Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I have spent hours going through the different topics in Forums and believe that I have read just about enough to be dangerous.
In El Salvador where I live, there is inconsitent water in the homes so all homes have what are called pilas, or watter tanks where people do everything from wash clothes to dishes to even taking baths. My house has one that I am not using and it is approximately 2400 liters/ 634 gals.

I was on the way home from the airport the other day and saw a fisherie and stopped in to see what they had. I was able to buy 100 tilapia fingerlings at $0.05 US and 15, 150 gram fish. I got home put them in water and they all swam! I have to say it was an impulse purchase so I was not really prepared. I have no test kit, no feed, and no circulating pump, nothing except water and lots of fish.

Well things went well for two weeks till I had to leave for a few days. I had been feeding the fish oatmeal and duckweed(of sorts) and they seeemed very happy. In fact they seemed to all want to talk to me at once when I came to see them. All were at the top and opening their mouths. Well, I left for a few days and by the on the trip I bought them some tilapia feed--50 kg of it. When I returned I received the news that just after I left, all the big fish dieed and about half the little ones. Someone with a little knowledge about fish told the guy watching my fish to get river water and quickly put the remaining live fish in a barrel with river water. Well, they survived fine.

After that I decided maybe I better do some research so I came to this site and realized I have done everything wrong and that what started out as just trying to raise some fish in a tank has turned into an excitement for AP. So here I am. Learning from you all and trying to figure out how not to kill my remaining 50 fish.

I cleaned the tank refilled it and let it set for 5 days. I slowly reintroduced the fish and they seem to be content. At least they are not all at the top wanting to talk all at once. (hehe)

dt, welcome! One thing you should probably do is get an aerator for the tank. One of the main reasons why your fish are all at the surface is that they have no oxygen in the water. If you can get bubbles happening through the water, they will calm down and you can get on to the rest of the AP projects.

Have fun, keep reading and ask many questions!

Hi Hawk, welcome. I would expect that tilapia would love oatmeal and duckweed. They love their vegetables! How are you going to construct your growbeds? You will need some soon to keep your fish alive. (Either that, or some type of biological filtration.) In the mean time, feed them very very lightly and shade them from intense sun. When you say that the fish come to the top and open their mouths--do they do that only when they see you, or all the time? If only when they see you, then great, they must be feed trained already. If all the time, then they need more air. If you can get an air pump to blow bubbles into the air, that would be great. Or if you can trickle water in to create splashing, that would help, too.

--Janet.

Well I have come up with a plan! I really want to try AP. All I have read sounds really interesting and maybe to some degree I feel I have to atone for the mass murder of so many fish by helping create new life through plants. Also I like to eat fish and vegetables.

It's night now so in the morning I will take pics. I figure that with a 2400 litre tank and 50 fingerlings I have plenty of options. First I have a plastic tote that will hold 111 liters so I would like to use that as my grow bed and use the present tank as my fish tank--2400 liters.

I have found a pump that pumps 35 liters per min continuous for USD 79.95 locally. Since this is the land of volcanos, I plan to use lava rock for plant medium. (I am going to look for that tomorrow.) A friend is coming from the US so I am having him bring me the MAster test kit from Aquarium Pharmaceuticals. Should I have him bring extra supplies such as reagents? I hope to have the test kit by the end of the month.

Meanwhile, I will wash the lava and place it in the tub, on a rack over the fish tank and use a system like El used with the dual exhaust for auto siphon. Only one tank, one exhaust. Then I will begin the cycle process with the help of a friend who will give me some pond scum from his lawn pond. hopefully by the time the test kit gets here on Dec 1, the cycle process will be well under way.

Have I left anything out? I could really use the help here. I feel like a mass murderer. I want to reform.

atone for your wrongdoings, grow more fish!

Your set up sounds like it will be good. You will most likely need more tubs for grow beds, especially as the fish get bigger. If like most of us here, you are trying to do things on a budget/cheap/free, try to get hold of old bathtubs or something similar. These make good grow beds.

Is your pila (have I spelt that correctly?) inside or outside? Do you need to provide shade or temperature control for the tank? Cooling will probably be an issue for you during summer.

All of these details are really fine tuning. Once you get your growbed setup, you can add more beds later. Just remember that each time you add a new component to the system, the whole system will need time to re-adjust.

Have fun with cleaning the lava rocks!

Hi Hawk,
As I have been finding out, auto-siphons can be a little tricky. I don't know what is available to you, but I needed to be able to change the diameter of the vinyl tubing I was using to get the autosiphon to work. While it's hard to tuck an 8foot length of PVC pipe into a suitcase, a few rolls of vinyl tubing would fit. And if you are using vinyl tubing, you will need fittings for them. Think hard about what you can get locally to build each component, and whether a few pieces from your friend would make life easier. Look at the many pictures people have posted to get ideas for construction details.

Actually I can get all the tubing I need both pipe and hose. Those kinds of materials are easy and cheap to get. The test kit is the only problem.

The pila is outside and there is plenty of shade for the fish. I am purchasing a pump tomorrow so I will start out just runing the water through it and let the water fall about 1 meter to aerate the water until I get the grow bed filled with lava rock.

I plan for this project to be all outside with no greenhouse. But there is shade but plenty of light. Will this affect what vegetables I can grow?

Jump in quick DT!

Does El Salvador get periods of high rainfall? You may have some issues with huge additions of water to the system.

As I said before, keeping the tank temperature cool might be an issue.

As to the veggies you can grow, I think that would depend on the ones that can grow where you are anyway. You probably won't be able to do things that prefer cold climates, but any of the tropical and some of the temperate type veggies should do alright.

Townsville is at 19oS and El S looks to be about 15oN. We should both be able to do a similar range of crops.

We'll be trying as many leafy greens as we can get our hands on (lettuce, cabbage etc.), beans, peas, snow peas, strawberries, mulberry trees, grapes, tomatoes and capsicum, herbs of various types, carrots. Search for varieties that suit the heat.

Thanks, I will look for seeds then.

just thought.... if you can get sheets of styrofoam, put small holes in it and grow some of your veg on rafts in the fish tank. Also provides shade for the fish. Wash the potting mix/soil off the seedling roots first.

now that is a good idea. So the fish do not need sun?

don't cover the whole surface, we're probably only covering 1/4 of the tank surface. We've got lettuces and other leafies and strawbs growing while we wait for the grow beds to be finished.

Come on jamie pictures

in about 1/2 hour I'll get a chance to get up there