Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Well sand is absolutely the way to go for small seeds at least. Three days or less till cute little sprouts come bursting forth.

On a less positive note. If anything should have captured screws it is the cover on your pump. Took the pump cover off today to inspect the impeller. As I was unscrewing the cover I thought "I wonder if these screws are captured or not?". 30 secs later my inquiring brain was turned off as I turned the cover upside down.

I now know that the screws are not captured at all. Three of the four screws ended up in the sump which was full of stirred up water. After pulling out another pump and a lot of stuffing around I finally found the screws and got the pump back together after removing the crap that was about the impeller.

Still trying to get the perch to take the 2mm pellet food that I got the other day. I've got them trained to come to a particular area of the tank when I feed them, which is surprising because that only took 3 or 4 feeds to do. They love the live foods I've been finding for them in particular ant larvae but they don't take the pellets. They are obviously hungry because they go after the crushed pellets but then spit them back out.

I'll keep trying but I'm running out of things to lift up and look underneath to get cweatures from.

Think you need to start breeding some maggots down the back of the yard, Stu !

Well I'm back again. I havn't lost interest in AP just been too busy to forum and have had long problems with my internet connection. Anyway I'm back in the big house twiddling my thumbs again (RCH not pentridge) so I thought I would give an update on my system.

The redfin did not do so well. I think I started with about a thousand but I just could not get them to take a pelleted food. As time went on I had progressively fewer but slightly larger fish. Anyway 8 weeks ago I added 180 trout and promptly found that I had more redfin survivors than I'd thought. The bigger trout pushed the redfin out of all the places to hide in the FT and made the poor little fellas swim around in the middle tank. Turned out I had about three dozen left where I thought it was only one or two.

Right now temps are really cold, <8 degrees, but self seeded mizuma, lettuce, pak choi and bok choi are coming up. Rhubarb is starting to take off and the poorly mistreated horse radish roots are sending up leaves in defiance of their treatment.

Lots of work to do planting out the beds for spring but while I'm in here I'll get to catch up on what everyone else has been doing.

Stu! Great (and unexpected) to see you back online so soon. Sorry to hear about RCH. Hope your boy's ok.

Hey Stuart, do you have any recent photos of your system?

Regards

Oh the mistakes that I've made...

Well this thread has been quiet for a while because I havn'et really done anything in my system for a while.

For ages I've been "just about" to start a commercial system so I've basically ignored it or just had it ticking over. With no signs of anything happening commercially in the short term I've decided to add to my backyard system.

Since it is essentially 6 years old I'm really battling against some of the mistakes I made 6 years ago but it works.

Current status is...



a mess.

Jobs in no particular order...

1. Move backup and primary air system into weather proof box (dead fridge) outside of greenhouse so they can stay cooler.

2. Install extra water storage to store water from the well (which dries up in Summer) and catch rain off the roof.

3. Install DWC bed (like I originally planned) in the center.

4. Install Fingerling tank and associated filtration so I can have a second lot of fish coming on.

Perfect advise as always - just what I needed at my stage of building various projects
Do you recommend putting air pump into an esky like storage container? I'd like to do the same for the Community Garden Build but in a limited space

DWC - If I did this at School system, would you recommend this vs pipe expansion and the tradeoff of more fish filtration GBs?

Fingerling tank - sumps are good for this?

I think perfect is over stating things a bit (like a lot) but thank you


Keeping them in the GH is not a good idea because of the heat but you have to allow air in so the pump can pump it out. I'll be cutting a hole in the fridge and covering it in mesh and/or louvers. I wouldn't want to do that to an esky but I've got several dead fridges from when I was contemplating using them as tanks or GBs. Getting one from the tip or hard rubbish shouldn't be too hard.



By pipe expansion do you mean NFT? In my GBs I've got about 24kL of gravel but because they are deep I don't have much growing area. The plan was always to make up the extra growing area by having a center DWC tank but life happened and I never got round to it.


I think it would be better to say sumps can be used for this but I definitely wouldn't say good. Certainly my sump wouldn't be because catching them all when the time came would be a major pain in the neck.

I think you will find air pumps generate there own heat I recon in an esky or fridge would give you no benefit except it will be a bit quieter
Just my thoughts

yeah good point.. maybe near the cooler ground would be better???

My thinking on the fridge is that it is a weather proof box. As FnF said they generate their own heat. A poorly ventilated and insulated container is probably a really bad idea.

Being 8 + years into aquaponicss I have tried most things but if somebody comes up with a better idea I am willing to learn

I'll be cutting several holes in the shell and I have and number of sheet metal louver panels that will keep rain out but allow air flow.