Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

So a quick update.
fish are still dying, one at a time.. probably work out to be one every 2nd day if you factor in those who I don't find till they are a bit manglated and float to the surface.

i sent off my water sample to the lab last week, but ETA for results isn't till mid January. Two samples - one to test my own drinking water (see whether something weird is coming off our roof to the rain water tank?), and the other to test the water from the fish tank. At this stage, it is just metals testing.

I have taken the remaining fish out and put them in an IBC. I'll need to do something else with them in the next couple of days.





I did find some rusty clamps at the bottom of the tank which couldn't have been helping. Not sure if that would have been enough to kill the fish though..

Also, I had a large red brick at the bottom of the tank that the pump sat on. If anyone knows anything about bricks - could you tell me if it might have been leeching something into the water?


So Im now after some thoughts. Should I thoroughly clean out the current tank, and put the fish back.

Or I have a water tank, which we are about to cut up.. I could use the bottom as a new fish tank? (nice size but not sure if there are other issues I'm not thinking about..

Or should I make the IBC a permanent fixture, and use that as the fish tank. (How many trout can live in that long term??)




All advice, suggestions and comments welcome
Todd
p,s Any BYAP members travelling through southern Tassie? drop me a PM.

Trout per ibc 50 small ones [2 to 3 in ] max 25 at 700 grams
as for the green water tank use your imagination use the whole thing as a fish tank just cut a 1/2 circle out of the top and run it chift pist or chop

Bricks shouldn't be a problem I have a few of them in my corrugated iron systems and they haven;t caused any deaths..

Not sure about why your deaths are happening, wait for the results I guess. Though that green tank looks like it would be ok..

The top half, the wife already has dibbs for a pig house.

id be more worried about the rusty clamps than the bricks, but with a nice green tank like that id probably commission it as soon as anyway

Is that galvanised bar/wire across the middle of the tank?

Give the pigs the top half of the green tank, pigs don't need it to be water tight. Keep the bottom section for the fish.

The wife already has dibbs on the top half of the tank..

Sad news. There must have been something in the white IBC that the fish didn't appreciate. The remaining 30+ trout died yesterday. I'm sad, but they were all dying anyway, so perhaps I just speeded the inevitable. I'm really not sure what to do now.
I guess I'll wait and see if the water test comes back with something. If it does, ill be able to address it. If it doesn't, then there really isnt any point getting more fish for them to die and I'll probably just stick with my hydro. very sad, but I'm sure other people our there have bigger problems than a few dead trout. Thanks for advice and I'll post again when the water tests come back.

I just did a quick scan through your other thread and didn't see any nitrite/ammonia test results. Did you ever test for that?

Yes.. all good with regards to normal tests. Whatever it was killed them very slowly - one fish at a time.. I remain clueless

was perhaps the stress of the move that finished them off. do you know what was in the ibc before? The main advantage of the green tank is, it is round so you can have a very effective central slo that works very well. And you know it will be safe for the fish. Don't give up mate...

Tdsal,

This is what I meant. Use the bottom for fish. The top for pigs.
Cut out the door then cut out a circle from it and silicone it over the manhole.
The sloped roof will stop water pooling on the pigs house.

That way both of you get what you want.

I would suspect that your galvanized roof may have something to do with it.The local Ag. school had trout in a tank in the the shearing shed and they were doing fine until one morning there was condensation on the underside of the roof and they all went belly up.It was the zinc from the roof that did it.
I am also loosing a lot of trout but I the place that I get them from may be the trouble as others are having the same trouble and they are loosing barras as well. I have carp yabbies and red fin and they are fine .I have tried them in the same water as the others and in different water and it made no diference.I have two left out of a hundred,the year before last 38 out of forty made it to the fridge

What's the metal tank with the wires running across it? Is that all galv?

[and the brick should be fine if it's just terracotta and not coloured]

It's dificult to see from that picture, but bricks tend to be fairly low temperature things, so if you want to put specks of glass and other random looking splashes of colour and texture, it might be the case that they use low melting point oxides as fluxes.

These would probably be iron, mixed with silica, so should be ok. But because nobody is going to eat a brick, there would be no restriction on the part of the brick maker to avoid using things like lead based frits as a method of creating interest in their bricks.

I doubt it would be the case that it would be toxic, but there would certainly not be any health controls on using lead for decorating bricks, like there might be on things like decorating coffee mugs.

I spent most of my life as a potter, and we potters have historically used pretty much all of the periodic table to decorate stuff.

Uranium oxide included. (yellows/browns/blacks I think).

Yum!

But lead is a common one because it melts at such low temperatures, it's good as a flux to help other things melt that might not melt until much higher temps. By adding things like lead you can make silica melt at 1000c instead of 1700c. (actually much lower I think)

So glassy spots in bricks might mean trouble. Normal terracotta red bricks should be fine.