nutrient sink, I noticed that many pond plants behave the same way. Parrot feather will grow like a weed in my system, sucking up many of the nutes I want to go to the GBs. Of course you can't eat it so watercress sounds like a great addition to my GBs!

I haven't been doing salt baths. Catfish are not good with extra handling and I expect it is the handling that tends to trigger disease episodes in the first place. The extra stress involved in moving a large catfish to a salt bath and then back again would probably do them in more than it will help them.

I have salted both systems just slightly. I will up the salt level some to see what happens but channel catfish don't do well with very much salt since they are very fresh water. I did once take channel catfish over 6 ppt but that was only short term (less than an hour) and they didn't like it. 3 ppt is as high as I ever want to take a system with channel cats again and the literature says they are only good to 5 ppt of salt.

Biggest problem with treating fish in an isolation tank is you still need some sort of filtration and if that isn't already cycled up before treatment the water changes and water quality issues are probably going to be just as bad on the fish so it will be hard to tell how well the treatment is working. Also, big channel catfish don't take kindly to being placed in a 100 gallon tank and that is likely to stress them out just as much as everything else. Not easy to treat large fish and I'm not willing to go the antibiotic medicated fee rout either. So they will either get better with the salt or they won't.

Could you remove most of the water from the system, salt the remaining water to 5 ppt, then put the water back after several hours? Very little fish stress, keep water cycling for O2 & NH3....

Argh! the internet is out and I'm writing this on my smartphone. tapping out letters and dealing with auto corrects try to fix my writing. and it has no idea where to put capitals. Still, better than nothing.