Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

i am tring to come up with a way collect rain water to use for top off water. I have this trellis i thought of hanging a plastic sheet on it and collecting the water from it. My questions is, will the pine sap and needles mess up the water?

Provided you rinse it off occasionally I doubt the pine residue would be too big a problem. However, plastic over the top of that may not flow off very well and will tend to pool and collect in the low points up top and could do some damage to the plastic at least and possibly even the structure. So While you could probably collect a fair bit of rain off of it, you might have some challenges in managing it.

You might even manage something with just a tarp hooked to the beam at one end and angled out to gather together into a barrel or something on the ground.

well my PH is a slightly less shade of purple today aroung 8 so thats a good thing 0 amon 0 rites and about 50 rates. The peppers are already looking a little better. the leafs are standing up some and they don't look like they are wilting.

Hey TC as a fellow Floridian, what kind of fish should go with? (legal, grows well, maybe good for resale,....) and do you know of any laws or licenses i might need?

I won't talk to re-sale, you will have to look into the aquaculture permits for that which should be easy enough for whole on ice but as soon as you cut into a fish for sale you need the food handling/processing stuff and I know little/nothing about that.

He in FL I recommend Channel Catfish if you like big fish (I recommend a 300 + gallon fish tank for them.) or Bluegill if you have a smaller tank. Blue Tilapia might be doable but they can't survive most winters even here in Central FL without some special care let alone growing on through the winter without heating.

Bluegill may not be big fish nor super fast growing but I expect they can get to edible size of 1/3 rd pound in a growing season. Catfish might get much bigger than that in a year but not in a barrel. Tilapia can probably grow to between 1/2 lb to a pound in one of our growing seasons but their legality is sometimes questionable and you would definitely need to follow the rules in order to legally re-sell them and if one of your big goals is to grow veggies from the system, our cool season is actually our best veggie season so it sucks to be short of nutrients because the tilapia quit eating when the water temperature gets below 70 F.

If you are looking to be able to sell something, you might make more money with less regulation if you sell produce rather than fish. Watercress really likes an alkali system so your high pH wouldn't be a problem for it so come September I would recommend planting watercress seeds so that it could be well established as soon as cool weather comes along. It struggles in the heat.

Watercress sounds like a good idea. I will look around
for some seeds. I do have a whole ibc for the ft and cat fish is hugh here. i know i need more gbs (only 3 right now). how many cats do you think i could have? i of course will start slow. i think maybe 10 for now (babies) slowly adding more till i have 10 1/2 barrels gbs and maybe 50 cats. I know very little about cats and i will do some research, but do you think this is a safe number?

Johnny's selected seeds has watercress.

For catfish, depends on how big you will grow them. I like to have ten gallons of fish tank and 20 gallons of grow bed per catfish for growing them out big. So in something like my 300 gallon system I would probably only stock 15 for some one's first season and then 30 as they gain experience. However, I've decided that tank is too shallow for my liking and I had trouble with my catfish in that system. (right now I have 90 bluegill in that system doing fine.)

How deep is your ft, TC?

Well the 300 gallon tank that I felt was too shallow for catfish is a 300 gallon rubbermaid stock tank which is only 24 inches deep if filled to the rim so generally only 18-21 inches of water depth.

My big system has a 4 foot deep tank with over 40 inches of water depth and my new tower system has a 34 inch deep tank with about 27 inches of water depth.

Here's a question I hope someone might know an answer for: My PH is still over 8(almost looks worse today than yesterday), i have removed all the limestone i can find, my tap water ph is worse than my ap system, i have asphalt shingled roof(making rain water a bad idea), but, what i do have is a condensation drain from my air conditioner very close to my system. I have tested the ph it is right at 6.1 or so, why can't i just have this drain into to sump tank as top off water?

The condensate from an air conditioner is usually really nasty water and you might want to treat it with some major disinfectant before then outgassing the disinfectant or otherwise neutralizing it for use in the AP system. Also, depending on what the coils are made of there might be some metals leaching into the water from the AC so it isn't as great a choices as it might seem.

Other ideas might be to use a carbon filter to filter the water from the roof.

Or an RO filter to remove the minerals from your tap water for use in the AP system.

would the ro filter lower the ph... or just the limestone that caused the high PH? Do you think i should recycle some of the ap water throu a ro filter just long enough to bring the ph down?

I'm not sure how much ap water would mess with the workings of a RO filter. I expect if you were to use an RO filter on your tap water which by removing the minerals that are causing the high pH the water from the RO filter will have a lower pH and be less hard and your plants will likely use up the excess calcium left in the system and the bacteria will use up the excess carbonates quickly enough and you will eventually need to add some sort of buffer back in. Alternating between straight well water (when you need some calcium carbonate) and the next time you need to buffer you might want to add something that will provide potassium like potassium bicarbonate or KOH (potassium hydroxide or old fashion lye from wood ashes.) I think I have been seeing potassium issues in my big system due to an overabundance of calcium from my shells, No changing that for the big system but in my other systems I'm setting up rain water catchment and I'm gonna have to get my hands on some good wood ashes or potassium bicarbonate to alternate with the calcium side of the buffering.

Maybe some one will more experience of RO filters can pipe up about running AP water through it or not (I do expect it would be a bad idea though.)

Of course if you need a good amount of soft water for a few partial water changes to dilute the calcium carbonate in the system water, get a few cheap kiddie pools and set them out before the next big rain and you may get yourself enough water to do the dilution. (then again setting things out to collect rain may just act as an inverted rain dance and cause the storm to hit everywhere except on you.)

Does anyone have any experiance with RO filters? and do you think if i ran my AP water through one if it would be an effective way to lower the ph? Any ideas welcome.

I'd use the RO filter on the water before it goes into the system. My RO filter self bleeds the water eg for every ltr it discards 2ltrs. ppm on tap water is a lot lower to start with. AP can have a high ppm and would block up your filter faster.

Well I have made a few changes and now have an IBC for the st and i have raised my gb. I only have one gb running now since everything else died. Ph is still over 8 but am,rites, and rates are all fine. I have also changed the pump from a constant flood to 15/45. The banana pepper plants are not growing vertically at all and each plant is produceing 1 banana pepper ea about 6" long. My bell peppers start out good but just stop growing after they get about the size of a marble. I know this is caused by the ph.

Are there some flowers that I could grow that would do well in this high ph? Also I know watercrest is good are there any other veggies I could try?

I have found a fairly good way to collect rain water. I use one of those "easy up" 10'x10' shade tents on the lowest hieght setting and fold the sides up about 3" then set 50 gal buckets under the center of each side. The rain rolls down the roof collects in the "gutter" then spills out at the center in to my buckets and when there is no rain in the forcast I take the tent down.