Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

My daughter unplugged my system yesterday to vacuum the car was off for about 4+ hours but luckily had the OTTO battery back up air pump which was still pumping away, trout all fine, daughter not so fine
Jen you can hit up western power or whoever they are these days for compensation for your losses, forms are on the website

Do they forms for claiming from your daughter Nocky?

something missing chappo, but yes you can take her away if that's what your asking

wow... but the blackout was part of a catastrophe event.... is it really fair to ask for compensation?? especially since I didn't really set up to back my system up.

It's what I thought:



reference: http://westernpower.com.au/mainContent/ ... amage.html

Jen we lost a freezer full of food not long ago power outage was due to a storm, it was the length of the outage not the cause they paid on, it comes down to you pay for a service and the service was not provided, generally when power outages occur due to lack of maintenance, factors outside of WP control would be accident where a vehicle smashes a pole with transformer on which would take several hours to fix (after smoko ) fire that burns several poles to the ground etc, but in the end you have nothing to loose, the fact you didn't have backup is irrelevant, no one has backup power for there house because you rely on WP, again it is the time of the outage and not so much the cause, it comes down to maintenance, if the grid was in serviced condition then it wouldn't have failed for so long

I didn't really apply for compensation, for one, I was really busy in that week so no time to read the terms and follow guidelines for application. and I only lost 14 fingerlings, that's about 30 bucks.. not that bad..

in the following week I did dismantle the overflow pipe and fittings from the fishtank. I sort of wish I didn't but at the time I was sick of running two pumps. I also installed a air pump with two outlets so that there's plenty of aeration whether or not the pump was pump water or not.
As a result I had to put the pump that was in the overflow sump into the Fishtank and pump from there.

For 2 whole weeks I spent most of my free time tweaking between the two pumps trying to equalize their head pressure and the amount of water going into the FT as well as the pumping out of the FT . There were several nights I had to wake up at 2 or 3 am just to make sure that the FT water hadn't gone too low.
Then last Sunday, I managed to get it equal and it has stayed stable ever since, I just top up the water every couple of days whenever the buried sump water got too low.

Yesterday I then put a different kind of fitting to the overflow hole of the FT so that I can get the overflow back again, along with a 4-outlet manifold. Today I plan on using a car jack with a safe plank on it to hold up the GB's and remove some of the bricks from the GB stands so that they would be lower for the CHIFT PIST to be good enough. I think I'm going to have to change the sump tank as well.. I'll post my results when I'm finished.
Hopefully by having the CHIFT PIST back, it will use only one pump in the buried sump.
Some pictures from my holiday as well as the latest system setup. I've also been playing around with another but smaller system that I made for the Goldfish... I'm also moving that out from under shelter, the plants in that system are trying to reach the sun!

I guess I've done it again... my attention span can only hold for so long!

Anyway... big news... not so good... I have trout that are longer than my feet! They've been very active and then the activity goes down on hotter days...over last night I got 7 fatalities. I was still asleep when dad woke me up saying he buried 7... he'd thought I'd gone to work.
So now I've only got 8 or 9, I can't count them as they move too quickly for me to get them all!
I argued with Dad about keeping them but he's already buried them so I can't do anything about that... I wanted to weigh and do stuff. With dead fish like this, is it still ok to eat them even though they were floating? Dad reckons they would not be.
So I tested the water...
Ammonia - 8ppm! Nitrite was about 2ppm, and pH was about 6 so it was borderline poisonous. It must have got poisonous when it got cold overnight.
If it's like this right now... which would you guys say is the best option, major water change OR don't bother with water change and start bringing out all the trout?
I figure... it's November - getting close to the hot weather and they are almost plate sized.

both...water change and harvest....0r just harvest and let the bacteria really build up....but loosing 8 good size trout, and not even getting a say in having a feed would be a bummer....sorry about your situation

I also want to add that I'm still working on my AP... fixing and changing things.. I've managed to modify my siphons and external siphons so that the growbeds are on the ground instead of on stands.
I figure if I have chift pist, this would work well because the fish tank height would be a little higher than 2x growbed and if I have one on the ground and the rest on stands I could have the fishtank overflow into the growbeds and then they overflow into this grounded growbed and I would have a pump in this g. growbed pumping clean water back to the fishtank!
It's getting very neat idea and I'm planning to set it up like that once the veggies and trout are out this summer and I will be looking towards starting my system again in Feb '10.

Bummer, Jen.

I would eat the rest of the trout as they will not last with temps rising, especially since they have been exposed to 8ppm ammonia!

Seems to me that others have had sudden ammonia spikes when the ph dropped too suddenly for the bacteria to adapt. You probably had a big bacterial die-off, so you pretty much need to buffer to keep PH more stable and then re-cycle.

Yahoo! Cycling!

Thanks for the response guys.. I'm relieved... I'm brought them in and am trying to cold-kill them. They're taking their time to die ?!

did you bleed them ??? cold chilling will push the blood into the meat otherwise

I thought it was to stun them? so that they'd stop swirming and restrict the blood release into their system.

ok... I broke their necks but didn't cull them. filleted and took out the guts, lots of blood came out.. I guess that's a good thing.
cleaned them and wrapped them and put them in the freezer...
Wow that was my first time breaking fish necks and filleting them... Thank goodness that Dad was here. I don't know what I would have done if he wasn't.

I caught only 5 and filleted them. I still have 2 left alive in the tank. I took out some bad water and put in clean water... hopefully those 2 will last a bit longer.

I have a few thoughts that I'm wondering... last I counted the trout I had 16. but this morning 7 died and got buried by Dad and I took 5 and 2 are left. What the heck happened to 2? I dunno if Dad counted the dead right... hmmm...
well I guess that means that the veggies will have to be pulled out and soon I will be able to fix my system into a CHIFT PIST for next year!