Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Yea, but this system has as about 40% of it's media, shells. All mixed in, no adjusting the buffering in this system.

(My new 300 gallon system, I might just try your method, Might have to buy pantyhose for the purpose though as I don't think I have any.)

Gemmell - surely you know the difference between pantyhose and socks....if not....well I'll leave it there.

Now, here's a truism about that . . . there's no more sexier sight than a woman in nothing but hose . . . . and nothing so sexless than a man in nothing but socks!!
There-in lies the difference!
Cheers IanK

Does that take into account how your wearing the socks.

It is so difficult to get a good photo of my catfish.
Here is an attempt at photos in the big tank.


And here is a shot of the towers on the main system (please ignore the odd tower in the middle, it is just a way to let some extra flow bypass where I have no tower but keep the splashing to a minimum, it is just an old bit of stuff that was handy for the purpose.)


And this nice big Okra plant is growing along with a pepper and papaya and bamboo and some other things in a constantly flooded bed which is getting a huge amount of flow through.

Remember the trial I was running with the water chestnuts?
Well it's still running
Here are some pictures.

As you can see the perlite is turning quite the shade of pea green.
But I have done some pH tests on the water leaving the bins and it doesn't seem that the pea green perlite is causing any major pH issues at this point.


The foam seems to have shaded out the string algae enough but this doesn't seem like a workable solution to me.


I think I kinda like the bottle caps

And a few pictures of the front porch towers.






The front porch system/fingerling tank has not been able to go it alone for long so far.

I had it running on it's own for a while and the nitrite levels kept rising and then the tank got a bit murky and I couldn't see the fish well so I turned the valve which tied it back into the main system. I think with the extreme heat for the last few weeks that I'm better off simply leaving this tied into the main system till fall. Daytime highs the past few weeks have been mostly 35-39 C (95-101 F) and it only gets down to 78-80 F at night much of the time.

Looking Good TCL
Your energy is both inspiring and perspiring
Always love watching the never ending progress to your system

Indeed, your systems are amazing.

Any preliminary thoughts on the towers? They look futuristic to me.

I want some of your towers TC? Love the flowers

Stunning as always!

I do like the towers for vertical growing but so far the only thing really doing "great" in them has been the basil. (It is the hot season here so I'll have a much better idea when November rolls around and it is cool enough to really test out the towers for growing salad greens.

Getting the flats of flowers was a quick way to add some color for the upcoming Central Florida Aquaponic Tour.
http://aquaponicscommunity.com/events/the-central-florida-great

Things I'm learning for the towers, one must block beetle wings from getting sucked into the pump as they are too good at stopping the holes feeding the towers. The developer of these towers only feeds about 10 gallons per hour through his towers, I'm probably feeding twice that and it's still ok, I just shift where the water flows in a touch if I see it splashing on bio-slime.
I think a settling tank might be needed if the towers are running a system with no grow beds attached since when I put the front porch fingerling tank on it's own with only the 4 small towers as filtration, the water did start to get a bit full of solids, I think if I was pumping from a separate tank after a settling tank, those solids would settle out and not be a problem. Or if I set it up so there is a grow bed involved those solids will probably settle in the grow bed. That will be my next trial but I might wait till fall because the heat is currently a bit extreme for a 100 gallon tank to be on it's own.

Yesterday was the Central Florida Aquaponics Tour. We had a nice group of people around and got to go see some other systems. Mine was the gravel beds and Nate's towers. The next stop had vertigrow towers to show off. Last two stops were Floating raft.

One of them still under construction but they had one of the Friendlies design micro systems up for show though not cycled yet (this is one of the small systems where they do raft culture but have no solids removal or filtration other than the raft beds themselves. They are supposed to be super low stocking density with only about 1 lb of fish per 3.3 square feet of raft area. So I guess the newbie stocking recommendation for a system like that would be about 15 fish for the two 4 foot by 8 foot raft beds. It is only running a small water pump and a large aquarium air pump and has a 300 gallon stock tank for the fish. Seems to work with tilapia, I'm curious if it would actually work with any other type of fish.) They are under construction on the large greenhouse operation which will have a large fish tank and 5 long raft tanks to become a commercial opperation.

Final stop was MorningStar Fishermen where we got the tour around though it wasn't the first time there for some of us.

It is interesting to see different ways of doing things. Also interesting to see one place using duckweed while another insists that you can't do that.

Morning star had one small system that was running on just an air feed from the large blower system. That small system had a couple dozen tilapia in the fish tank and a couple barrels with some screening and filter media and one raft bed and it was all being driven by a single little airlift pump that was moving the water from the raft bed over to the fish tank. From the fish tank the water moved by water bridges through the two filter barrels and into the raft bed. All with no electrical feed of it's own. I wish I had a DO meter cause I had no way of knowing what kind of oxygen levels that system had. there were no additional air stones, only the one air lift pump circulating the water. Again with the bomb proof tilapia.

Anyway. I still like my low maint fast growing gravel bed system with my huge catfish but it's good to see what else is possible.

How is the sisters growing thing working for you? It looks like the beans overshot the corn. I am trying some mounds with some fish remains under the corn.