Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Had to go to the pet store today to buy litter for my cats, so I picked up 10 more comets. They're maybe 2" in size. Gave them a 1ppt sea-salt bath (without pet store water) for about 30 min, and then put the fish in the FT, and put the salted water in the sump since I needed a top-up anyways.

GB #2 is doing nicely.

I still need to make my hood and get new bulbs!

Already had a casualty today. One of the newbs got caught in the stand-pipe to the sump, and wasn't able to get out. Its backbone was broken in the 90 degree turn

New fish seem to be doing fine. Far better than the 2 deaths per day I had a while back.

I replaced my flouro's with new 5000K bulbs. They are definitely brighter than those that were replaced.

I also lowered the ballast closer to the GBs.

I definitely found that when using Floro lights over my indoor hydroponic plants, I needed to have the lights very close to the plants. As in so close that I needed to raise up the light in order to inspect, harvest or do anything with the plants and then move it back down to within a couple inches of the tubes touching the plants foliage.
I also had mylar camping emergency blankets hung around the system to help reflect light back into the plants and keep the light levels down for the rest of the room. Having the lights that close to the plants also helped keep things warm for the seedlings which is great during cooler weather but during hot summers here it means running more AC.

Yep, the reflector is on the list of things to do. I'm thinking that aluminum foil being 98% reflective is probably good enough for me at this point.

OK, I finally threw some strips of Al foil over the lamp ballast. Presto, cheap ~80% reflector hood.

Plant growth is going OK so far. No explosions, and I'm wondering if I need to increase my feed. I've not measured anything for a couple months, so I don't know what I am currently doing. I guess that would be a good first thing to do.

OK, starting next Tuesday, I'll track feed and results with DanDMan's charting program.

So I weighed my fish yesterday, and they're right at 8 oz. I'm starting a feeding schedule at 3% of body weight, which I'll probably update monthly.

I also took off the housing of my pump because the little slots were getting stopped up with gunk.

when I 1st read that, I thought you were a bit shitty with the fish (sots I was thinking of, not something else :fingerwag: )

*what would your mother say*

Another one of those language things. I have no idea why "sots" would be funny.

Were you from Tamo42 ????? Please supply google grid position.

Don't have google earth, but you can find me by:

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8& ... 80f34b17b4

Yes, what is so amusing about a traditional Korean cooking implement?

Funny, I've often seen "drunken sot" but never "sot" on its own. But why one would employ the redundancy of "a drunken habitual drunkard" confuses me. Speaking of which.......where is the bottle.....time to get confused!

Got me confused there Hydro.... and I haven't had a drop