Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Yep, as you say TCL... Linksys is the PC division of Cisco... who have been making routers for the mainframe and ISP market for donkeys years...

They should do the job OK... it's just frustrating that they build the Linksys models to a price market... when with a little extra cost they could build in the functionality and reliability that they do for the higher end of the market...

Yea. However I've been finding out that with some 3rd party firmware some of those "consumer" routers can be tricked into doing most of the higher end stuff if you are stilled enough in networking stuff to do it. They probably don't try to build/program such things into the consumer grade stuff since that would then mean the "consumer tech support" would have to know how to talk a consumer through how to deal with it after they mess things up.

Biggest drawback I understand with the consumer stuff is the fact that it tends to get warm and will cause it to tend to fail/drop signal after it gets a little older.

Anyway, things seem to be pretty good right now. If only underwater cameras were easier. I think I managed to fix the catfish cam but I have to wait for the silicone to cure again before I can put it back in.

Hey tcl, great read btw, cool to see it progress.

Question, how does the moringa tree work out? Have u guys started eating the leaves yet? I've been reading up a lot on moringa and they seem pretty cool.

As a side note I think uve convinced me to do at least mostly Catfish. If u have a hard time keeping tilapia alive in Florida, then Missouri would be a nightmare

Hey TCL, can you believe this thread has been viewed over 40,000 times! Someones Mr Popular..

This thread has been around a while so I expect it has been viewed a lot. Though I expect most people are only viewing the latest post not going through the whole thing.

As to the Moringa, it is very tedious to pick and eat the leaves since the leaves are so tiny but the stems are not very edible. I'm hoping the seed pods will be nice to eat though. I must admit that we haven't been making much use of the moringa, saddly the chickens and ducks don't seem much interested in eating it either.

Definitely tilapia require heating big time in most of the country and there are only a few places where you can grow them without any heating here in FL. In a raft system less heating is needed but still for home use, unless you have something against catfish, they seem to be a much better choice in my opinion. As far as I was concerned they tasted pretty much the same but the catfish grew bigger so you didn't need to clean as much fish for one meal.

I'm not growing bluegill too but they are still small.

To pick the moringa leaves you have to be a bit ruthless, get the stems between thumb and finger, squeeze and pull...in other words strip them.
The pods best eaten young, and are like asparagras.

Hey TCLynx,
nice videos.
I saw that your cats eats floating peletts.
Mine only eat at the tank bottom, do you teach them to eat at surface?

Whats your tankwater temperature, and how much do you feed?
Do you know how much they are, and how much there weight is?

Dom

My catfish have always been willing to come to the surface to eat.

This time of year my water temperatures fluctuate between about 80 F and 88 F aprox. In winter I've had water temperatures below freezing in a flood and drain system not in a greenhouse.

Right now I have 33 catfish in my big tank and they are anywhere from 2 lb up to about 8 lb but that is kinda a guess since I don't catch and weigh my catfish unless we are about to kill and eat them. Catfish are not good with extra handling and netting them to check their weight would result in lots of sick fish.

How much do I feed, I've never really gotten scientific enough to try to estimate the exact amount of feed. I dial up the feeder to feed as much as they will totally finish off in less than 15 minutes. This time of year I'm feeding 3 times a day but during the cooler part of the year I'll only feed once a day and if any feed is left over when I peek in the tank I will reduce the amount of feed.

For the bluegill I now also have in other tanks I'm still feeding higher protein feed and they are still preferring the ground up stuff that sinks as they are still kinda small for the larger floating pellets. I'm also feeding smaller amounts more often to the small fish.

By the way, I've Just gotten home from a gig away and all seems well. No dead fish and water tests all good.

Not much exciting to report on the big system. Been picking tomatoes as well as still picking cool weather plants that are still carrying on even into true summer here. Things seem to be going just fine so I guess I should just show some pictures.

And yes there is a banana in that bin again, I really need to move it before it gets too big.

Looking good Alyeece....

Looks great - of course !

Any significance to all the plastic lids in with your water chestnuts ?

Well the recycling doesn't like the lids and I hate to throw stuff in the trash.
Last summer I had a problem with the bins growing a brown string algae that was actually enough to cause daily pH swings (crazy in just three small bins for that big system) so I started experimenting with ways to block more of the light from the bins. One bin I just filled up more with gravel. The other bin I tried the drink caps and the third bin I tried other things that didn't work so well. The plastic caps don't stop all algae and I've got quite a bit of green string algae growing in there now but it doesn't seem to be messing with the pH the same way so seems successful to me. So tow of the bins now have drink caps and they are close enough to the recycling bin that they keep collecting more.