Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

The early days there wasn't a lot of good graphics around, but last 10 years or so there have been some great graphics and clipart collections available, I've been collecting it for over 20 years and paid big money for some collections.

I like to alter the original artwork and make a one off and that's where the problems start, and CorelDraw is the culprit, their conversion to EPS has bugs. It's only the detailed and complex graphics it happens, anything simple is OK.

I always come back from the plumbing supply shop without the PVC cement, or I think I have some at home, then find it's out of date and gone off.

Best of luck with that RFF, it should be OK.

I get wet nearly every time I feed the fish and don't get a real good look at them because I'm ducking the splashes, so I decided to mount the camera, throw in a bit feed and stand back.

They certainly flick a bit of water about and there's not too many days I don't get wet when I'm feeding them.

Here's an update from down in the fish tank.

I've had to back their feed off because of the cold weather crashing the bio-filter.

How cold has it been?

Sent from my SM-J700T using Tapatalk

Boss, it has warmed up bit this week, it has been down below zero overnight on the odd night or two in the past 2 weeks, but it's mainly been around 2C & 3C.

The temperatures below are from the past few weeks.


High & Low Weather Summary for the Past Weeks
Temperature Humidity Pressure
High 18 °C (4 Sep, 1:30 pm) 100% (26 Aug, 1:00 am) 1030 mbar (26 Aug, 1:00 am)
Low -2 °C (29 Aug, 4:00 am) 26% (30 Aug, 8:00 pm) 997 mbar (31 Aug, 11:30 am)
Average 9 °C 70% 1019 mbar
* Reported 21 Aug 1:00 pm — 5 Sep 1:30 pm, Melbourne. Weather by CustomWeather, © 2018

Now it's getting very dry up north all the cockatoos fly down into the Golf Course opposite to feed, I heard a flock of about 30-40 fly over the house squawking with these last few dropping off to check out my grow beds.

They know there's plenty of feed in the grow beds now so they'll be back, they can't get anything because of the bird netting but they still hang around.

They'd chew through the bird netting if they got the chance

hmm, that'd piss me right off, they can be very destructive that's for sure. I've seen the damage they do to pine trees/cones at the local golf course.

Its funny what you end up worrying about pest wise. Last season I had all my trees netted as what I thought were parakeets demolished the apricots over the back neighbors. I found out after getting my young nectarine tree cleaned out overnight and peaches over the next few weeks that it wasn't birds but rats! The bastards were coming from neighboring property and chewed through netting at the base of the trees to get to the fruit. I had 3 traps out and avoid poisons as we have a dog and free range chooks & don't want the risk of accidental poisonings from bait or dying rodents. Out of the whole season we managed to get maybe 1 1/2doz peaches. They were even gnawing out the centres of beetroots! We trapped probably about 6 rats over a few weeks. Hopefully with the house that I suspect they were coming from demolished and cleaned up we won't have any further issues, but I'll be leaving the traps set as a precaution!

It sounds like there are a few downsides to living in a tropical paradise. We've seen a surge in ticks up here in the mountains with this abundant rainfall. At least the Cocketoos aren't as creepy as rats, yeah that's probably not much consolation is it? Are Cockatoos native to Australia? Oh damn, I went and looked them up.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulphur-crested_cockatooIntelligent, hungry, loud and live to be 20 to 30 years old, bummer. Okay, between the damn snakes and the smartass birds I've decided not to move to Australia, lol! Now I don't even want to hear about the Roos.
I like the little added tidbit in this Wiki article: a person keeping guard for sudden police raids on illegal gambling gatherings is referred to as a cockatoo or cocky for short. See; humans are adaptable.
We may just survive the Cockapocalypse!

"We may just survive the Cockapocalypse!"
I like that one Boss, chuckle chuckle.
And all the other xyzapocalypses that come at us.
Graf, the rats sound bad and good riddance to where they are coming from. It's the fruit bats and the ringtail possums that wreak havoc here. I ended up getting rid of my plum and pear trees because the bats would clean them out in one night and then crap over everything with a nice purple dye. The possums have not only eaten the skins off my lemons but completely stripped all of the bark from my avocado tree. And don't get me started on the blasted corellas.
Hey Boss, if you get time, check up some you tube vids on Keas in New Zealand. They make our cockatoos seem quite meek in comparison LOL.

I've seen a documentary about Keas, wow yes, talk about an intelligent bird. I believe that documentary was comparing birds puzzle solving capabilities and they were ranking as some of the best with several levels of cumulative tests being solved for a scrap of food. I know a lot of humans that couldn't get past the "find a tool that'll work," phase of those tests, lol!

Yeah Boss Cockatoos are where the term comes from, one stays as a lookout while the others feed, and it squawks a warning when anybody or anything approaches and they all fly off.

This guy is a very smart bird

I love spring, everything starts growing pretty fast and it all looks lush & green.

I've got a few seeds germinating that will replace the lettuce in a few weeks time.

The cool overnight temperatures are still playing up with the bio filter, the ammonia was up and down from 0.25ppm to 0.50ppm, so I've had to cut back on feeding for a few days.

The fish were getting pretty hungry, I put my hand to get a water sample to test the ammonia and a Rainbow Trout hit my hand & the glass vial with an almighty whack that knocked my hand into the top of the fish tank.

It was a very hard hit, I don't know what damage it did to the fish, they bang into the tank quite a lot while they're feeding so I think it will be OK.

I put 3 x small Root Pouches full of Zeolite in the sump to help lower the ammonia, it was 0.50ppm at 5:00pm last night and had dropped back to 0.0ppm this morning so it's a great help.

One Root Pouch sits under the stand pipe from the GB, and the second one has the water from the T split in the pump running through it, and the other one sits under the spray bar, so there's quite a volume of water running through the Zeolite.

There's a few Goldfish in the sump to keep the system ticking over when I harvest the Trout, it's not the ideal spot for the Goldfish but I think the Trout would stress them out and eat their tails off if I put the in the fish tank.

Still having problems with the overnight temperatures killing off the bio filtration so I have increased the Zeolite by around 15L, and will add more in the coming days.

The ammonia fluctuates from 0.25ppm to 0.50ppm, today it's sitting in between the two.

I have 100L of C1 bio media and 48L of K1 in the MBBF, that'a a total of 148L of bio filtration plus 2 x 300L grow beds loaded with plants so there should be plenty of filtration when the weather warms up.

There are currently 40 x mature Rainbow Trout and 9 Goldfish in the system, I doing small water changes daily, feeding only every 2 - 3 days, and there is never a large load of fish solids in the RFF, and most of it is drawn out with the daily water change.

Once the overenight temperatures hit 15C on a regular basis I should be OK to increase the feeding rate and grow the fish out to a reasonable size.

Pretty impressive Joblow. I've had the same problem here re ammonia levels, and added to it by forgetting to turn off the top up hose. 12,500 litres later......damn! Quick trip to get some seawater and get salt levels back where they should be, plus bucketing out lots of excess water onto the veggie patch. All seems to have settled again now though and at least the trees across the back will be happy. Note to self: " Only top up in future with timer set"
BTW, loved watching your piranha, I mean trout feeding.