Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi, what a great site!

My name is Wayne Kinne, I will be 59 in a month and a day. I have 34 acres with about 6 acres of it being ponds. I am located in the center of Michigans lower peninsula. I have been looking at aquaponics for a couple of years at least, but this is the first website I have found that freely shares all the information needed to get started. Most tell you some and want to sell the rest, I really want to thank those responsible for such a great site.

I already have a 50' x 100' greenhouse but want to start aquaponics. My plan is to start with between 1 and 4 ibc systems as discribed on ibcofaquaponics.com, one of their youtube videos lead me here. I heat my home with an outdoor woodburner and it is more than big enough to heat my home and a nice aquaponics green house. I was very concerned with how I would heat a aquaponics system and then I read that heating the water in the system delivers tons of heat to the greenhouse. I can always add a radiator if I need to warm the air a little too. I am wondering about too much heat in the summer and am wondering if running a few hundred feet of 3/4" hose through my pond would be a good plan, it is very very cold at the bottom even in the dead of summer. I would use a heat exchanger perhaps to keep the system water isolated from the water circulating though the pond line.

I am also wondering about fish taste. I have eaten farm raised fish before and was not pleased, they always seemed to taste like the fish food smells. Is this a problem for anyone, or was the fish farm we went to just a bad apple? Is there foods to avoid or prefer?

My short term goal is to get a system up and running and see how it goes. My long term goal is to set up a commercial aquaponics farm, selling both fish and crops. I always like to dream big. I have been self employed all but a few years of my life, I am far from rich but get by just fine. I have done many different things over the years, I currently have a class 4 laser variance from the feds and do some laser shows, I grow some crops, I build some robots, I do some prototype work and love my 3D printers. I did a project for Boy Scouts, it can be seen here: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:954185 it was a great time but of course did not pay anything LOL I printed 28 of them, it took 5 months of three 3D printers running 24/7, I have never had so much fun, it was the best!

Well I will stop boring anyone that read this far ;-P

I'm sure I'll be back, I pretty much live on my PC!

Wayne

With all those ponds are there any fish in them now. I would presume they freeze over in winter or maybe even solid. Those are some rather large 3D bugs you made. They are as big as the kid holding it. Many people here eat the fish they raise, I am sure you will get an answer soon about taste. Could also change the diet for them in the last week if in doubt.

My ponds are full of Bluegill and Crappie, they are too deep to freeze solid but every so often it will methane up and cause a fish kill under the ice, but it only kills the biggest fish.

And that kid holding the hexapod is 59 year old me

I have heard about the ice methane and seen vids of them lighting it on fire in the ice. The kid I was talking about was on the site you linked in your post. Back to your ponds, will you just use that water as is or get Fish tanks. During the winter it would need to be heated before the plants got it. It is not easy to heat water and then let it go. Money out the drain for sure. Maybe you will need and use both. On fish food, we use the same pellets the fish farmers use. Like I wrote, I would move them to a holding tank and change up the food for the last 2 weeks. Like they do with many things we eat. Probably give them fish to eat. as much live food as they can eat then serve them up. Purge out the fish tank taste if they had it. I am a long way from that if ever. Every fish now is a pet or food for larger pets.

I heat my home with an outdoor wood burner, it heats 350 gallons of water to 185 degrees. I will be using a heat exchanger so the fish water will not go to the wood burner. I will be raising my fish in tanks, I purchased 4 IBC's. I will thermostatically control the water temp for the fish and garden, I plan to use the pond as a heat sink in the summer to keep the fish tanks from getting too warm, same thing with a heat exchanger.

I want to raise Blue Tilapia and also hope to raise my own Duck Weed for their food.

I doubt I will use the water from the ponds to fill my tanks, I will likely get city water and airreate it for a few days.

I just recently pulled a baby wild tilapia out of an ice cold stream. Maybe they need warm water for mating but this baby was caught by net 2 weeks ago so it had to be born in even colder water. It was refrigerator cold. So I am asking why would people heat the blues. Fish out of cold water always taste better to me. When you get them maybe you could try a few in the cold pond and see what happens. The baby is now in room temp water of about 80 degrees and swimming just fine.

Well my reason for heating the water is to keep my roots in water that is at the best temperature for growing vegetables. Also the fish will grow faster in warmer water. So maybe a cold tank to put them in a few weeks before harvesting them? I know pan fish caught here in Michigan in the winter are much better than they are in the summer, so that at least proves that not all their life has to be in cold water. So the question becomes how much cold water time is needed to make them firmer and give them that better taste. And the you would have to find out how slowly to cool the water down, a fast switch would kill them for sure.

I like the release idea, when I get my blues I will for sure release some. My pond does not drain, so there is no risk of a release into the nearby lakes and streams.

I used to do the old bag of fish in the tank for 2 hours to get the temps equal. With the local fish I just pour them into a net over a sink and hand separate them for size and toss them into their chosen home. No waiting. No losses so far because of shock. They usually go from cold to warm. If I bought an expensive fish I would balance it first but trials on caught fish I can replace at will shows no lose for me so far. Each fish is held in the hand to get a once over and warmed and then in. If it died in transport it goes in the tank also. The larger ones in the monster tank and the small babies in the shrimp tank. Only fresh like this will do for the shrimp. They will let an old dead fish just sit there and rot while they go hungry. In the big tank they don't last but a few seconds. All fish eat their fresh dead and complete the cycle.

I would try and dump in one male and a few females into a pond and let nature take over.

On the purge time I would think that 2 weeks should do. And I, like you say, the meat tastes a lot better this way. The trout farms would have died off years ago if they tasted like cardboard. So the cold water has to be firming them up. Nothing worse then a mushie tasteless fish. I can buy local farm carp like that all day. They come out of really warm ponds that are on the edge of DO failure all the time. Besides cold water holds more O2 then warm water. Maybe stick them in a bucket in an old fridge for 2 weeks. Feed them a bit better. Add plenty of air. Mine are now eating snails and clams. All the clams are gone and they just went in yesterday. Shells and all. I bet your pond is full of them on the bottom. When I collect fish I try to collect what they might be eating also.

Crayfish or our shrimps will grab a clam and pick at the edge for days until they open it up and have a feast. The last 4 inch clam I stuck in there, they worked it for a month and then got it. Once the seal was broke (eaten) they feasted for several days and all I had left was a shell that looked like ants picked it clean.

There is an AP commercial company that sells special purge tanks for culling fish but they never say what they do. I only know they are off lie of the AP system and they do this for commercial applications. If I remember right they only put the fish in for several days. Must be like a gym also with stronger currents. A lot also depends on how they are culled. If done wrong they will be in shock and get filled with adrenalin and that changes the taste also. More research is need on these tanks on how they finish the fish. No body in commercial is going to spend one dollar and delay a lot of time if there is no benefit.

The members with trout AP systems must be sending cold water to the plants. Maybe which plants will take it is the question to figure out. In the ice cold streams there are lots of growing plants. They cover the stream beds and are thriving. In the warm farm fish ponds there is almost nothing growing except farmed fish.

This is one site I had found, but they never really say what they are doing inside. http://aquaponics.com/aquaponic-systems ... e-systems/ They do say 3 to 4 days. And One of the options is a chiller and also a heater. So they must balance the temp at a given best.

In another article they change the filters on the purge tanks 3 time a day. Very clean water and off line of the AP.