Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

LOL! Smart boy getting Kathy to wash the gravel

Sure... she's got to earn her keep...

I bet she wasnt looking over your shoulder when you posted that

No, but she'll be reading this thread sooner or later...

I'd love to see pictures of that happening especially if she still has hat welding plant around when it happens.

Not much to report for some days now. The plants in the one operational growbed are going gangbusters (fuelled on SeaSol). Kathy's fallen down on the job, and only half the crushed brick for the second growbed has been washed.

However, here's what's been happening.

Someone (thank you, Steve) very kindly gave us a handful of gravel to get the bacteria going.

Here's my baseline figures - before bacteria went in:
Ph 8
Ammonia 0ppm
Nitrite 0ppm
Nitrate 5ppm (why?)

Bacteria went in on 31/10; on 4/11 I got:
Ph 8
Ammonia 0.5ppm (had a pee or two in the fishtank)
Nitrite 0ppm
Nitrate 5ppm

Today, 12/11, I got:
Ph 8
Ammonia 0.5ppm (had a pee in the fishtank yesterday)
Nitrite 5ppm
Nitrate 10ppm

So, aquaponics experts...

Does this sound like I'm getting somewhere?

I assume I need to have a pee every day or two, 'cause if the bacteria don't have some ammonia to eat, they'll die. I'm looking, I believe, for:
Ammonia 0ppm
Nitrite 0ppm
Nitrate something ppm
before I put some fish in?

hi michael, just read your thread, sweet looking system
although i hope kathy's ok??

if your fishless cyclig, bring the ammo up to about 4ppm for a while, till you start seeing nitrite / rate readings. then let it fall untill ammo and rites are 0
now piss in the tank till ammo is 2ish ppm, wait for it to fall to 0 and repeat.
when youve got it from 2ppm to ammo and rites to 0 in 24 hours or less then your cycled
just make sure it does this consistentley (i.e. more than once)
add your fish, go easy on the feed as a) theyll be stressed and may not eat all the feed for a few days
and b) your bacteria will probably have to grow some more

start feeding small amounts at first, and as before, wait for ammo and rites to fall to 0 in less than 24hr. then ramp up feed and repeat till your happy the system is healthy and coping with the bioload.

bear in mind this could take up to 2 months to complete
and your ammo might never fall to absolutely 0, mine sits on about .1 ppm because fish are always weeing and releasing ammonia. traces are ok but anything more than a slight trace is bad

good luck, and keep the piccies rolling
ben

and your readings indicate something is happening , just not enough bacteria yet . . patience and you will be rewarded
dw about rate levels unless they go beyond your test kit readings

Thank you for the concise explanation.

There are so many threads here, many of which are so long, that attempting to distil some concrete information out is quite hard.

Oh, and Kathy's fine - she just got bored washing crushed brick!

haha well we all know that feeling

and those long threads are because everyone has their own opinion, i.e. there is no 'set' way of doing things. the above is just how i would do it cheers
ben

BEWARE, Fresh pee has a delayed reaction!!!!! I wouldn't pee in it anymore for a few days or you are likely to suddenly get an ammonia reading off the chart and it will keep rising for several days after that too which will only slow the process. See fresh urine still has most of the nitrogen as urea, it takes a while for that urea to convert into ammonia (see if we peed out ammonia it would burn!)

Anyway, I ran a pee ponics system for quite a while. I found (in researching the safety of such and using liquid gold as fertilizer in the garden) that you could pee in a bottle and seal it up for a few weeks and this would not only allow the urea to convert to ammonia in the bottle (so when you add it to the tank you can get an ammonia reading so you can better judge how much to add) but it also has the boon of killing off e. coli that might otherwise survive.

I liked to dose the system up to an ammonia level between 1-2 ppm, then ya wait a while while the bacteria starts to colonize. This first step usually isn't too bad. Once you see the nitrite climbing and the ammonia falling you have to decide if your are going to dose again or let it be for a while longer. See ammonia inhibits the bacteria that convert nitrite to nitrate so sometimes waiting a bit before dosing more will let that bacteria get a foot hold too. Anyway, once you can dose between 1-2 ppm ammonia and have both the ammonia and nitrite fall to 0 within 24 hours, you can call it fishlessly cycled. You can continue small doses to keep the bacteria fed until you are ready to get the fish. You want to make sure the ammonia and nitrite levels are both 0 before you head out to pick up your fish. And as noted before, when you add new fish to the system you will have to watch for spikes and ramp up feeding slowly but it should be far less stressful than doing the whole cycle up with fish.

Hopefully the crushed brick doesn't buffer your pH up too high for too long. (actually it would be the mortar residues left on the brick that are most likely to give pH issues.) It might be a good idea to try adjusting your pH a bit now (before you have fish) and see if it will budge. If you can get it down below 7.6 and if it will stay down to 7.6 then I would expect that the cycling process should take care of the rest and even if not, 7.6 is still low enough to grow plenty of plants (I know, I've done it.) 8 and up is a bit high on the pH for most plants to be very happy though the fish are bacteria are both usually fine with 8.

Thanks, TCLynx.

The pH is high, at 8, and yes, I imagine it's mortar and concrete. I've read here that cycling tends to bring pH down so I'm hoping it will end up reasonable. Certainly the plants I have in at the moment seem very happy.

Perhaps I'll get hold of some pure ammonia - I don't mind peeing in a jar, but whilst waiting a few weeks for it to convert, the bacteria would probably starve.

Michael, you are at the stage where you are growing a bacteria colony. So I wouldn't worry too much about starving bacteria that isn't there yet. Patience... there is no need to rush out to buy ammonia when you yourself are a source of ammonia.

As the others have said, leave it a few days, check that your ammonia readings then. You might find that it is already close to 2ppm. Then leave it to keep going from there until both ammonia and nitrite readings reaches zero. Then dose to 1ppm again and make sure that in 24hours, the ammonia and nitrite reading are zero, then your system is cycled.

Note that although you had bacteria to seed your system, it still takes some time to cycle your own media. Possibly 1-2 weeks at least I would say...

I have taken out all the fishes from a system before, left the tank empty for 2 weeks without adding ammonia and the system was still fine when I added fish again.

Pulled my finger out and did some work today.

Made a cover for the fishtank out of some corrugated iron I had laying around. The outer two sheets are fixed; the centre one will hinge. I need to add a trim to keep fingers away from the cut edge, and I need to cut off the excess:


Finished wrapping the shed:


The plants are growing - the ones in the growbed came out of the seedling tray; the ones still in the seedling tray show the growth differential:


And Kathy finished washing the crushed brick! (but we still need more...)