Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Every thing removed is saleable.

I suppose you could vermicompost the sludge, and sell the worm casings.

Or find a way to turn sludge into fish food or plant food and incorporate that into the system design. If that was easy it would be done all ready, but I can dream can't I? A system were all the fish feed is converted into humman food, a closed system is what I am after, less maintainace means less labour, I will still have to run a seive or drum filter or something, but I hope this reduces the need for such a device.


The total volume of the system I am looking at is 17000L don't know how I would go about sizing the sub system to handle such a system. I may need some more numbers, after I look through the PDF mention above I will have a better idea.

I know a 1/2 inch pipe can carry Max about 1800Lph so if the swirl filter SLO is 1/2in it would take 10 of them to filter the water. This is a wild guess, as you come to realise I often throw these ideas out so see if there is any traction to them.

Edit* surface area of water in drum = .180m2 * 200lpm(Max load rate) = 36lpm

45L in the drum with 36lpm passing through means a retention time of 1.25 min. Witch should work for some cans but not the ones earlier in the chain. Well at least according to the unverifide nembers I just pulled from some random web page.

Look how they deal with sludge in this DIY home swuage system. Not saying I can do this just saying its a good idea.

http://m.wikihow.com/Construct-a-Small-Septic-System

It has and is... already being done...

Good find on that PDF interesting read.

Rupert

Don't know what I would do without you all this info you have in your head. Can you send me some links.
Or are you speaking about a system with a media bed.

No... not usually with media beds... but...

Look at Savidov's work at Alberta.... with media beds...

UVI... with rafts....

BYAP "commercial" system...

Taylor Made & UES, Australia.... NFT...

My old hybrid "mega system"...


And many others...

I'm sure Ryan could name quite a few... but he may not...

Watch forthcoming developments in the UAE... and Middle East...

Hey do you know what the isrealies are using liquid oxygen in there acauculture systems for?


I was thinking to kill the fish, but then wondered if the extra oxygen can burn out the fish waste in some kind of chemical reaction.

Nope LOX is used in RAS to achieve higher stocking densities...

But yes... oxygen/aeraation is required for aerobic digestion of fish wastes..

I read through the pdf that Damian posted the link for,very interesting read. I went straight out opened the lid and watched the action of my swirl filter,true enough as in the pdf a light coloured poo came from the outlet but instead of disappearing into the depths did the u turn and disappeared down the outlet.
So i changed the filter over to radial by using a pail over the inlet and directing the flow downwards,the pdf results showed that this was the better layout,resulting in near 80% removal of TSS.
For me,with the radial configuration there was a visible increase of visible bits in the water going to the outlet,converting back to swirl but with the elbows angled down more seemed to have a cleaner water between the inlet and outlet,the true test is what is in the bottom of the filters,but in my layout swirl APPEARS to be better than radial.There are so many variations of layout within inlet and outlet design position and shape its difficult to know where the ultimate layout is.On my system the two elbows angled down at roughly 30 degrees seems to work but I’m open for improvements.

So they ahchive higher stocking densities how exactly? What does the Lox do? Provide a DO level that's unobtable by conventional airation methods?

So you took out the filter cloth and used just a buket? I don't really understand what you did can you explain more?

I ent finished reading the PDF yet so far so good though.


What do you think of putting in cilinders of fine wire mesh each 2in diameter bigger than the last.my thinking is it will help slow down the water concideribly and make it easy for the solids to settle.

All the lox stuff is explained in the yellow book of Recirculating Aquaculture. If you are serious about going commercial, you should have already read it.

Now that I have lox, I need a bagel, some cream cheese, I can use nasturtium seeds for capers...