Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hi,

I am awaiting delivery of my silvers (20) and 10 mussels. I am thinking of adding some salt before they arrive, Can I use cooking salt or do I need something special? IBC fishtank, currently with 600L in it.

Skygazer

just normal pool salt is the go, $6 for 20 kg's (?)from the local hardware shop, and you will have a bit left over

Monya,
Do you see any point to adding GH or KH powder to AP systems?
General Hardness and Carbonate hardness.
Carbonate holds your Ph, so maybe not, but what about the GH is that anything special? Or are the LFS just ripping off the Aquarists? Will NaCl do a good enough job?

I have shell grit in my system too. Cost me $2 for 5KG at my local pet produce store.

Buggered if I know Kuda, I would say the carbonate hardness is the really important one so that ph doesn't plummet, and I have, up until now, added shell grit (now I am trying to bring ph down lol)

What dosage would you recommend. 600L tank. 5 Goldies and 20 silver perch arriving any day now.

I have 2 kinds of KH - 1 is community fish KH, buffers to 7.0
the other is african cychlid KH which buffers to 8.5

I should be wary of how much of the second I use? (I want to use them up :-) )
I even have test kits to measure how much of either I have in the system, including the GH - Does anybody know what GH is and what it will do for my fish or plants?

Non-iodised salt, but yeah pool salt is the cheapest. 4 parts per thousand, so 2.4kg

Do you have a small tank the fish can stay in for a couple of weeks, so that you don't have to salt your veggies.

The salt will, among other things, give you a preventative treatment for Ich. The life cycle is 10 days (?) at 25oC, so you need to quarantine the fish for at least that long, maybe 2 weeks to make sure.

Maybe 3 parts per thousand as a preventative to stress related problems. So in 600 litres, that would be 1.8kg's of salt.

Is the system cycled? And how big are the silvers?

Yeah System is cycled. 3 Weeks running , but system got a boost because I added a small filter from one of my cichlid tanks to get things moving faster. Ammonia now 0, Nitrite now 0, Nitrate now 5ppm (also boosted from water changes from my cichlid tank). Had 5 goldies (1-3 inch) in there for 3 weeks. Silvers are coming from Aquablue Seafoods and will be approx 50mm I believe.

I think I will go for 3 ppt for now, try and not stress the plants.

Hi SG,

I added 1kg of Home Brand cooking salt to my system (at 1ppt) just recently. Got it from the supermarket. No problems so far.

Good deal on the shellgrit!

I wouldn't be stuffing around with aquarium shop build KH or GH stuff. The CaCO3 in the shell grit or whatever source you use will deal with your KH and as for GH - don't have that much experience but I know mine is always high. Doesn't CaCO3 also contribute to the GH??

As for the salt - I think its best to plan to be able to hospitalise the fish in a smaller tank when they first arrive - with a preprepared biofilter attached. This allows you to have a good concentration of salt without any issues with the plants and also saves on salt due to the lower quantity of water (I don't think it's a good idea dumping thousands of litres of 4ppt salt water when finished with it). Having them in a smaller tank will also allow you to raise the temp - which will speed up the sycle of any ich present and will even kill it at about 30 degrees.

VB - I agree re stuffing around with aquarium salts, but many of us have some left over, and the hoarders here like myself wont want to throw it out :-)

So will it be beneficial, and will it hurt? I may as well use it.