Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Wow Tony. What a great system. It was great to read your thread now as I am just starting to cycle mine and I feel a lot more confident about a few things having seen how you fared. Well done!

I agree - great system. And I cannot imagine going away for 2 1/2 weeks. I might have a 7 day trip comming up and I'll be worrying the whole time.

Mark

man you have got one sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet AP system . . .
you must have a real eye for detail to have everything neat and tidy . .
any plans for more GB's? as your fish get larger you might find some probs with filtering out all of their waste???

Most people find space for AP and place it around existing stuff in their yards, you built the yard around the AP! An absolute masterpiece.

Also great that you went away for so long and it all held together, although lets get a look at how the plants are doing now.

I love it , so neat and well thought out. Some really great setups with the air supply and auto feeder
And amazing plant growth too

Thanks for the positive comments guys.. I appreciate it.

No more plans for any additional GB's at this stage, though I have thought about it. The fish are now around 300gms each and doing well. There shouldn't be any problems with loading even when they are around 500gm which is when I'll start harvesting. But it is also leading straight into summer..

The automaticity of the whole system is awesome. I only check the water levels once every 2 - 3 weeks now, and have recently come back from a 3 week holiday where all went very well. We lost power twice apparently for 4 and 6 hours respectively and no problems at all.. The fish even put weight on though I had dosed down their feed to half of what was needed.

Winter however was COLD.. So plant growth was a major issue. I had to let most things just go to seed so I still had filtration. Not a lot grew so all I had in was brocolli, spring onions (100's of them), beetroot, lettuce, and parsley.

I am away again for another 3 weeks so will plant out new seedlings with the warmer weather on my return. But when we build the new house, and incorporate the aquaponics into the actual living / working space a number of things will change. One most important element will be a sloping bottom tank and swirl filter. Relying on just grow bed filtration is not ideal in larger systems.

Otherwise, I will soon post a new thread and number of photos showing the success of converting the biopod for breeding housefly maggots vs BSF for supplemental feed and the excellent nutrient profile for those of us in colder climates that cannot reliably / easily breed BSF.. I have been achieving about 200gms a day of maggots and the fish go crazy over them.. Not to mention much younger fish (fingerlings of around 75-100gm) can eat maggots much sooner than BSF that equate to a 9mm pellet on average.

Cheers
T

Excellent work Tony, I'm about to move back to Tassie so i'll be pestering you with questions!

any more updates tony?? a little birdy tells me you got some trout ?

Yeah, where's a pick of the 650 trout ?

Just turn up... and point at the ones you want.... before anyone else does....

Yeah, yeah, yeah - everyone's a comedian

pick = piccie !

you guys are hilarious.!

Yes well after losing all of my salmon at Xmas time the system took about 6-8 weeks to come down from nitrate levels of 80-100ppm She went right off the scales.

But I promise to post some "pics" of the befores and newbies soon

When you order 100-150 rainbow trout and get delivered 650 from a mate, what do you do? Well, call on some AP enthusiasts and find out if they need some free fish..!

So here you go Chilli... This is what they look like

Only lost 4 RT's in the transfer and began feeding them yesterday. They sure were hungry...! They're much more fun to feed than Atlantic Salmon.. Eat right out of your hand..

After the complete disaster of the last episode, lets hope this batch get to harvest..

thats alot of fish!!
how many have you offloaded so far?