Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

You can get the feed troughs delivered from the manufacturer too.

www.rapidplastics.com.au

you can order through them and pending on size of order they will deliver for free. Good bunch of blokes there too. I went to school with a bunch of them. Great products too.

Not bad growth after 5 weeks. . . . (poor photo but)
I need more beds, but I haven't got the room, guess I will have to plumb the orchids into the system, or convince the next door neighbour to put a few bed in and I will plumb him in under the fence!

Very nice system AJ, I love the "slim line" GBs

Discovered something interesting about my system today, it has mudeyes living in the tanks with the trout and the 10 pygmy perch are still swimming happily in the tank I would have thought that the trout would have cleaned them up by now, I must have either blind or dumb fish. . . . . .I need to get more beds real soon, or get rid of some fish, 40 is way too much for my grow beds .

Could you make a simple
Biofilter with a barrel?

Cheers. . . . I need more of them, I have room for 3 more but even that will only give me about 1000 Lt of GB's with almost 2500 Lt of FT (look at me flying with acronyms) I have plumbed in a 600 Lt tank that has my breeding Pygmys' in it but I have taken it out of the loop till the Pea Souper buggers off. . . I might look at making a biofilter to see if that helps, but I am way overstocked I think

A.J

Just on the topic of biofilters, where's the best place to position one, at the discharge of the pump or on the return to the FT's? The worst part about my system is the distance the water has to travel from FT to GB and back again. It's feed line is 32mm and the return is 40mm and keeps up just when draining through the Pygmy tank, bypassing the Pygmy tank and it really flows back to the FT's. Damn this disease. . . . . . .

Best really to be on a separate larger pump, so you get heaps of flow. But I think return line would be best so there is no solids going through it

Hmmm. . . . maybe I should put a tee-piece in the discharge and pump half the flow through a filter, pump is a PondMax 12,000, and the head is only 1.2 metres so I should be able to re-route half the flow through a Biofilter and have plenty left over. . . . .
A.J

Update. . . .
I purchased a Pond One ClariTech filter and installed it before I flew out, water was still murky when I did it but after three days with it in the return tank SWMBO informed me that the water in both tanks was crystal clear. The tanks had been covered for a week beforehand so that may have been the cause more so than the filter. . . . .who knows? It has a 9 watt UV light which was on for my tour of duty but I turned it off last night. It has it's own pump supplying it at 2000L/ph and there are now no solids on the bottom of either tanks, where as before there was heaps in the return tank. The lack of solids may have something to do with the fact that I also removed the "decorative" stones from the tanks as well so it had nowhere to settle anyway I am happy that the water is clear and both the fish and plants are blossoming (no deaths- cept for a few Pygmys' and a whole heap of mudeyes and a pea or two) now all I have to do is get more beds!
A.J

Very nice looking system AJ

Man how fast do these things grow????
Cheers
Now all I need to do is get the crops to grow as quick!
A.J

Wow, your trout look so different to mine. Amazing looking species arent they. Ill have to try take a photo holding one in the sun like that to compare. Interesting.

Hi Charlie
I think it may have something to do with having black tanks, I can't see the buggers swimming around at all. . . .which annoys me somewhat as I wanted them to be on the surface where I could enjoy watching them, but nooooooo they hide under the pumps and blend in with the bottom of the tanks. The only time I see them is when I walk out with the "white bucket" and then it's on for young and old!

Nice AJ... Hey you won;t have to wait long for those plants to take off.. Yes it's interesting how a lot of fish change colour to suit their environment.