Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I was at the beach yesterday. There was some rough weather and the place was strewn with garbage lots of which was nylon rope netting and rope ends from fishing nets and lines. I thought wow this stuff is dangerous to sea life so collected as much as I could. Then looking at the pile thought this would make great bio filter material.

Question is how safe is this stuff to use in a bio filter?

It is mostly nylon but some of the ropes have a more cottony type appearance but still kind of plastic....

The primary problem will be with the stability of the material. Fine particles could come off the rope and cause problems for the fish. You would need to put a very fine filter on the outlet, and that will cause a large pressure drop.

for the most part it is pure nylon ski rope type stuff. I will probably need to sort through it and clean it thoroughly. Will post some pics...

sorted the stuff into what I am sure is nylon rope and chucked anything that looked in any way dubious. Now I have built a bb biofilter with it which I am running at my brothers house so when he actually gets around to catching some carp for me from the nearby vlei (wetland dam thingy in S
A) he will have somewhere to keep them alive for me. The carp have just spawned now and then they all hatched and disappeared! We are going to set a few bottle traps in the reeds and see if we can haul in a couple of hundred fry.

I just love the fact that this stuff is the waste litter of the fishing industry and using it for aquaculture filters is so cool as it uses their crap to help make them redundant... at least for me and some of my family