Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Newbie here. Starting this hobby this year. looking forward to many months of reading through all of the threads to get caught up.

Hi Deuem,

Be aware that this "hobby" can turn into a passion which can turn into an obsession...

There are some very large aquaponics projects in China. We look forward to seeing yours grow into something special!

In Lake Taihu / 太湖, aquaponics was used to try to clean up the water a bit, and there are large floating rice fields in other lakes:





A nice little system in Southern China (Jinghong / 景洪):



An interesting system in Taiwan / 台灣:




Please take plenty of photos to document your journey! Everyone loves photos!

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Sam

Hi and thanks for all the photos. The reason you mentioned is exactly why I want to start this for my family. Yea they use the plants to de-tox the water then go and sell them to us or feed the pigs, where we would bury them. Labeled not for animal consumption. With over 90% of the water here unsuitable for drinking, even by animals it is a chore to get clean water. It is about 100 or more time the cost of tap water. Ok I just ran the calculations and clean water is 266 times the cost of city water. River water is even cheaper. Which the farmers use as is. It is the same water we get in the tap. No treatments at all. If I use it in my fish tank, the fish die in 3 days. But it is ph neutral.

So I doubt if any farmers could use clean water to grow any food. So what they use we get hidden in the juice of the foods. This is what I want to get away from. That water can contain anything. City water is 0.00045 US cents a liter or 45 cents a ton and clean bottled water in 19 liter bottles is 2.20 each or 0.12 cent a liter. 0.12/0.00045=266 times the cost. So I would rather drink most of your clean fish tank water then drink out of the tap.

Deuem

Deuem,
Man, that is harsh...

Reminds of this haunting photo showing pollution in New Delhi...



Hmmm... I've read of some using reverse osmosis (RO) to get rid of contaminates in their water before using it for household water and for aquaponics. One of the problems with using RO water for aquaponics is that it takes out beneficial minerals from the water as well. If using RO water for aquaponics I think one would probably need to prepare to add back in some basic minerals that plants and fish might need to be happy. I've never used an RO system so I'm not sure what qualities one should look for, but perhaps something like this could help?

Shenzhen Yili Water Purification Equipment co.ltd


It is very admirable what you are trying to do for your family. I wish you all the luck... and more.

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Sam

Deuem, I hope you can find resources locally to clean the water.

There are specific plants that are listed to clean the waters here.

You can also build silt ponds in a cascading style and travel the water through them which will take out bigger particles.

I guess, you can not completely remove bacteria unless you have an ultraviolet light along the pipes.

Also you need to build a storage for the cleaned water.

Can you collect rain water?

You have a hard task on hand but with trial and experimentation, I am sure you will get there.

For reverse osmosis systems, there is a mineraliser cartridge which puts some trace minerals back in the water. If you are doing RO, look into this

Many people here have Ro installed on the tap water for drinking. Our 19 liter drinking water is all RO. I have now been getting my drinking water from a local well. We then lug it home and upstairs. Lucky I have an elevator in the condo. I also use this water now for my fish. They love it. That picture with the kid in the garbage is well known. I went to a place that most of us would call heaven. Fantastic stream flowing through steep faming valleys. Until! I got out and walked down to the water edge and wanted to toss my cookies. Almost solid green with algae. You could float a supper plate on it. Along both side of the stream the banks looked like that photo. Everyone takes their garbage to the stream to dump it. Then it flows down stream. Now that might have been Ok when there was one farmer on the stream and no plastic.
Now it is farmer after farmer for over 100 miles and they all do it. So the entire length of it looks like that photo. I was told that 100 years ago they used it for drinking. Now they can't even give it to the pigs but still use it for the rice and veggie fields. So even way up in the mountains we have this problem and my reason is an easy one.

Ok I book marked this site Shenzhen Yili Water Purification Equipment co.ltd and will contact them with a local person or I would pay twice the cost or more.

GurkanYeniceri: I have a UV light on my fish tank. It works wonders. But that is a closed loop system. Our water is an open one. The light would need to come on, on demand and most likely 10 times the power of the fish tank, seeing it only got one shot at it and not over and over. Up for ideas. I had wondered about it. I would need to do the main. That is now 1 inch PVC. Or the other PV material. Can't tell it is painted outside. and inside only a threaded hole. The rain water etches the window on my car. I don't want to drink that either. To let you know, I have never seen a chemtrail here. Our problem is when the air comes in from the North or west. It drags down all the nasty pollution from up north. When it comes in from the sea it might be OK. RO would take out everything I am worried about including everything the plants need. But if I added them at least I would know what was added.
All of us are recently having problems with higher brain function. I am worried that there has been a change out there in the food and we are getting heavy metals in the greens. Something even boiling the water won't take out. Just make them more concentrated. Since your skin is your largest organ, I am a bit worried about bathing and bushing the teeth in tap water also. So this year I am starting my DARE program and will be working on getting thing straight for all.
Thank you both for all of the links and info.

Deuem

ps By the way when I first bought my house I used the tap water for the Fish as is. Nothing ever happened for 5 years plus. So things are changing for the worse not the better. I feel confident that all the answers are here somewhere. And I have to thank Vanish from Fishkeepers for the link to here.

Dare stands for Deuems Aquaponics Research Effort ( DARE )
It is my thread on Fishkeepers if you wish to take a look.

We had a major set back here and a very dangerous one to boot. Some one has poisoned the great well water with something. I did a 30L water change on my tank like we always do with the well water that has been bubbled for a day or two and my fish are dying left and right. What is worse is that we drink this water also and all of us are now sick. We all feel like passing out all the time and have to lay down. This is a village well that has been used for over 300 years. Some one did something to it. I tossed out all the well water in the house and bought RO water for us but I don't know what damage was done first. Some people are so mean. We ordered an RO system for the house today. It will be a week so we are on bottled water for now. The fish are all getting red bloody gills and tails and swimming in circles and die off. If it were not for the fish we might not know what was going on with the water. We drink a lot of this water. We had a new load that the fish and us just opened.

That is terrible, Deuem!

Food and water security is becoming more of an issue every day... Our village just opened a new well yesterday after 4 months or so of water problems due to (rumor has it) the local geothermal well drillers digging a deep steam-vent well too close to where the main village water well was and supposedly drained down the aquifer.

Bottom line was that those who could afford it, all started installing water tanks on the back of their houses to avoid outages... Those who could not, lived with 4 hours of rotating water outages most days. I'm still working on digging my own well out back to not have to rely so much on the poor infrastructure.

Sorry about your fish, but glad they could at least die honorably providing a warning system like the canaries in a coal mine. I hope the feeling sick passes rapidly and there are no long term effects of this.

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Sam

Well we all woke up this morning except another fish. We are still sick and the fish tank looks like fish Zombies. They just sit there not moving. No reaction to anything. These are the fish that follow me as I walk around the tank. Yes on the canaries in the coal mine. I would never have known if the water was tainted and drank more of it to get even more water in our systems. Our well is an over flow well head that never runs out. So if anything was tossed in it, it would have been pushed out by now. The well has a tile bottom 1.5 M deep, 2 meters round and a pipe feeding it from below. The main problem is that the top is open for people to scoop out water. It should be sealed and fenced off. We had 3 and they closed off the other 2 like that. Now they are off limits due to a quality problem. Someone is spiking these wells. Probably people that sell water. This is going to be a problem for some time now. I don't know what to do. When we drank it we boiled it first and we got sick.

At the moment no more fish have died, they are all just zombie fish. Staying in one place for hours, not moving, not even to eat. Even banging on the tank won't make them move. If I touch them with a probe they only move enough to get away from it. I am now saturating the tank with extra air stones, changing the filter and on watch. We are all on the bottled water for everything waiting 3 more days for our RO system to show up. When it does I will make 300 L of water for them and change it out. Maybe even bleach out the tank while I am at it. I will try to move them to buckets today that are filled with Bottled water. These goldfish were going to get moved to the AP system but that is not easy if they are dead.
D

Update: half of them died so I took the only step I could, I grabbed one of my new grow beds, filled it up with 40 dollars of RO bottled water. Got the remaining fish one at a time, shook them dry and tossed them in. We moved the largest fish first and it lived so in went the rest. I have a Chinese algae eater wild fish I have had for years. He made it so far.

Back to the tank. WOW does it stink now. And all I did was change out 30 liters (10%) The water is so awful to look at it will make one sick. It is growing things I have never seen before. Thousands of particulates are all over the place and the walls are turning brown. And I run a UV light and 80cm long filter 24/7. It was pristine prior to the water change. You could drink it. It has only been a few days since I did that. What ever is in the water is growing at a fast pace and I will have no choice but to bleach the tank to kill it. So my great well water I brag about went to hell in a handbag in a week. No wonder we all got so sick. And my coffee tasted like crap. Well I just looked them over and they are all swimming now. But they had quite a few bad days to get over. Most likely they will all pass on.

Update: Well the fish so far have responded very well to the RO water, they all woke up out of the Zombie life and are swimming around once again. I did bleach my tank and I will let it run for another day. All of the problems are dead now and the plants ( plastic ) are crystal clean. The glass is clean also. Now is the hard part, to get it all out of there. I have done it before and it is not easy but in this case worth it. During this process everything is left in the tank. I even tossed in the net. After a rinse or two I will start to take things out, wash them up and sun dry them. The last is the gravel. The last time I even boiled that to kill anything left. We had gotten infested with ick at the worst level. My hood is integrated with tank and I must disinfect that also with a good bleach rub down. Lots of work to do! I wanted to move these fish to the AP but I am not ready yet. When I refill the tank it will be with all RO water from our new machine once we get it.
D

What a terrible thing to happen! Especially as it all seemed to be coming together.

Hope the new machine and aquaponics helps you and your family live a healthier life! Noone should have to worry about water for their family.
Best of luck