Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Ahhh ... thanks guys ... I thought so.
What is the advantage of a chift pist (sounds a bit rude!) over just having 1:1?

more fish! the more growbeds you have the more fish you can have. Slane, I don't kno where in SA you are, but if you are ever near Meadows in the hills, send me a PM and come and visit, you will be enlightened about chift pist and many other things

Nothing really, it's just a different style of system.

Now you be nice Mon, no trips on the quad OK!!

...or if you come close to Brissie any time, I can show you a system that has 6 GBs with 500 litres of gravel in each and only has <200litres of water removed from the sump tank at any one time

My system is running at 1:1 and I am pretty convinced it needs to be more. The plants that are established are nearly glowing green. I currently only have 10 kilos of fish in 2,000 liters of water (they are probably 12 since it has been a bit now). I am about to dump in another 10 to 20 kilos of fish. (notice I don't talk number of fish since that isn't the issue)

Now that the first stage is running well - it is on to the strawberry towers! I just read it is possible to grow blueberries - this I have to try!

Really - there are so many factors and there are two ways to deal with such (engineer speaking here in case you didn't know). We can get all fancy and measure total space or rock AND the size of the material (it will matter) - the temperature and type of fish, size of fish, amount of food of the fish, amount of usable light and type of plants being grown. Of course the PH that you can maintain in your water will matter too and how hard your water is. I am sure I can come up with more factors if I think more about it.

Or we can monitor the system based on what we see, smell and test with our test equipment - and adjust. Starting with a small test system to learn on is a very good idea - and it then can be a nursery for fingerlings if you wish. It can also be the system you experiment with in order to determine just what ratios you can do.

Remember, the higher the concentration of fish - the more likely to have a die-off if something goes wrong.

Oh, I cycle all the water in the system once an hour by my calculations - but less than that was working fine too (forgot to clean the screen!)

One thing to always remember - if your plants don't seem to be reacting well to the amount of poo that your fish should be producing it can be a few factors.

PH - very important, if it gets out of whack, the plants can't pull up nutrients.

Or perhaps you aren't yet converting ammonia to nitrates.