Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

what product did you use to line it? I am doing a sil=milar type of thing, but not to your scale and was looking at using Pond Shield... thoughts?

Steve,

I used these 2 products

http://www.aquaticeco.com/subcategories ... ete-Sealer

http://www.aquaticeco.com/subcategories ... s-1-Gallon

Smin
LOL the quarantine ward........... nope, thats as big as i want to get..........

will have to add a cupple of 100 gal tanks outside for quarantine and purge.........

Rupert
the bio filter is setup like the 3 barrels at the bottom of this page
http://www.koipondcentral.com/articles/filtration.htm

I have a hand drawn pipeing Schamatic, that will have to be scanned in, or redone in Paint or something...... before i can post it.....

RS

Or just take a photo of the hand drawn schematic. I've seen people do that before

Hi All,

After many unforseen delays, and unending rain for 3 weeks, I finely made it down to Overton Fisherys and got 19 Tilapia and 33 channel cats. YEAAAAAAA....!!!!!!! I cleaned them out on the Tilapia they had in their small tank...

Was told that they would harvest Tilapia from large 2 ponds soon, with a estimated 10,000LB per pond

They have a Very nice setup for over wintering them......

These Tilapia are very white, with only a few of them with any dark spots or stripes, and do not look like the coloring in most of the pics of Mossambica that i have seen......

Hopefully all will make it after the stress of the trip, and will have no floaters in the morn......

I am so excited...........

RS

cool....and best of luck

We feel your excitment all the way over here RS....

Tilapia are pretty tough and I expect they should make it. The catfish are fairly hardy but definitely the more sensitive of the two species to water quality and handling stress.

Catfish should be able to tell you if all is well with the materials you used for the system or if anything else is of poor quality.

No floaters this morn, and all seems well.......

RS

Cool. First 24 hours is always the toughest.
For the next week or so keep an eye on the skin of the catfish. White patches tend to show up on mine if they are stressed out.

Hi all,

reporting in on the new fish.......

The fish went into the tank on the 19th
and the ammo went to 0.5 by the next morn
and to 1.0 the next morn
then stayed there till the 23rd when it started dropping, and went to 0 on the 27th
the nitrites kicked in on the 22, at 0.25- and went to 1.0 on the 26th, then started comming down, and dropped to 0 on the 28th
Lost 6 catfish during the days when the ammo was high, and none after it went to 0....... did not lose any Tilapia...
Started feeding a small amount of floating pellets on the 29th, and they were all Hungry..!!!

On the evening of the 25th i had a accident, and overflowed the biofilter barrels, and lost about 4" of water from the FT, refilled it about 5", and fixed the problem, and provided a syphon between the FT and input barrel, forcing it to keep a constant water level between them, so that problem could never happen again.........
so, had a partial water change because of this prob....

water temps have been between 72F and 78F depending on if its been sunny or not....
A cupple of days ago, I added a 100' Black garden hose up in the rafters for water heating, and that is helping, but it needs another 100' to have enough dwell time to really heat the water, and it needs to be strung up higher in the rafters, for the higher temps in the top of the green house. Will have to wate on a local kid to show up and be the monkey in the rafters to get that project done......
The FT water is beginning to get Green with algae.....

Still need to do some more rigging up, so i can run the ele pump less, and need to rig up a cupple of cut in 1/2 blue barrel growbeds inside the GH, but I'm very happy with the way things are coming along so far........

RS

TCLynx,

You've mention that feeding in a happa cage could be tricky, and i now see what you mean, about the floating pellets going though the netting.........

What did you do to stop the pellets from excapeing the cage....?

RS

Hope you don't mind if I jump in an offer an answer.
Some sort of floating or suspended rigid perimeter will contain the feed. I have used white pvc and black poly pipe. A ring or some shape that fits the perimeter will work well. Or you could suspend some other type "wall" on the interior of the happa. Such as the type used for flower beds that comes in plastic roles.

You have a super looking setup there. I would think you will always battle algae in your system. Although, having tilapia in the open part of the tank will utilize the algae as an added food source. A very common way to prevent algae is with some sort of opaque cover over the fish tank. That will prevent algae growth for obvious reasons. Although it may hinder the "greenhouse effect" heating of the fish tank water. (That may be a good thing in the summer).

Keep up the good work. And my apologies for the interruption.

Thanks for the reply

i am not sure yet what i will use on the netting to keep the pellets in the cage........

maybe some pink foam strips might work.............
or on 2nd thought maybe a 18"sq piece of pink foam with the center cut out like a frame, and float the pellets in the cut out, so that they cant get away, and i can remove the foam frame when it's not needed..... hummmm....... i like that idea.....

i think that i will use a 2" thick pink foam floating raft on part of the FT with perlite filled cups and lettuce, to block some of the light getting to the algae in a corner, and as a quick way to soak up some of the Nitrates with lettuce plants, till i can get some grow beds installed and maybe a NTF Pipe or 2.......

i have now started watering all the dirt plants in the GH with fish tank water.....

The design of the green house makes it where the sun shines to the back wall of the GH during the winter, and does not shine on the tank during the summer..... so that should help with the algae during the summer........

i even like the floating frame idea for holding duckweed and koi kandy from floating around so much.....

RS

I have heard of fish "sunbathing" on rafts after coming up thru the hole too fast, don't know if Tilapia get that frenzied though.