Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hiya guys'n gals,

I'm an Aussie a long way from home. My husband and I are in Vancouver for a year or so and are very keen to get a small-ish system up and running for the experience.

This is *very* early days for us, so we'll be lurking around the forum and site a lot. Sincere thanks to Backyard Aquaponics in their total awesome-ness for pulling together this rich and useful site.

If there is anyone else out there who happens to be in Vancouver, we'd love to hook up and have a look at their system before we start our own.

Cheers'n thanks,
Lyn.

Hi Lyn and welcome to the forum

There is a number of people your way, use the search tab at the top of the screen and search the word vancouver and should lead you to someone you could PM.

Keep us informed of your progress

Thanks Charlie, will do.

I am only a hop skip and jump accost he Straight of Georgia in Nananimo on van isl. If you ever find yourself over here feel free to come by and check out my set up

Hi FOrm Vancouver too. Do you know any resources here?

Hi, and thank you for the invite. We're in the boondocks (Port Coquitlam), but if we find ourselves heading to the Island, it would be *great* to meet up.

In the meantime, I was hoping you'd be able to describe the fish you've selected for your system, and link(s) to any suppliers.

(I promise not to bother you with too many newbie questions, but this one is a stumper so far.) :-)

Many thanks.
Lyn.

We had some problems with this as well as our climate does not allow for one species of fish. Basically we resorted to Koi. My setup is in a greenhouse that is unheated and the water temps soar in the summer time and plummet in the winter. Koi can withstand all of this.. from 0 deg right to 40deg C. Problems you will find here is that during winter without supplementary lighting and heating the tank/greenhouse.. you will not grow much.. we tried last winter with no success and summertime temps without a chiller or buried FT make it impossible to do trout as they can handle 25 deg max and are not truly happy at that temp. Ideal would be around 17 for good active trout.
Another problem with koi over winter is you can not feed below 10 degC as they will not be able to digest food and will get bloat and die.. no food = no nitrates. Also the bacteria in the nitrogen cycle slows down to a crawl below 13 deg C (feed is minimal as the bacteria may not be able to keep up with heavy feed/stocking density). With all this being said if you have a way to heat and maintain temps at 15 deg over winter trout would be a great cool weather choice (if you got 3 to 6 inch fish and overwintered to harvest size by early summer) and during the hot months of the summer koi would be better option unless your willing to fork out money for a chiller. All these things = money when paying for electricity. Basically for us over the winter the koi just go dormant and sit on the bottom and we forgot about them for 4 months.. They are just starting to come back to the surface for food now. No you cant eat them but they sure are pretty to look at..
Hope this helps..

This is my thread viewtopic.php?f=18&t=9762
might give you info that i have not covered here.. there is some average water temps and stuff threw out our first year.

Thank you Mordyr. We'd come to something of the same conclusion, so it's good to have that confirmed. The other good thing is that if/when we move on, it will be easier (we hope) to find a new home for the Koi. I'll check out your link now. Cheers! :-)

HI where are you? We would like to visit where in Nanaimo are you at ?