Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I finally got my third sump tank installed, and finished grow bed #3!



This one is clay media over a layer of scoria. I decided to quit being cheap. Well, okay *as* cheap. MrBill was right, scoria is too hard on my hands! I moved the onions and carrots into it, since I didn't see how they could grow right in the heavy gravel. It's also temporarily hosting some lavender plants that are going into my yard as soon as I decide where I want them, and some basil cuttings I'm rooting for my daughter's chef boyfriend. (Speaking of which, I think I am going to make a rule that any guy she dates has to be able to cook. We've been eating very well since he came along!)

Strawberries and tomatoes are going crazy; I'm definitely going to have to learn to can preserves, because I never met a tomato plant I didn't like, and a couple that I bought had several suckers apiece, and I can't bear to throw away a perfectly good potential tomato plant, so naturally when I pulled them off, I stuck them in the media. And just as naturally, they are all rooting and growing happily.

I also moved ten of the tilapia into the greenhouse, and they're stuffed like little pigs every time I see them, from chowing down on the plentiful algae in the tank. I really meant to move all 30 of them, but the only net I have was purchased with my giant aquarium in mind, and is too long to maneuver in the pleco tank, wi the grow beds above it. It's a wonder I even managed to catch ten of them. As soon as I remember to get another net, I'll move the rest of them.

Today I cleaned my giant aquarium, and siphoned the water I drained from it into the greenhouse system, so my plants should be enjoying a nice bump in the nitrate levels. I'm sure they're going to be happier with fish in the system!


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Fish traps have been made since ...well a long time ago.

Very simple to make and very easy on your fish.

Picture a 2L coke bottle with the top 1/4 cut of and inverted.

They find it easy to swim in through the funnel, but tend to roam the walls when trying to find a way out. The result is they never investigate the small opening in the centre of their trap.

It's not as if fish are stupid, but the traps work. I guess if I was locked in an invisible room, I too might not investigate the centre for an exit.

I'd like to think I would, but who knows.

My other thoughts on gently trapping fish is to build a 2ft long mesh trench, sitting so the top of the trench is at surface level where you feed them. leave it in place all the time, so they get used to it being there. In order to get first pick at the feed, fish will have to get right up inside the trench. Then all you have to do is shut the gate behind them and you have gently trapped your fish in order to grade them, cure them, eat them, move them to a different tank, or simply show them to interested kids.

That trench thing isn't tested or anything, but it would work.

The traps on the other hand, have been tested for centuries, but make sure you build a door so you can get them out gently as well.

Fish trap images - https://www.google.com.au/search?q=fish ... 84&bih=678

More random thoughts...

It would be easy to grade out bigger fish with a trap as well. So you could perhaps keep buying batches of fingerings for your aquarium, and trap only the big ones by leaving a trap in all the time with holes big enough for the small ones to escape. Set your escape hole size to whatever means you don't have too much fishload in your aquarium.

Just a thought.

I wonder what the fish breeding people do. Their fish always seem to be the same size.

You read my mind, BW. I was thinking up trap designs in my head last night, and planning to do some Googling today. The soft drink bottle one might work, and I already have one I was using as a yellow jacket trap last year when they kept invading my closet in droves. All I have to do is rinse out the dried sugar water residue; maybe I'll give that a go!

I thought of something similar to your trough idea too, but Henry the 16" pleco would probably end up in it, and I don't think the result would be pretty. :-/


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I tried the trap today. It's a 2L Coke bottle with the top cut off and stuck back on inverted. It stays in place simply by friction, so it's easy to get the fish out. I added some pea gravel for weight, and a couple of algae pellets, and in no time had caught nine more of the tilapia fingerlings out of the pleco tank. 'Way easier than chasing them around with a net!


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OK engineery type people.

Conservation of energies etc...

If you have a heat source. Say, a rocket heater in a grow house, it dumps a certain amount of heat into the world.

If you harness some of that energy to run something like a Stiling engine to pump some water, it presumably converts heat into motion.

But them what? Where is that energy now?

Does the heat just bleed out of the Stirling engine?

Does that mean you can tap into the heat source without losing any heat overall?

Where does superman get changed now that everyone has a phone in their pocket, and there are no phone booths?

What kind of a place was a phone booth for nudity concealment in the first place?

Is sleep important?

It's in whatever's been set into motion. I think. I'm really a lot better with neurotransmitters, these days.

Superman now has clothing that makes use of advanced color-changing technology and is imbedded with a network of fine microfibers and circuitry that respond to an app on his iPhone and reconfigure themselves according to which costume he chooses. Or, if he selects "motion activation" in the configuration menu, he can simply hold his iPhone in his extended fist as he jumps into the sky, and the internal gyroscope senses his motion, direction, and speed, from which the iPhone calculates his most probable current activity, and automatically reconfigures his costume to match.

Dr. Who conceals all sorts of stuff in his phone booth, including, presumably, occasional nudity.

And yes. Very important. Without sleep, we would all be manic, psychotic, or typing witty forum messages which will undoubtedly sound really, really stupid in the morning.

(EDIT: And contain multiple spelling errors requiring repeated editing.)

BW<

If you harness some of that energy to run something like a Stirling engine to pump some water, it presumably converts heat into motion. YesBut them what? Where is that energy now? You convert the heat energy into expanding a gas which normally is used to create movement of the piston, which in turn pumps water?

Does the heat just bleed out of the Stirling engine?Heat will be transfered through the body of the engine. You may use cool ambient air to cool it down or another gas.
Does that mean you can tap into the heat source without losing any heat overall? No, You will lose some of the heat energy through the work you have done. Also, Some how you need to get the piston to return back to its original location to pump again

Where does superman get changed now that everyone has a phone in their pocket, and there are no phone booths? Maybe he does a Mr Bean???
What kind of a place was a phone booth for nudity concealment in the first place?

Is sleep important? I think it is, or maybe you have had too much coffee.

I guess the friction in the engine, and the sounds it makes all waste the energy back to heat in the end.

It's an interesting conundrum there bullwinkle.

Entropy always wins, so eventually your energy will end up as heat I guess... If you manage to do something useful with it along the way then that's a bonus :-)

I don't think there's a lot of useful work that can be done with a backyard Stirling engine, so even if you do manage to break the laws of thermodynamics I'm sure that the relevant deities would be happy to turn a blind eye :-)

Yeah, I don't think so either.

I just don't like it when I think I understand something, then it turns out I don't.

Actually I love it, but you know what I mean

Any updates with your system?

Plugging along! Gbaby eats all the strawberries, and doesn't see any reason she should leave any for anyone else. I'll have to plant more next time. The tomatoes are leggy; I think I put up the shade cloth too soon, but I was worried about it getting too hot because I don't have a ventilation system yet. I just ate my first ripe tomato, though, and it was delicious! The cucumber plant from Mrs. Tangent has tiny cakes all over it, and the zucchini is getting off to a late start...after I transplanted it in, the roots rotted off, but it managed to hang on and grow new ones. I guess direct sow might be better next time.

The tilapia seem happy and fat, when I manage to get a glimpse of them. Bladder snails got started in the fish tank and went wild. The sides are *covered*. If I could find a commercial use for them and duckweed, I could make it a profitable venture!


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Do fish eat the snails?

The tilapia don't seem to. Clown loaches would, but then they'd grow into giant clown loaches, and I'm not sure what I'd do with them once they'd run out of snails. Unless maybe the snail population could keep up. I keep almost buying a couple every time I go to the fish store. (I like clown loaches, so it feels like a pretty good excuse to get some, except it's probably not.)

Just realized it's been a while since I've been on the board! I haven't done much in the greenhouse because back in June I caught the mild upper respiratory virus that everyone else got over in two days, and for me it's turned into an ongoing ordeal of fatigue, shortness of breath, and heart arrhythmias. Argh. So I've been pretty much tottering around clutching my shiny new inhalers and dragging myself to work and neglecting everything at home, which is a bummer.

My doc thinks maybe I've developed asthma, but she also found a heart murmur, which got me sent to a cardiologist, who thinks it's probably nothing terrible but is checking it out anyway. Meanwhile, I've finally started feeling somewhat better. At least enough to totter out to the greenhouse once a day or so to feed the fish and check on things. Dang, I hate it when things try to destroy my delusions of youthfulness!

Some of the tilapia are up to around 4 inches long now. Some are still only around an inch. Two are still in the house, because they refuse to be caught and are too smart to get caught in my traps.

The veggies aren't as prolific as I'd like...I've had one cucumber, and am eyeing another that's about ready to pick. There are lots of small ones, so maybe there's hope. No zucchini yet, and my pepper plants don't seem to want to grow past the 4-inch stage they've been at for 2 months now. The carrots are coming along, though.

I think I mentioned the tomatoes are really leggy. They also are producing really sparsely. I was comparing notes with my psychiatrist colleague the other day, and his dirt garden tomatoes are the same way. So maybe it wasn't my shade cloth that made mine leggy. We're wondering if the lack of fruit is due to the decline in bee population hindering pollination, or something. Also, I probably just don't have enough fish mass to really make the plants take off, yet. But I'm still having fun, in a tired, panty/wheezy sort of way, so it's okay.

I do have an ongoing bumper crop of duckweed that likes to escape into the pipes and pile up under the water outlets in the grow beds. I'm not sure the tilapia eat any of it at all. If so, they're not even close to keeping up with it. Every other day or so I scoop out a giant mass of it and spread it in the sun to dry. I had this thought of powdering it and using it as a nutritious additive, but since it's full of dried snails, I decided it's not for human consumption. (Not that the snails wouldn't add protein. And calcium. It just makes the whole thing less appetizing.) But it would make a good food additive for the chickens, maybe. And the fish. I think Henry the pleco likes it; or at least the nightly clumps I stick in his tank seem to vanish, anyway.

Okay, that's it from here. Except that I still haven't found any Twinkies for you, Bullwinkle. They're supposedly back out there now, but the Twinkie-starved hordes must be getting to them before I do. Sooner or later, they'll all fall into carb-overload comas, and I'll finally get my hands on some!