Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

You are a true Ap'er Smallfry, race home, check on fish, test water add salt and post on forum. It might be another, very long time until your next holiday, as it igets harder to leave the backyard farm when you have animals.
It was nice to meet you and the family as well. A pity it was sooo wet when you were here, but at least you got to say hello to the dancing Barry mundi!

LOL - thankfully DP had said that as I wasn't well that I had full license to get home and check on the fish/chickens/quail/cat before I was allowed to help him unpack. I checked the fish, logged onto the computer, checked likely disorders, salted THEN helped unpack. I didn't check the water till after the unpacking as there were no deaths.... there was mention of the fact the PC was going within 10mins of hitting home and I was sitting here tapping away.

I'll be back to visit in finer weather! Thankfully my mum lives only 4km away from my house - so as long as I don't ask her to do anything like test the water, well she can handle feeding and collecting eggs.... so I might still get away. The 4 cases of wine probably wont last long

My littlest one LOVED quokka. She talked about him on the rest of the trip

Did you know that she is a mum and the babies are 11 days old today?

"ooohhhh soooo adorable" is the response

Well things have settled back down here - the one SP with fungus died, but the rest appear to be doing fine. All this rain has meant that my salted water is somewhat diluted.... my salinity meter arrived today in the mail so I'll be popping that in soon to see what the results are.

Things still ticking over very very slowly. Still don't appear to be cycled, but I'm managing so far to keep the ammonia around 1 at the most. Trying to not get any HSM's. Might be the very slighest trace of nitrites and nitrates, but I'm thinking it's more wishful thinking.

Plans are underway to construct an ibc system as a hospital/fingerling tank... I feel the need to build something from scratch. The ready built system is wonderful, but I do need to do some tinkering

Kids are back at school now and for the first time in months I have actual days where I don't have something to rush off and get done. (Although might have to go kick a teacher's butt this week who sent my DD to the office for basically being autistic, well dah - she has autism!)

Hmm homemade BSF system before spring hits... which should come first, system 2 or the BSF ??? Choices choices...

Grow bed update

Looks nice and healthy Smallfry

Still no nitrites or nitrates, and ammonia is definitely around 1. Stopped feeding as pH is still around 8 and I don't want things going toxic. Salt is still 2.3ppm.

The fish tank at least had temps around 15deg today and the silver's are starting to actually become active. Hopefully the warmer days they are predicting this week will help. Basically still waiting and watching.

OK - stage 2, greenhouse...(the step before the second AP system...)

The area which I have the aquaponics set up is a strange size... it's a paved area beside the carport. If you consider the open side of the carport as South then this is 4.85m long (and the eaves are at 2.4m high), East is 3.2m (wooden fence 1.5m high), West is 2.45m (fibro fence 1.7m high) and North is 5m (fibro fence 1.7m high). Angles aren't nice - not even close to 90deg on any of those.

So I'm looking at constructing something in here that will provide shade in summer, and be retractable in winter. At this stage I'm leaning towards PVC only because a) not allowed to attach it to the carport or fence - must be freestanding. b) Ease of construction (especially weight of product) If I ran created a base frame and basically have it housed on 3 sides, with supports along the 4th, and had the roof angled from the 1.7m fibro fence to under the eaves 2.4m this could possibly work. This would only give me about a 10 deg incline on the roof. (Hmm never tried PVC bending - but reasonably sure I can at least attempt this) I'd attach shade cloth along the main fence line and have it such that I would pull it up to the apex.

So - comments ? Would PVC be strong enough for what I'm looking at doing, am I complete idiot lol? I'm assuming that I would need to use 50mm PVC for the supports, but could I get away with something smaller for the roof ?

Meanwhile - Ammonida 0.5, Nitrite 0, Nitrate basically 0, pH 8.0, salt 2.2. Was at the Woodvale fish and lily farm today and was given some different watercress's from their plant filter... this has been planted in a floating basket on top of the FT - crossing fingers there's some good bacteria to help get this thing cycled! (patience is not my strong point!)

I finally have nitrites.... was starting to think it would never happen, I got a huge surprise when it went purple! Still no show on the nitrates though, so a while to go yet on the cycling phase. Waiting waiting waiting. Haven't fed the fish for two days as I noticed the ammonia was getting close to 1 when I checked Wednesday, no nitrites then (back down to 0.5 ammonia today). Hope this phase doesn't last as long as the no show phase!

Ok - things have been moving along...

It looks like things finally cycled
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=10484

And then I seemed to have a few issues with fish dieing...
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=10509&p=293658#p293658

So I've finally stopped having deaths (none for 6 days), and I'm left with 2 biggish silver perch (about 20cm long), 2 goldfish, and possibly 2 smaller silver perch (well I haven't found their bodies as yet - the other 4 I can see in the fish tank)

The latest problem I decided in the end was a DO issue - mainly due to the fact I couldn't even SEE the fish unless they were at the surface. I did a 50% water change 9 days ago, and then adjusted the water back to 3ppt for the salt. I then covered the fish tank to try and get rid of the algae build up (just checking it twice a day and counting the 4 fish that are left) I've got some visibility now, enough to see darker shapes at the bottom of the tank, but not enough to see anything clearly...

So during the week I had ammonia build up again (bodies found last Monday and ammonia has been pretty constant since then)


And it appears I now have nitrites again... so it looks like it's doing a bit of a cycle again...


pH is still high (but the lowest it has been so far in this system)


So - at the moment it's just sort of sitting there, no feed going in, no light, basically me trying to ignore it apart from testing the system and checking to see if the water is cleared. Sigh. Really really want to restock, but thinking I should a) wait for the algae to finish dieing off so I don't have a DO problem again and b) wait for it to finish cycling again as my pH is still so high that this is a pretty toxic environment still. This patience thing is killing me!!!!

Hows things coming along smallfry??

All going excellent Big healthy Silver Perch which are starting to look very very close to going on a BBQ... Life kind of got in the way of hobbies there for a while (hate that). Hoping that I'll be able to expand the system before it's first anniversary, but can't believe how fast time is flying by. System seems incredibly stable now, and plant growth is amazing... must take a photo soon!