Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

well I hate to be writing on this board again but I feel that my stupidity should come to some use. So above my main tank i have a palm that is in flower and has consistently been dropping the dead flowers into my tank.

I thought very little of it except for this afternoon after having spent admittedly less time caring for the system than I should hgave over the long weekend to find my goldfish at the top of a side tank that i had added some time ago and all of my large silvers that I had seperated in an attempt to get the big fish to grow better, dead .

I quickly checked the pump and found that it was working, or at least vibrating as it should be, so then checked a y pass tap i have on the pump line and found that the pump was trying to work but was having no success, so up comes the pump only to be found to be completely blocked by the flowers, I was not happy. To aid salt to the wound the pump has two settings of sizes to sieve out and it was on the smaller one, oh yeah .

So i have now unblocked the pump, covered the tank almost completely and fished out all of the dead silvers. I had read somewhere that Les was going to test my eye in fish sizing and thought I might give him a hand with wieghts and lengths of all of the dead fish

fish No. Weight (grams) Length (cm)
1 231 25
2 164 22
3 148 21
4 165 22
5 162 21
6 225 24
7 142 22
8 112 19
9 197 23
10 175 22
11 101 18
12 126 20
13 75 17.5
14 7 7

any way here are some pictures as well,
Cheers Nick

Bummer!

sorry to hear that

Damn, that is not nice to hear Nick...some of those were getting to be a good size too

Death must come to them as a surprise, all dead fish have that "shocked" loook on their faces.

They seemed to be growing out nicely too.

That look is the typical gasping for oxygen "look"....

No idea how long your pump was off nick, but obviously it wasn't pumping through the growbeds and returning... hence no oxygenation....

Guessing you don't have any supplementary aeration in the tank either??

If you're pumps strong enough maybe plumb in a bypass... or even drill a small hole in the riser pipe from the pump.... so that it pumps/sprays a small amount of water back into the tank

That will provide some oxygenation if all else fails..... assuming that is that if it was to happen again you were getting some pumping action.....

Secondary backup plan..... add an aeration source... a small air-pump..... perhaps battery backup..... in case power fails....

Covers both contingencies then if either the power fails or the pump stops.... at least you have some oxygenation happening....

Not going to bail you out for a long period of time.... especially if you're heavily stocked and/or your fish are large....

But it might save your bacon while you address the problem


Edited :

Having reread the post (slowly scrolling sideway ) I see you did have a bypass teed in Nick..... was wondering if the pump was pumping anything at all.....

Obviously not..... murphy well and truely got ya mate.... bugger...

+1 for Aeration seperate to the pump (preferably a different power supply too).

Always think what would happen if a pump fails.

really sorry to hear this Nick. Tis a constant battle and then to get *frack* over by some flowers, that sux

yeah not overly happy but am trying to look on the bright side of it, the parents have bought a new house and I am going with them(poor Student) so was going to have to move them all soon, less big fish will mean less issues.

But also it lets me start rearranging stuff for the move, am thinking of doing a VB inspired chift piss setup with on of the growbeds and getting in some of the jade perch form Ausy fish.

It means I can take my big tank out and move it first and get everything organised at the new house before having to move stuff over there.

I will do the internal filter and aeration seperately and shut down the system at night and try to get them eating well so as to be able to eat them by christmas. I am determined to be eating fish for christmas.

I am going to source a 20L/min air blower from age of aquariums and set this up so hopefuly all will be okay.

Trying to think positive, Nick

1

Sorry to hear Nick, we know how you feel