Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

great Nocky.....Deals Direct ...I know where I will be all morning.

Another water testing result posted for comments;

latest test First test
10/08/09 09/08/09 08/08/09 05/08/09
Temp 16.3 14.4 17.0 17.5
pH 7.4 7.4 7.4 7.4
Amm 0.5 0.75 1.0 1.5
Trite 0.5 0.5 0.375 0.125
Trate 5.0 5.0 5.0 4.0

Should I be concerned about my Nitrate levels? or will they begin to normalise soon? Obviously I'm happy the ammonia is slowly dropping and am thinking the nitrite levels are rising in response to the processing of ammonia, but are not yet being fully processed into nitrates, so the system still needs some time to settle?

I'm not feeding anyone at the moment to aid in settling the system, the silvers seem to be very happy and lively just around this time, so I'm off to watch them.

No Sig Nitrate is fine mine around 10, but nitrate is what we want for the plants and fish can handle much much more, and all others appear to be coming down nicely, except water temp our daytime air temp is less than that

Thanks for the input nocky

Tried this earlier, but DanG computer died.

So we got our fish from Ross and Vicki Rickard, they where terrific, happy to answer the many questions we had and spend quite a lot of time with us, probably a lot more than they really wanted to. They supply Australian Bass, Golden Perch, Silver Perch and a heap of mosquito control species too, not so much redclaw anymore, but also a few Saratoga too.

I can't recommend them enough, I'm the kind of guy who see's something good, or comes across someone I think is doing a great job and I let people know about it (just as Burnsy about his sawmill I'm surprised he is still talking to me after all the talking I did about how great my sawmill is) Ross was a bit worried about having too many fish in one bag so he split them into two bags for me to make sure they got home in the best condition and testament to his experience and knowledge we didn't have a single in bag fatality.

We where very lucky as Ross and Vicki had had a late spawning with their silvers and had some nice larger 'fingerlings' We asked for 100 of the larger ones (50c more per fish than 50mm fingerlings, but I felt they would be well worth it by the end of summer) all where above 50mm and some even up to 100mm, but mainly around the 70-75mm size. It was a really good experience to see the size variation from a single spawning, even though silvers aren't like barra or trout who will happily munch on their smaller siblings and thus individual fish will make much larger gains, there where two fish we saw who where almost 150mm - such a big difference

So anyway, as promised, here are some pics...







More to come...

In the last pic of my previous post - I measured the end of my finger to try and give a frame of reference, you can just see my fingertip at the bottom of the bag. My fingertip is 20mm across

more pics you guessed it, more pics of fish...





I'm still a bit bummed about our water clarity at the moment, but it seems like my home-made filter is doing it's job and we can make out the redclaw baskets at the bottom now, but can't see well enough to see the redclaw in there or see if any have turned tail up.

I haven't fed the silvers yet, they seem to be happy around 1700-1900hrs, trawling the sides of the tank seemingly eating some algae off the black plastic maybe?? I will give them a small pinch of aquarium fish flakes tomorrow afternoon as I've found(the 20kg of fish pellet we bought in anticipation of feeding fish) the pellets sink and I can't see clearly enough to see if they are eating them or how much may or may not be left. I figure they can do some house cleaning on any algae for a little while anyway.

Well as Nocky said, Cover your fish tank. No sunlight, less algae growth. Fishes don't need the sunlight. I was told the same thing about covering the fish tank, hence I covered it with a tarp. After a week, the water became clearer and it has been becoming clearer as the days go.

I think you should check that your redclaws are alive. Dead creatures quickly affect the water quality and may result in an escalated deaths of others.

Not sure about your whole setup, but if it is only one fish tank and no sump tank (like mine), I feed the fishes at low tide (ie. when the growbeds are fully filled and overflowing over the standpipe). Hence there is less water in the tank, so the bottom is easier to spot.

+1: If it is easy, it is certainly a good idea to check that they are alive.

FYI: nitrates can safely go well over 100 ppm, some say in the thousands of ppm. Probably varies with species, but nitrates are very benign.

Ivan, we don't have much evidence of algae, ( I figure the times I've seen the silvers swimming along the sides and stopping to 'mouth' the wall, was them going a bit of cleaning) we certainly can't see any, the water was pretty clear and clean prior to putting the bottom GB online and when we did, we could see how 'dirty' the gravel obviously still was. I had thought I had a method which was washing it well, but it turned out it wasn't as good as I thought, that's where the dirty water has come from.

The boss and I will raise the redclaw baskets later today to see what's going on in them.

Water results. I had read that nitrates don't seem to be an issue for the fish, but nitrites and ammonia are where the problems are. I can identify the ammonia is coming down so I'm happy with that and will keep checking it to make sure it is coming down. I am thinking with the nitrites, they are building a little in response to the available ammonia and will begin to drop once enough nitrobacter are present to utilise all the produced nitrite and then I should get higher levels of nitrate along with increased growth from the plants.

So I'm not 'feeding' the fish any real amount, just going to try and get them used to an evening feeding time with the use of halogen lights and one or two pinches of aquarium flakes. I figure there are over 100 75mm fish in there so 2 pinches of flake really won't produce a jump in ammonia and by waiting until it is a bit darker, not night time, but around 1730-1600 I switch the halogen lights on over the FT for 5 min, drop a pinch of flake in and wait. The little guys got the idea yesterday, I had about 15 'hits' on the surface, they come speeding up out of the depths of the tank, unseen if not directly looking at the right spot. The ones you don't see coming up leave a small little tail fluke of disturbed water on the surface and that's all the evidence you can see. I think it's great I hoping for a bit of more interest tonight, maybe word will get around "when the lights come on there's easy food around guys"

I'll let you know.

Sig now you have fish Amm will probably go up again as with Rites which will the increase your Rates which is the end result, as your water temps are reasonably high then you need to keep an eye on AMM and adjust feed as required, all should even out in a week or so and then go back to daily feeds,

Sig, great system you've got there mate.

In that last pic titled "Letting them get acclimatised .......", are there screws in those elbows and tees?

Like Taz asked, how have you conected your pipework, have you glued them?
System looks great mate, I bet your stoked having your fish!!

Yeah I've got a couple of screws holding some fittings. I used silicone on them and smoothed it around the junction between fitting and pipe, but found a couple 'popped' (the pump is 10,500 lph) so I gave the fittings some 'help' to stay together. The GB pipework is just pushed together, no glue,silicone, screws or anything on them. From the ball valves on each bed back to the pump is all "glued and screwed"

I sure am happy to have fishies in there

We should take a 'whole' system pic now we have everything ruining, functional and most importantly pretty

Really hope you haven't got it ruining - looks too good for that

Another water test today, all results so far are shown

We did pull out the redclaw crates today, to add 'feeding tubes' and also check on everyone since we dirtied the water so badly - 3 more gone tail up. The last one was quite offensive too, must have been on it's way up to the large pond in the sky when we last looked at them a few days ago. I would have expected ammonia levels to have spiked from the really smelly one, but amm has stayed down (although not down as much as we'd like) and trites and trates has had a jump. Is that because the increased ammonia in the system from the dead redclaw had already been broken down into trites and trates, but the increase in trites was too much for the population of nitrobacter to fully consume. And also the trates, too much for the plants to consume just a the moment too?

I'm still not feeding other than 2 pinches of flake to get the silvers accustomed to 'feeding time' and most of the plants seem to be loving the idea of AP

I saw a pic on a thread, (maybe Faye's???) can't remember exactly something about bubbles staying in the water, like there was detergent in the water??? I don't have a heap, but some cluster of fine bubbles do seem to persist on the surface when the GB drain back into FT. Was this discussed in Faye's thread? If anyone can recall, I'd like to re-visit it to check out what the cause was and see if that may be applicable to my few little persistent bubbles.