Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

And they are quite active at night too. Who ever said that bluegill don't eat off the bottom?

so I don't have the live streaming fish cam online yet but I have managed to get stills up that auto-refresh.
http://www.aquaponiclynx.com/aquaponic-lynx-live-garden-cameras/fish-cam

Unfortunately, the camera in the catfish tank has gotten all blurry and it seems some moisture has gotten inside the housing. So much for waterproof to 165 feet. And that is even sealed up in a rubber coupler with silicone all over the metal bits. Sigh, I guess the catfish chewing on it didn't help.
So what to do now?

Anyway, enjoy the blugill cam while it lasts I guess.

The quiet one 800 gave enough water to supply four towers so I put in two more. In order to get enough water up six ft. over the water level, I took out the hard elbows and and pump discharge strainer. I do get enough water but one or two 1/4 in. emmiters will plug every day or so. I have a plank over the pond and it is small matter to go up and clear them. The 1000 gal. pond is stocked with 41 bluegill up to 6" long. About 50% of the water is diverted from the smallish growbed to the dirt garden every week.

I'm happy to report that the quiet One 4000 has been doing very well providing flow for the ten towers as well as the flow for the fish tank, granted the fish are small still so I'll have to keep an eye on dissolved oxygen as they grow (seeing as I have not aerator in that system currently.)

And I seem to have a live fish cam up and running.
http://www.aquaponiclynx.com/aquaponic-lynx-live-garden-cameras/fish-cam

TCL, are you running pure strain blue gill or hybrids? Any problems with them breeding in the tank?

They are whatever strain that Florida Fish Farms sells, probably nothing special, just Florida Bluegill.

I've only had them since the end of March so they are still fairly small.
(you can see them if you go to my Live garden cameras link below and choose fish cam.)
So no I haven't had any problems with breeding. Yet. Actually if they were to breed in the system that would be kinda cool seeing as if they grow fairly fast for me and can provide breeding well that would chalk up two of the three main reasons people usually choose tilapia first (third being the vegetarian fish thing but of course if you only feed tilapia veggies, they won't grow out fast.)

Just a quick update. This system has been running with 60 bluegill for the past month or so and the feed increasing. We finally got rain which let the pH drop. I caught it when it was just around 6 and the ammonia had gotten up to .5 ppm. I did some well water top ups which brought it back up to about 6.3 and the ammonia was back down to .25 this morning but I've decided I need to add air to both the tower system and back into the 300 gallon tank.

I think I'm going to be reducing the fish number in the tower system here for a bit till I can add more towers since 10 towers is not enough plants to use up all the nutrients from high protein feed for small fingerlings.

I'm gonna either need to set up a measured way to add well water to this system regularly as my top up for it is currently a rain water tank. Or I may need to add a bag of shell grit to keep the pH buffered through the rainy season.

That's not a lot of fun when you are walking a bit of a knife edge like that, why do you think it's so finicky with pH and ammonia, is it perhaps not enough biofilter?

Hard to know here. I think mostly it is probably cause I start out with hard well water here so the bio-filter cycles up at a higher pH then when the buffer is used up and the pH drops it must be more of a shock to the bacteria than if I were starting up a system with a pH below 7 the whole time.

I noticed this in the 300 gallon system last summer too where the bio-filter stalled pretty quickly upon the pH drop. When the 300 gallon system has a pH between 7 and 7.6 the bio-filter is really rock solid and can handle an amazing amount of waste very fast but when the pH drops down near 6 there seems to be no getting rid of the trace ammonia.

Well, they are bacteria - they're not going to be the same all around the world, due to evolution and genetic variation....

And I've got hard, high pH well water to start with so I expect the bacteria that colonizes my systems at start up are going to be the strains that prefer the higher pH.

Anyway, I've got the pH back up to 6.4 in the tower system (hand full of chicken grit limestone chips in a basket under the water flow from the fish tank into the sump.) The ammonia has dropped down to 0 again.

I've now also moved half the fish out to other systems. The bio-filter seemed to be keeping up with the fish load (at least until the pH dropped so low.) But the amount of plants in the system was not up to keeping up with the nitrates so a smaller fish load seems appropriate till I get more towers. (The 300 gallon system around back has been running very low nitrates and some of the corn/tomatoes seem to be showing some sign of nitrate deficiency so the extra fish load has moved back there since I've added air back into that tank.

After the next gig I'll probably start seriously looking at adding more towers.

Well the system has been running on just 30 fish (moved the others out to the 300 gallon system since it was so short of nutrients.) Survived my absence fine and pH is back up to 7.2 since I left the basket of shell grit under the water flow while I was gone.
I'll probably be moving the rest of the bluegill to the 300 gallon system in prep for getting new catfish that I think will quarantine better in this bigger tank.
I think I need more towers to use up the nutrients since I'm still running between 60-80 ppm nitrites even with the reduced fish load. Still haven't tried the duckweed idea in this set up. Maybe I need to get on that ASAP.

Yep, surprising how few fish it takes when a system gets mature.. at least it's reasonably easy for you to add more towers..

Well sometimes it seems it doesn't take much fish at all but in the back yard I'm stocked very heavily and yet the nitrates are way low and even though they are detectible the tomatoes are showing a lack of nitrogen.
Go figure!

Just goes to show each system is different and like a living thing each will have it's own balance and change over time.