Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Not as easy as that unfortunately, cause it could well be up close to 120/140, which is getting too close to extreme readings

les, take a water samle in a graduated jug, say 200ml

then add 200ml of tap water.

Then take your samle from this mixture.

The PPM will be double what your test reads, but makes it easier to "see" 40ppm than what it does 80ppm.

you could also add 600mls of water and then multiply your test by 4

Now that's a real cool way of doing it - get it down to 20 then work out your multiplication factor

i figured that one out when i was wondering what was troubling my indoor jades test said 160 ppm, diluted by 50% test still said 160ppm, diluted by 75% test said around 80ppm. No wonder the poor bastards wen't eating, the NO3 was around the 300ppm mark remember, this is a heavily stocked aquarium with no AP

So jades are pretty tough fish then, not sure what mine was reading last week but did a few 50% changes and it still looks like it is over 40 - will do the "steve's division" method tomorrow and see what it is at.

Might go for the 25/75 ratio and try to keep it <=20, of course it helps if the fish/veggie ratio is balanced but will get there with the new setup

well there always another way to skin a cat

Happy fish, happy plants

feel guilty about the zero AP posts?? LOL

Someone has to keep usin line, actually, I was just following the lead of VB

Am having trouble getting the water level to fall at the same pace in the two tanks. Currently they are linked by a pipe at the bottom as in pic 2. I thought it was working fine, the drain hole in the vat is covered by a net pot with a brick on it, after I took off the fibreglass mesh that was keeping the shit out because I thought it may be blocked. Now the fish are all huddled atround the net pot.

In theory as the water gets pumped out of the poly tank, it should come in out of the vat, but the vat is very slow to let water in to the poly tank, hence, good swapping of nute rich water is not hapening.

I was wondering if i made a u shaped pipe out of 90mm poly, filled it up with water and capped it, and had it level across the 2 tanks as in pic 2, then undid the caps/replaced them with holey ones to keep the fish out, would this syphon the tanks to0 the same level?

It would syphon the tanks to the same level, but not sure how it will achieve a better mixing then that of the bottom pic, as the pipe openings will be basically in the same place. Or is the pipe you would make the u (90mm) bigger than the hole connecting the two currently?

Yep - depends on the pipe size and how much the water is restricted in getting to/from the pipe.

90mm should be adequate to keep both around the same level and a nice flow through the pipe as well.

To go one step further, take the water out of one tank (to the GBs) and feed it back to the other (from the GBs)

yeah, current pipe has inlet from Vat is approx 35 mm, down to rubber joiner, then into 50mm, then 40mm then 32mm onto the brass fitting on the poly tank. This is what I am now wondering if that minimum size of 32mm is restricting the flow too much. So intheory the 90mm should drain it better yeah?

One problem you will have with the syphon is it will eventually build with small air bubbles in the top of the pipe. Why not join the two tanks at the top and the bottom with straight pipe. The syphon is not flowing all the time, it just allows the water levels to equalise.

Mon,
32mm pipe has a cross sectional area of 804mm2
90mm = 6,360mm2

so there is a big difference (about 8 times greater)