Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

What do you reckon about the main system, Quachy, salt to 3ppt or just wait or do major water change and wait. I think it will be a case of just wait any way as i need to go to melbourne tomorrow and wont be home till sunday. Hope everything is fine when i get back.

I had a similar problem in my aquarium about a month ago. Moved the infected fishes to a quarrantine tank and salted to 6ppt. I also salt-dipped some of the worst off fishes in 10ppt solution for a short period of time (10 to 30mins). It depends on how the fishes take it. If they look like they are struggling, shorten the time and move them into the 6ppt tank.

Most of the fishes recovered... Only the weaker ones died. I am not sure a water change would help stop the disease from spreading, but I think it will stress the fishes out more and stressed fishes are more prone to disease transmission. I would just add salt.

So salt the main system to 3ppt or would 1ppt suffice?? I doubt this will happen till Sunday anyway but need to know what peoply think I should do?

simon, salt main tank to 3ppt and then after a week do a 1/4 water change, after the next week do anothe 1/4 wate change. that should bing salt to 1.5 ish ppt. you plants will be fine with that.

As quachy said

Okay got home rather late on Sunday after spending all weekend in melbourne, to get the update from the fiance, apparently the wind was ferocious and had blown the airpump stand over so system was with out additional air (other than GB syphons and inflows) for at least 12hrs.

She had scooped another struggling SP out of the SPtank and he went in with the quarintened GFish, and seen another on the the bottom which she couldn't reach.

So far the death count is 4 SP.

I went out on Sunday night with a torch and went about salting the main system to 3ppt, and added some more salt to the quarentened sump to bring it up to 6-8ppt.

Today it seems everything is okay, no more signs of struggling SP. All trout seem fine, although not overly hungry? And test results seem fine too.
PH 7.4
amm: trace
ITES: trace

I was very suprised about the test results. Unless I'm in for a spike soon. I did notice today that all the worms in the bottom of my FT, that have normally been quite happy eating fishsh1t, were dead! I have scooped them all out now I hope. Could it be the salt that killed them?

salt should not have affected the worms? Maybe something else?

Did you notice the worms alive after the loss of air event?? Worms also need oxygen, so if your fishes are having barely enough air, the worms will also have problems.

I agree on that one

Ahh that makes more sense, I would be guessing that the air was off for somewhere between 6-12 hours so I would say that is the cause of the worms dying. This has now had a slight effect on the water quality.
Test results today: (limited due to the rain)
Amm: 0.5
Ites: 0.5

I scrapped some more worms out this evening too.
Every thing else was okay expect a slight scum/bubbles on top of water. Is this caused by the salt...... or ammonia due to the dead worms?

Okay, one week after the salting I did a 25% water change to bring te salt levels down, all test results looked undercontrol although not 0,0 but trace. Used water that was sitting in the isolated side of the sump with out the goldfish. This water has been sitting for a few weeks and a few weeks before hand I had added some hummonia to this tank, but not much. Whilst topping up the main system with this water I thought I'd better do a precautionary test and discovered lightly high Ammonia readings obviously from the hummonia. But figured that at only 25% of the main system it would quickly balance out again.

Then, busy with work and not getting home till after dark every night and most of the time raining!, I have not been keeping an eye on the testing........ Then getting home midweek this week to find that the shed power has tripped again sometime during the day!

So again somewhere between 6-10hrs of no air or filtration. Now I have high AMM and ITES readings but fish all seem fine. Did another 25% water change today to try and reduce the ITES. Should I salt again? After 2 x 25% water changes the salt in the system should be back down to around 1ppt right? Is this sufficient to combat my temporarily high ITES readings.

I really need to off load these gold fish so I can bring the whole system online and double my GB filtration, but aside from diggin up the back yard to make a pond for them they need to go somewhere else. I think I may have a place for them........

Heyya BB. The bubbles and slight scum are a sign of protien, which is very likely due to your dead worms. Its not harmful to the fish, or to the plants I think, and will come down itself over time or will be cured by a water change

Full system is finally online!!!!!!!!!!!
Nothing like a crisis to swing things into action. Major nitrite readings at the moment so had to remove Goldfish and bring the whole system online. Moved the goldfish to a bathtub i had from a bathroom reno and moved my pump to the sump and connected a new pump line to all 3 GB's and it all seems to be working exactly the way I had planned. The only tweeking I had to do was slightly close the valve on the SLO from FT2 to the sump to slow the water entering the sump.
I love when things just work the way they were planned!!
I am hoping that now that my system has doubled it GB filtration the ites should clear up soon.

I will also take a short video of the whole system soon and post it up if I can work out how too.

Now my next question would be what to stock once these trout come out. I would like to get a couple of murry cod, but after doing a lot of reading today and discussion with Quachy, I'm thinking that FT2 will hold trout during winter months and Jade Perch during the summer months. Any opinions from people would be welcome but Im thinking i will start a new topic thread regarding this so please direct your responses there shorlty.

Great work

cool mate,

How's the trout going???
Big yet??

regards
Matt